Portrayed by: Kate O’Flynn
Show: Widow’s Bay
There are few things better in pop culture than a surprise. Anticipation and meeting high expectations are great, sure. But when something comes out of nowhere to fill a hole the audience didn’t even know we had in our lives? You can’t beat it. That’s Widow’s Bay. The Apple TV breakout hit of the summer is a little bit workplace comedy and a little bit small-town horror, mixed with a weird little special sauce poured on top to blend everything together and make it wholly unique.
Matthew Rhys stars as Tom Loftis, the hapless mayor of New England island Widow’s Bay, who’s burdened with the increasingly daunting task of navigating his restless teenage son, sometimes-peculiar coworkers, and a community who shows less and less faith in him by the day as they’re all beleaguered by eldritch terrors at an increasingly alarming rate. This charming show about a seaside town (that’s absolutely better than Martha’s Vineyard and has definitely never resorted to cannibalism) has earned 19 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series nod for Kate O’Flynn, who acts her ass off as Tom’s right-hand woman Patricia Moyer, and is far and away the best TV character of the year so far.
Patricia Moyer – The Final Girl of Widow’s Bay
Patricia Moyer is everyone who’s reached midlife and finds themselves not at all where they thought they’d be, and the first few episodes of the season set her up perfectly. She’s artistic, but nobody cares about her paintings or her poems for the tourism brochure; she runs the mobile library, but everyone fills the return box with their trash. People think she’s weird, but not in a cutesy Manic Pixie Dream Girl way; they just find her odd. That’s because they’re not paying attention — this woman is smart, and she’s fierce. Case in point: already suspicious of Tom’s interest in a woman whom he describes as “age appropriate,” Patricia wryly quips, “Was she in her forties?” when Tom mentions being scratched by an elderly woman.
She’s also lonely, though, and that much is clear. The first chance we get to know her a little better is in Episode 4, “Beach Reads.” Patricia shows up, wine in hand, at a party to which she clearly received a polite nobody-actually-expects-you-to-come invite, and tries in vain to participate in conversations with women who clearly don’t want to talk to her. (This is the scariest thing that happens in Widow’s Bay. I’ll take the killer clown any day.) She jumps at the chance to talk to the only person at the party she doesn’t know, regaling her with the story of the time she was almost killed by The Boogeyman in high school, before the other women at the party convince her that Patricia is a liar. Kate O’Flynn portrays the insecure heartbreak of a woman who still feels like a scared girl inside with such delicacy and nuance that it’s almost hard to watch. Arriving home, one of the newest additions to the mysteriously illuminated mobile library parked outside Patricia’s house calls to her, and she takes the self-help book Your Turn: Out With The Old and In With The You by Lucy Fours inside, where it starts worming its way into her immediately.
“What don’t you love about yourself?” it asks.
“Circle your worst features,” it prompts.
“Feeling like you could die tomorrow and no one would notice?” it makes her wonder.
Luckily, Lucy has the solution: throw the perfect party to make everyone like you and get your life back on track! Patricia has the opportunity to do just that with the upcoming Sunset Cocktails event after the Inaugural Swim. Patricia flings herself into party planning, sending out the invites and checking RSVPs obsessively. She asks the group of women from the house party to come, but Kris, their leader and Patricia’s old high school nemesis, tells her they’ll all be skipping it in favor of another party. It looks like everyone else in Widow’s Bay is following suit, because there are exactly zero confirmed guests for Sunset Cocktails. But that’s not going to stop someone from being expertly tutored by Lucy Fours, so Patricia uses her role at city hall to have the competing party canceled. Problem solved! Thank goodness the book has all the answers. Patricia spends her time reading it more, more, MORE.
At the Salty Whale on the night of Sunset Cocktails, Patricia chops fruit for the punch in her party dress and tiara, ready to make this life-changing night happen. Widow’s Bay Town Hall coworker Rosemary (fellow Outstanding Supporting Actress nominee Dale Dickey) is worried, and Patricia asks her to be supportive, but it turns out Rosemary was right to be concerned. The party is not going well — there are no good-looking people there, the dance music is interrupted by ads about male pattern baldness, and her mean girl bullies show up just to watch her fail. Patricia finally confronts Kris head-on, asking her what she’s done to deserve all the nastiness. Perhaps she wishes she hadn’t, because Kris paints a rough picture: these women think Patricia is so starved for attention that she’s been lying for decades about almost being killed by The Boogeyman when it was their friends who were actually slaughtered that night, and they resent her for it. Patricia sobs alone in the kitchen of the Salty Whale, but Lucy and “Your Turn” are there…
“SERVE THE PUNCH NOW,” it commands.
And there must be something in that punch, because what a difference it makes! All of a sudden, Patricia is the glittering hostess she dreamed of being, dancing to “Rhythm of the Night” and making a speech to the admiring crowd of partygoers. Everything is perfect as long as you don’t think about the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of sense that the women who have been so mean to Patricia are suddenly warmly encouraging her, or that some shots of the party guests show everyone looking a bit…different.
It takes Sheriff Clemons (Kevin Carroll) — who’s known something fishy is going on since he glimpsed Patricia looking a bit overly immersed in her party planning book on some security camera footage — to finally snap everything back to reality. Patricia is broken out of her hostess with the mostess hallucination and takes in the grotesque reality of what she’s done. Unfortunately, her delicious punch was actually a blood potion made from animal sacrifice, and her pretty party crown was actually a headpiece made from deer antlers and yet another dead animal. (In fairness, Rosemary did say that she had her qualms!) And yes, The Salty Whale was full of effigies, and Patricia’s Sunset Cocktails was actually an elaborate spell she placed on everyone while under the influence of a Satanic grimoire, but planning an incredible party is hard, okay?!
Jumping Into Action – Better Than Everyone Else
Ironically, “Your Turn” and Lucy Fours may have rubbed off on Patricia in a more positive way than intended, because the entranced Widow’s Bay citizens are in need of rescue, and she jumps into action. When she tries to throw the book into the evil bonfire to break its spell on everyone before they drown themselves in the lake, it stubbornly sticks itself to her hand, almost mockingly daring her to do what it doesn’t think she’s capable of. But Patricia was never as hopeless as she seemed, and now she gets to prove it. She sticks her own hand, book and all, into the fire to destroy the grimoire and save everyone. Nobody’s grateful, of course. They all accuse Patricia of drugging them, and she shuffles home, forlorn and alone. Along the way, she gets picked up by Tom and Widow’s Bay’s most supernaturally perceptive and island-weary resident, Wyck (a wonderful-as-always Stephen Root), who need her help. She may not go as unnoticed in life as she thought, to be the one they seek out.
Patricia moves through the season with a bit more confidence after this. She doesn’t lose all her insecurity overnight — anyone who would ask an undead man who’s hundreds of years old, “Are you mad at something I said?” isn’t exactly brimming with confidence. But this Patricia will boldly try to stick her fingers down Tom’s throat to get him to throw up hallucinogenic mushrooms; she will steal the Sheriff’s car to buy Tom and Wyck more time to save Widow’s Bay. Then, in Episode 8, “Your Baggage,” Patricia takes her full Final Girl form. She’s in her comfiest outfit — the elite combo of oversized tee and bike shorts — and is ready to dig into a yummy dinner of chicken parmesan and coconut cream pie, only to open the take-out containers and find that her order was mixed up with a tragic bunless turkey patty and a lone sausage link. Because Patricia is Patricia, when she calls the restaurant to complain, she’s not even angry; she just wants them to do better next time. (And because Patricia is Patricia, the voicemail box is full and nobody at the Driftwood Diner will ever hear what she has to say.) She’s about to be glad that she didn’t have a stomach full of parm and pie, though. The Boogeyman is back, and she’s about to do some running.
Armed with naught but a taser boasting a feeble 1% battery life and some gumption, Patricia is off into the night, yelling her head off to save herself and warn the rest of Widow’s Bay. Barricading herself inside the temporary safety of the home of one of the women who’ve always been so unkind to her, Patricia also finally gets a chance to defeat another, more metaphorical demon that’s been haunting her all these years.
Patricia is forced to admit that no, she didn’t receive calls from The Boogeyman in high school. She was a teenager who got carried away by the insanity of the situation, lied, and then felt like she had to double down. But The Boogeyman did try to kill her that night, and he is trying to kill her again now. Kris isn’t having it, berating Patricia for being an annoying loser weirdo, and even though Patricia is trying to conserve the taser’s precious little charge, it’s worth using some of it to shut Kris up with a zap, because Kris is, as we know, “the fu–ing worst.” But Patricia is fulfilling her horror movie heroine destiny tonight, so it’s back out into the street to run and scream her way to a solution.
As it turns out, her solution is pretty genius. Making her way to the gas station, Patricia soaks the ground in petrol and uses the last sparks of the taser to create a giant wall of flames that should surely kill The Boogeyman once and for all. If it weren’t for the cashier and his fire extinguisher, that may have worked, but The Boogeyman manages to stab Sheriff Clemons before Patricia blasts him back to hell once and for all with a shotgun. Widow’s Bay lovingly pokes fun at some of the sillier tropes of the horror genre, so Patricia knows as well as we do that The Boogeyman somehow dying of a gunshot wound when he was impervious to all manner of other bodily harm doesn’t make much sense, so she is taking no chances. Our scream queen keeps that shotgun pointed at The Boogeyman’s head in the back of the ambulance and into the morgue, not letting up until the doors of the cremation chamber open to reveal the scant pile of ash as all that remains of her tormentor. With Enya’s “Caribbean Blue” as her anthem in this scene, it’s a peaceful kind of triumph. She didn’t just survive this night, she put a bullet in everything that’s been weighing her down since high school, when The Boogeyman first tried to take her out.
In the last episodes of the season, Patricia is the moral compass of the show as things escalate to a fever pitch. Lecturing Rosemary about her tone every time she says “lesbian” aside, Patricia is the only one who fights for Ruth’s life when she, Tom, and Wyck discover that the older assistant to the mayor is the lone remaining descendant (or so they think) of Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater). They don’t relish it, but Tom and Wyck are willing to do the dirty deed of offing Ruth (K Callan) to save the island from its curse. She doesn’t have a husband or kids after all, so is it really as bad as it could be? Patricia knows that it is.
The husbandless, childless ladies have to have each other’s backs — certainly no one else is going to. Part of the reason fans feel so strongly in Patricia’s corner is that we know that she’d be in ours just as fiercely. In a lesser comedy, one satisfied with cheaper laughs, Patricia Moyer would simply be a punchline. A woman portrayed as pathetic and desperate who’s an easy target for weak jokes. To the benefit of all, this is Widow’s Bay.
First Featured Image Credit: ©Apple TV