Widow’s Bay’s “Your Baggage” provides closure for Patricia’s personal slasher story and becomes the definitive subversion of the exaggerated subgenre. […]
Widow’s Bay’s “Your Baggage” provides closure for Patricia’s personal slasher story and becomes the definitive subversion of the exaggerated subgenre.
Legacy sequels have become all the rage not just because they’re able to recycle old intellectual property and manipulate feelings of nostalgia, but they’re also impressive opportunities to check in with traumatized characters who must reopen old wounds and confront their pasts. 2018’s Halloween was hardly the first legacy sequel. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later even attempted the same idea two decades earlier in the same franchise. However, 2018’s Halloween helped establish the modern framework for legacy horror sequels, for better and for worse. Legacy sequels have been tackled in everything from Candyman to Leprechaun, but it’s a concept that’s quite hard to pull off and leave everyone satisfied. That’s why it’s so exceptional that the latest episode of Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage,” provides one of the best takes on conquering trauma and demons that surpasses Halloween and any other legacy sequel, and does it in under 35 minutes, no less.
Part of the reason that Widow’s Bay is able to so successfully tackle trauma that’s compounded over decades is because it has the luxury of a full season to seed Patricia’s pain. “Your Baggage” isn’t a legacy sequel that unearths old characters for a second go, but it ostensibly operates as one. Patricia still faces a killer from the past, decades later, which is all approached with the same intensity of any legacy sequel. “Your Baggage” is the pseudo-sequel to “Beach Reads,” which is the first episode to truly unpack Patricia’s unresolved serial killer trauma. “Beach Reads” leaves the details of Patricia’s Boogeyman open to interpretation, while “Your Baggage” is a cold shower that confronts the audience with the truth.
There’s a palpable tension to “Your Baggage” even before the episode bares its teeth and announces that Patricia will be fighting for her life. The audience hasn’t spent nearly as much time with Patricia as they have with , , or even , yet her trauma is omnipresent. Not enough praise can be given forperformance and how every little thing that she does channels decades of unresolved pain. Even the way in which she carries herself when she walks is steeped in backstory.
A seemingly ordinary scene in which Patricia carries out her nightly routine before she goes to bed is rich in mounting anxiety that amplifies every time Patricia turns off a light. Andrew DeYoung (Friendship) has a filmography that’s more reflective of his talents as a comedic director. However, DeYoung knows exactly how to mine these moments for maximum tension, right down to the framing. Another simple sequence in which Patricia prepares to eat the world’s saddest dinner speaks volumes for what she’s experiencing. It’s arguably an even stronger depiction of the internalized trauma and survivalist themes that are explored in Halloween’s legacy trilogy. It’s infinitely more compelling than how the same ideas are handled in 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre legacy sequel.
In fact, the empowering arc that Patricia experiences in “Your Baggage” tops the greatest moments of clarity and agency that are reached by Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott in their respective franchises. One might think that Widow’s Bay would cut these complex themes short because it’s a half-hour comedy. However, it’s more prepared than ever to take Patricia to the dark places that are necessary in order to get her to the other side of this experience and truly move on.
There’s a tense confrontation when Patricia, looking to escape from The Boogeyman, crashes Kris’ (Lauren Bittner) book club. Patricia snaps into action and moves with the strategic efficiency of You’re Next’s Erin (Sharni Vinson) while she prepares for every contingency plan possible. This scene becomes one of the episode’s many emotional climaxes. As much as “Your Baggage” is about Patricia literally conquering her demons, it’s no coincidence that her empowering display of strength also helps her get the necessary closure that she’s needed from Kris and the rest of her community. She’s no longer viewed as the scared, weird victim that they’ve always seen.
So many slasher sequels are consumed with their characters not only finding empowerment, but a sense of peace. The haunting horror that’s defined Patricia for most of her life finally receives closure, but she’s still in the belly of the beast. Patricia has no plans to leave Widow’s Bay. She’s immersed herself in a broken place that may never genuinely know peace. It’s a grim realization. However, “Your Baggage” concludes with Patricia finally feeling like she’s in control. She’s able to help herself, but also the other lost and tortured souls who call Widow’s Bay home. “Your Baggage” hardens Patricia into the confident, capable, kick-ass final girl that she’s always been. She may not have felt like she earned this title in the past, but she definitely has now and she’s ready for whatever is next.
As crucial as Patricia is to this episode’s success, The Boogeyman’s portrayal by Airon Armstrong and the rules that the character follows are also a testament to how well Widow’s Bay understands the assignment. There have been a slew of horror and slasher films from the 2020s that attempt to create their own Jason Voorhees/Michael Myers analog, whether it’s Freaky, In A Violent Nature, Heart Eyes, or most recently, Psycho Killer. Many of these attempts to recreate lumbering slasher icons become cases of style over substance. Widow’s Bay’s The Boogeyman is a villain who very much operates in extremes and is meant to feel like a parody of past horror legends. Nevertheless, he’s still genuinely terrifying. Hitting every single slasher stereotype can turn a villain into a punchline, but it also has the potential to transform an antagonist into a malevolent force of nature that feels unstoppable.
“Your Baggage” adeptly turns to Boogeyman POV shots to let the audience know that Patricia isn’t safe while also providing a visual shorthand for the horror story to come. All it takes is for one eerie POV shot for a few seconds to immediately change the rest of the episode’s atmosphere. “Your Baggage” still adheres to a typical episode structure in the sense that there’s a minor B-story with Tom that it needs to occasionally cut over to and service. These moments away from Patricia would typically defuse the tension that’s been gradually building. “Your Baggage” avoids this pitfall by frequently using The Boogeyman POV shots before cutting away to Tom’s story so that the audience is still left in a place of unease, knowing that Patricia isn’t safe and that every moment she’s not on screen is one where she might be attacked.
This episode’s effortless ability to tee up tried and true slasher tropes, only to then brilliantly subvert them, leads to the best joke from the entire first season. There’s an extended sequence in which Patricia is so skeptical that the Boogeyman is actually, truly gone that she refuses to stop pointing her shotgun at his deceased body as he rides in the ambulance, receives his autopsy, and becomes cremated. The fact that Patricia is still pointing her gun at the Boogeyman’s ashes, still unclear if he might find some way out of this, is everything that makes Widow’s Bay such a perfect genre satire.
There are plenty of self-aware horror movies — in particular, the Scream films — that have explored this gag to various degrees. That being said, none have pushed the cliche to such a ludicrous breaking point. It’s the sort of broad gag that you’d expect to catch in Scary Movie this weekend, not Widow’s Bay. The very nature of this sequence – which features an Enya needledrop, no less – is beyond absurd. It also underscores horror’s limitless nature and the endless heightening that’s become increasingly normalized in slashers.
If Jason Voorhees can be brought back to life all Universal Monsters-style from a bolt of lightning, or if Michael Myers can casually get back up from a close-range shotgun blast, then are any of Widow’s Bay’s events really that much more ridiculous? Widow’s Bay, at its core, is all about playing in this hyperbolized space and pushing genre tropes to unprecedented places. The bold conclusion to Patricia and the Boogeyman’s relationship becomes Widow’s Bay’s most sublime synthesis of horror and comedy. The entire series’s mission statement is in that one sequence.
There are still two more episodes in Widow’s Bay’s first season and Patricia has already accomplished the impossible and entered the Final Girl Hall of Fame. Whatever happens next with her character will no doubt be enlightening. That is, of course, unless Widow’s Bay decides to take a page out of Halloween Resurrection’s book with how it treats its final girls.
