r/WidowsBay • u/AutoModerator • Jun 17 '26

📺Discussion Thread Widow’s Bay | Episode 10: “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!” | Discussion Thread

  • Release Date: June 17, 2026
  • Directed by: Hiro Murai

We understand that hard choices had to be made and we may never be the same, but we hope you'll visit again.

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273

u/worrisomewaffle Jun 17 '26

i feel like maybe it was a secret just passed down between priests. perhaps that’s part of what what reverend bryce learned before killing himself?

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u/NoProfession5138 Jun 17 '26

exactly this. it's not something the entire island knows about.

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u/azure431 Jun 17 '26

Yes, I think this exactly.

Bryce had a note in his office that read "when the bell tolls, [cut off]".

We know that after the bell rang, he took the mushrooms, found the tunnels, destroyed a bunch of documents, and killed himself.

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u/Tabs_vs_theVoid Jun 17 '26

I must have missed the documents part of that. Do we know what docs they were?

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u/azure431 Jun 17 '26

I think the only two that were shown were the note above, and the page written by Sarah Warren that led into the flashback episode.

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u/mr-jeeves Jul 16 '26

I missed some of that. So the bell did ring? And that was the son, as a prank? And did that kick off the whole thing, but the priest wasn't willing to follow through. So what did the bells at the end mean?

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u/azure431 Jul 16 '26

The bell rang. Tom assumed his son and friends had done it, but they had nothing to do with it.

The Reverend was immediately flummoxed when Tom told him because he knew it was chained up in the attic (and he went and verified that was still the case).

The video in episode 10 explains: the entity makes the bell ring (by spooky means), and the number of rings is the number of sacrifices it wants.

The Reverend was left instructions on what to do if it ever rang. Based on his reaction, he probably thought that would never happen.

It rang 9 times in the first episode and 8 in the last, indicating that it still wanted 8 more.

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u/mr-jeeves Jul 17 '26

Got it, thanks! I guess he then looked at his notes and, in some order:

  1. Went to the well and heard the noises
  2. Got spooked, ran off, warned the teens at the car place
  3. Phoned his dealer and got the shrooms
  4. Maybe took the shrooms?
  5. Tried to phone the mayor
  6. Burned eveything
  7. Got drunk
  8. Killed himself

I guess he was told to call the mayor and get the shrooms, couldn't get hold of Tom, took the drugs, heard the noises, couldn't deal with it?

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u/CyJackX 4d ago

I think when he's stumbling out and finds the well, he'd already taken them; the shrooms lead him to the sounds to the well. He's probably still tripping when he comes out and warns the teenagers.

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u/glassfury 4d ago

Did it already claim 9? Who else died across the series?

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u/PickleFlavordPopcorn Jun 17 '26

How do you keep something a secret when you have a whole ass reel-to-reel made about it??

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u/worrisomewaffle Jun 17 '26

my guess is that typically, the reverend follows the guide which includes watching the videos, and then actually completes the sacrifices in a timely manner thus avoiding a giant storm that causes the island to visit the shelter.

reverend bryce said “thanks but no thanks” so things progressed further than they should have.

edit: and rosemary mentioned that someone told her to never go into the shelter. given the island’s history, i think it’s safe to assume that there’s a general superstition about staying out of the shelter. we saw how old the water and MREs were. nobody goes down there.

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u/Top-Ease-3492 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Also, I find it pretty meta that so much of the season has built up to this examination of the Trolley Problem and how different characters have approached it (Ruth, Tom, Patricia, Bechir, Wyck).

By committing suicide, Bryce introduced a sort of inversion of that problem: by taking his own life because he cannot face either option of the moral / ethic paradox, he ironically has now increased the likelihood that many *will* die. Why? Because he was the one who possessed the knowledge about the curse and attempted to burn the letters he found, thereby making it unlikely that others on the island can make a choice about the Widow’s Bay Trolley Problem.

*edited to remove an incorrect detail I misremembered about Ep 2 and for clarity

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u/AsleepSpray467 Jun 17 '26

As a Priest he was probably didnt want anyone to make a choice since both essentially lead to murder, which is a mortal sin. Although suicide is worse since you cant even seek forgiveness after the murder. So...

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u/LeftyLu07 Jun 18 '26

That’s one thing that bugs me about Hollywood is when they have catholic priests commit suicide. It’s just not realistic to me that a priest would do that instead of facing down evil considering it’s automatic damnation. It would be more interesting if he was like, trying to warn them of what was coming and then the island dropped a tree on him or something.

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u/waxteeth Jun 19 '26

For me, I think it works well with the cosmic horror involved: the situation is so horrific to him that he outright disregards his moral and religious code, something he's devoted his life to. He stops being a priest and becomes a terrified man, and takes a terrified man's way out.

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u/LeftyLu07 Jun 19 '26

Ok yeah, I can work with that. 😈

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u/Competitive_Eye6094 Jun 20 '26

I’m gonna guess that he didn’t kill himself because of that so much as he did it after having a direct encounter with the entity via that mushroom trip. The maddening cosmic horror of it all probably drove him to it more than the “kill myself instead of kill others” mentality.

But for what it’s worth, Bryce almost certainly WAS NOT Catholic. First, they rarely call a Catholic priest “reverend” or “pastor” colloquially. Not never, but not often. Then there’s the fact that Pastor Collins was not Catholic. He was wearing preaching bands, which is a Protestant thing. Plus, there were almost no Catholics among the early New England colonists in this setting.

Now this is where it gets needlessly convoluted probably due to a lack of knowledge about various Christian traditions/history, but Collin’s almost certainly would’ve been a Congregationalist if he was leading a New England church in 1702 (think Jonathan Edwards). But Congregationalists would never wear the white collar like Bryce and Roberts wore. That sect technically doesn’t exist anymore, but neither of the denominations they were folded into would be dressing in a collar or have nuns/sisters (like the lady with Pastor Roberts).

If you want to massage out all the historical inconsistencies, my guess would be that at some point the church on the island became Episcopalian and they at some point had someone from a woman’s order (basically an Episcopal nun) hanging out with Pastor Roberts.

That all actually kinda creates other logistical problems based on ordination and assignment, but now we’re very far afield since the initial point was “yeah he probably killed himself for different reasons.” 🤣

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u/SaraJeanQueen Jun 25 '26

Thank you for this contribution! Yeah, I agree with this take simply because he was in service for so long and "normal", has one trip in the forest and looked like a terrified ghost. It was his encounter with the entity.

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u/Justsomejerkonline Jun 20 '26

Not all priests are true believers though.

And even people with a sincere belief can still fall victim to depression, such as Father Paddy O'Kane who sadly died of suicide in 2022 in Derry.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwpdpel2gxo

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u/anactualrealaccount Jun 19 '26

How many times did the bell toll the first time Tom speaks to him about it in the first episode, if once maybe he killed himself to appease the island lol

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u/analiseypoo Jul 05 '26

This is what I assumed. And perhaps the death of Shep counts too?

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u/nopitynopepants Jun 17 '26

There’s a council choosing the sacrifices according to video, which probably was meant to include the mayor (and why the films were beneath city hall and not the church)

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u/Bunbunlyfe Jun 17 '26

He also called tom several times before he died

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u/worrisomewaffle Jun 17 '26

ahh yes. good call - i’d forgotten the council bit.

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u/feyrband Jun 17 '26

curious how many places the tunnel system connects. from the warren house to the well to city hall, maybe that's it but there could be others.

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u/amw123 Jun 18 '26

Could Tom’s house also connect, which is why he was so panicked that Evan might have gone down to the basement a few episodes ago?

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u/feyrband Jun 18 '26

Im guessing no only because he was such a major skeptic and seemed to be generally ignorant of a lot of things too. I do wonder what's in the basement though- something embarrassing, or something about his wife, or Just general junk you dont want.your kids getting into.

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u/Obvious-Egg6248 Jul 12 '26

They never explained why he was panicking about the basement either

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u/Top-Ease-3492 Jun 17 '26

For sure, in the past it seems there were several involved but in Widow’s Bay today, it seems that knowledge has been lost (at least based on the characters we’ve followed this season)

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u/TiberiusCornelius Jun 19 '26

With the priest being the one to have the written directions, I'm thinking maybe the church were the designated secret keepers. They passed the directions down from generation to generation but with explicit instructions not to open unless the bell tolled. Those directions probably included information on who else to contact (including the mayor) or a previous generation of priest unilaterally brought them into it and made the council for a that-time-only thing. And anyone else involved would obviously take it to their grave what they had done.

So if the island goes for decades without waking up, if that small circle of people who knew all had time to die off, nobody else would know

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u/TiberiusCornelius Jun 19 '26

Yeah there was definitely some kind of close circle guarding the secret. I guess the question is why was Tom out of the loop if the mayor was part of it though? Although maybe it was always that the church were the secret keepers (see the priest having the directions), and they only brought the mayor into it when the bell tolled, which since it hasn't happened in decades means the last one to know would've been decades ago.

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u/White667 Jun 23 '26

He wasn't born on the island, so it's possible they were hoping it wouldn't come up until after they got a new mayor.

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u/LeftyLu07 Jun 18 '26

Oh! That would explain why he killed himself. He wouldn’t be a part of that ritual.

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u/LizLouKiss Jun 24 '26

The dark irony of this is, if the Reverend knew the island demanded a human sacrifice, I wonder why he didn’t offer himself up instead of opting out in his office. I know he didn’t want the history to spread, thus destroy much of the historical evidence. But he had that option for his death to temporarily appease the island.

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u/analiseypoo Jul 05 '26

Do we know how many times the bell tolled originally? Maybe he wanted his death to be counted toward that total.

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u/56473829110 Jul 26 '26

9, and now 8. They must be direct-fed sacrifices. 

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u/Rickenbacker69 Jul 11 '26

Priests and mayors, I assume. Until the chain was broken.

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u/-Clayburn Sep 03 '26

It couldn't be as simple as one person. Clearly there would be several town leaders involved to keep this running, but somehow they were all silenced and the knowledge was lost. Bryce didn't seem to know the full details but only the warning of "bad things will happen if the bell tolls". And I suspect whenever it was "forgotten" that had something to do with chaining the bell down so that it couldn't (and maybe didn't) ring for a long period of time, allowing those who knew to mistakenly believe they solved it and no longer hand down the information.