The Widow’s Bay Finale Makes Some Terrifying Revelations About the Island

Spoilers below.

There’s a scene in the Widow’s Bay season 1 finale in which distressed mayor Tom Loftis references the infamous “trolley problem.” To paraphrase: Imagine a runaway trolley is speeding down the tracks, headed for a group of people who are tied to the rails. If you pull a lever, the trolley will change course onto another track, where only one person is stuck on the rails. The group will be saved, but the individual will die. Do you pull the lever?

This is the kind of quandary that Tom (an incredible Matthew Rhys) finds himself in as the eighth episode begins. He has recently learned that the curse that’s been plaguing the Apple TV horror-comedy’s titular island for centuries will finally break once every last descendant of its founder, Richard Warren, is deceased. As it turns out, there is only one descendant left alive: Tom’s elderly colleague, Ruth (K Callan). She’s 84 years old and has no children or living relatives, so it doesn’t take long for Tom to make his decision in this particular version of the trolley problem. Getting rid of Ruth is the lesser of two evils.

In fact, Tom might argue, it’s for the greater good. Widow’s Bay has long been tormented by a curse that causes anyone born on the island to die when they leave. Oh, and there’s an ominous fog that possesses people who make contact with it; there’s a haunted inn that causes guests to hallucinate various horrors; and there’s a treacherous storm that sucks people into the sky now taking over the town. (Plus countless other freakish issues.) Once Ruth is gone, Tom believes, all this drama will be over. He can go back to making Widow’s Bay “the next Martha’s Vineyard.”

But once he arrives at Ruth’s house, he starts to question whether he’s doing the right thing. Without giving away his plan, he shares the trolley problem with Ruth and asks if she would pull the metaphorical trolley lever to save their town. Ruth has an interesting reason for saying no. The trolley is life, she says. You can’t stop it—no matter how bad it is—from happening. But once you pull the lever, you are actively choosing to kill someone. She couldn’t do that.

Still, Tom decides to pull that lever, crushing up two of Ruth’s medications that should never be mixed and slipping them into her tea. Before she can feel the effects of her spiked drink, she makes a surprising revelation: She had a daughter, which means she is not Richard Warren’s final descendant after all. What follows makes Tom’s moral dilemma infinitely harder.

Who is the actual last descendant of Richard Warren?

Because Ruth had a secret child, the Warren bloodline does not end with her. She had an affair with a married man when she was 40 and got pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl, but she gave her daughter to the man to raise with his wife as their own child. That child was Lauren, Tom’s late wife. That means Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), Tom’s son, is Ruth’s biological grandchild and the real, last living descendant of Richard Warren.

Ruth watched her daughter grow up from afar, but she still tried to remain part of her child’s life. She visited Lauren in the asylum after the ferry incident and told her she was her “secret mommy” (which explains why Lauren used that phrase in a letter she wrote to Evan). Now, Ruth tries to do the same with Evan, working in his dad’s office way past her retirement years and keeping a room for him to sleep in at her house.

This all comes out after decades of secrecy, likely because Ruth is loopy from the drugs in her drink. Tom is rightfully horrified upon learning the news. It means, according to his theory, that the horrors of the island will only end when his son dies. Tom was so willing to sacrifice Ruth for the greater good. But his own son? The teenager he’s hellbent on protecting from danger after watching his mother die? No way. The hypocrisy is glaring, but it’s also understandable. That also explains why, when local sheriff Bechir (Kevin Carroll) breaks into Ruth’s home, Tom keeps his discovery a secret.

What happens with Bechir’s baby?

Protective dads are a running theme here. Bechir might’ve been hesitant to believe in the curse at first, but in the finale, he won’t take any risks, especially as his wife goes into labor. He won’t let his future baby be born on the island and doomed to its curse.

He first tries to flee the island with his wife, but the storm keeps them from escaping. When he finds out Ruth is the last descendant of Richard Warren and is the key to breaking the curse, he rushes to her house to get the job done himself. (His wife is feeling contractions at this point.) Upon arrival at Ruth’s house, Bechir shoots the elderly woman in hopes of killing her before his child is born. “She’s not the last descendant!” Tom shouts at him. But when Bechir asks who is, Tom lies and says he doesn’t know. If he reveals it’s Evan, Bechir might try to kill him, too.

Coincidentally, the storm on Widow’s Bay stops shortly after Ruth is shot. The two men don’t know why, but we viewers can piece it together after watching the chaos in the shelter. It’s also still unclear whether Bechir’s wife has yet to give birth.

What did Dale watch in the shelter?

While residents are arguing over food and water rations, Dale (Jeff Hiller) finds a supply closet with old video recordings. They turn out to be informational videos on what to do if you’re chosen as “an offering.” A man in a white shirt and tie speaks with a surprisingly chipper tone, telling the viewer they were “selected by a committee of your peers” and “will save countless members of our community from needless suffering.”

As Dale goes through reels of film, he sees footage of people who are stripped down to their underwear with bags over their heads and their arms chained to the ceiling. They appear to be in the underground cellar that Tom found earlier in the season—and that Evan and his friends find later in this episode. In one of the videos, the man advises residents not to comfort the offering(s) because “it” likes the taste of fear.

The reels suggest that there was once a practice on the island where residents chose a person (or people) to be sacrificed to some unnamed entity for the good of the community. Maybe past Widow’s Bay residents arranged this “pact” to keep peace on the island, albeit temporarily. As the instructor says, “The bad times will not end until the covenant is honored, and honored fully. Life for life. The island will make its needs known: one soul for each bell toll.”

Why did the storm stop?

At the same time that Tom and Bechir are with Ruth, Evan and his troublemaking friends try to escape the shelter through a shaft that leads to a system of underground tunnels. As they explore, they end up in a cellar room with a creepy-looking chair that has straps for the sitter’s head and arms. As they fool around, the town handyman, Kenny, finds them and shoos them back to the shelter. But as the kids leave, the door closes behind them, accidentally leaving Kenny inside. Evan tries to open the door, but it’s somehow locked. He hears Kenny screaming more and more fearfully, until his screaming stops—and so does the storm.

The door unlocks soon after and Evan looks inside. Kenny is missing, but his flashlight was left on the ground. There’s a set of doors on the other side of the room, left slightly ajar. Did something come out of there and take Kenny?

Based on Dale’s videos, it seems like Kenny became an inadvertent offering, and his death might have saved the town this time around. Maybe these life-threatening storms were a regular occurrence, and the Widow’s Bay citizens somehow learned that sacrificing human lives would quell the terrors for a period of time. Even if the weather seems fine at the end of the episode, that doesn’t mean that the curse is over. Especially not while Evan is still alive.

What do the bell tolls mean?

They’re clearly a bad omen. When Tom first mentioned he heard them earlier in the season, local priest Pastor Collins (David Dean Bottrell) was shocked, because the bell in the town church has long been chained up. As he researches Widow’s Bay’s history, Pastor Collins finds an old note from one of his predecessors that reveals the bell tolls are a harbinger of unspeakable horrors. He was so stunned by what he learned that he killed himself in his office.

At the very end of the finale, though the skies are clear, Tom hears the bell toll eight times in the distance. He shrugs it off, but he doesn’t know that in the videos Dale watched, the instructor said the island wants “one soul for each bell toll.” That could mean the storm—or whatever “it” is—could come back for a second, bigger serving. We just don’t know when.

When Tom realizes this—and if the Warren theory still holds true—he’ll soon find himself in an unthinkable version of the trolley dilemma. Will he let the storm continue to ravage the town to keep his son alive, or will he pull the lever, like he said he would before, to end the curse for good? I think we know what he’ll decide, but we don’t know how much worse things will get on Widow’s Bay if and when he does.