The One Mystery Widow’s Bay Season 2 Should Refuse to Solve

This article contains spoilers for Widow’s Bay episode 10, “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!”

In the first ten minutes of Widow’s Bay, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is on a mission to get a positive article about the show’s titular island town into the New York Times travel section. Discussing the potential timing of the article’s publication, Loftis pulls his calendar down from the wall and flips through its monthly pages, which depict wolves in various settings. One howls at the sky, while another month, June, shows a group of wolves staring at something off camera.

But when Loftis gets to July, there are no wolves to be found. Instead, July’s image is of a white vehicle overturned at the edge of a desolate road. Loftis pauses, checking that the calendar really is just supposed to be a fun one about wolves (it is). Still, he has far too much on his plate to overthink it, and quickly moves on with his day.

Later in the series, when Loftis is back in his office and under pressure to shut down the island thanks to a looming storm, he returns to the calendar and once again stares at its pages. After his assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) reminds him that people have died, he flies into a rage. He tries to rip up the calendar and fails. Either Loftis doesn’t have the strength to rip through a calendar that must be all of 14 pages, or the calendar itself is indestructible for some mysterious reason. Either way, I don’t care. I do not want to know. It’s much funnier not knowing.

Like Demolition Man’s peaceful utopia, which replaces toilet paper with three seashells and never explains how they work, the Wolves calendar is more hilarious if we don’t know why July’s page is so haunting. Our imaginations can do all the heavy lifting, and the writers of Widow’s Bay can concentrate on all the lingering mysteries left to solve on the island, like what happened at the old hospital and why it’s safe to drive by there but not to stop. Or why various members of the town have much younger biological ages. Or why the island’s evils seem to be so drawn to Patricia. Or whether the Shaman survived being swept up in the storm.

Of course, there are already theories about the calendar, since the July car-wreck mystery wasn’t fully solved in the show’s first season. The strongest one sprang from Loftis’ visit to his elderly neighbor’s house in the season finale. Poor Ruth had no idea what Loftis had in store for her, poring through her photo albums and pointing out every notable man (and woman) of the town who had made a pass at her over the years. But to begin, Ruth lingers on a picture of an old boyfriend, Alfred, whom she says she loved so much. “But he got bit by an animal and became that animal,” she reveals. Our minds immediately jump to Alfred now being Widow’s Bay’s resident werewolf. Could it have been Alfred’s car overturned on that haunting road? Maybe, but I maintain it would be funnier if he became a different animal, like a spider or a deer, and the Wolves calendar had nothing to do with it.

Instead of making a definitive link, I say leave the Wolves calendar to be picked apart online forever by those compelled by it. Much like the series it often gets compared to, Twin Peaks, Widow’s Bay can confidently leave things unsaid and unexplained, though Apple TV’s sleeper hit might want to avoid killing one of its main characters and turning them into a ghostly drawer knob. That could be a bit too far.

All episodes of Widow’s Bay are now streaming on Apple TV.

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