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All hail Patricia, the wonderfully strange and intense Widow’s Bay character played with perfect comic timing by Kate O’Flynn. Viewers have been hearing about Patricia’s brush with the Boogeyman—the island’s Michael Myers equivalent who stalked and killed teenage girls when Patricia was in high school—since the first episode of the Apple TV horror comedy. It’s a key part of her lore, even though her bitchier peers have doubts about her brush with death back then.
This week’s episode, “Your Baggage,” finally brought forth some proof for the naysayers—and it gave Patricia a chance to put the Boogeyman out of business forever. The end result is a mini-slasher movie contained in 30 minutes of TV, but incredibly, O’Flynn wasn’t too familiar with the genre before Widow’s Bay. In a new interview with the Wrap, she confessed she didn’t even know about one of its most important tropes: the Final Girl. She certainly didn’t realize “Your Baggage” put her character in an elite group with Halloween‘s Laurie Strode and Scream‘s Sidney Prescott, among others.
“I had no idea what ‘Final Girl’ meant until I started doing press for this!” she told the Wrap. “I’ve only just started to understand what it means, but it feels great!”
The episode sees the Boogeyman return to scratch her name off his kill list, and though he’s remarkably resilient (surviving falling out of a second-story window, being hit by a car, and getting set on fire), Patricia manages to turn the tables on him. It’s a huge personal validation for a character who’s so often left holding the short straw, whether it’s being made fun of by the local mean girls, getting the wrong take-out order, or accidentally hosting a party powered by witchcraft.
“It was really satisfying,” O’Flynn said of her character’s victory. “I think there is a danger of viewers pitying Patricia, of feeling too sorry for her … I hate it when that happens, when characters are pitied.”
In episode eight, she said, “You really see the guts of her … you get to see her not [conform to her] archetype, or even just as a ‘normal’ sort of Final Girl. I find that very pleasing, because I would find it pleasing as a viewer myself. It’s nice to see something different.”
New episodes of Widow’s Bay arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV.
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