Warning: This post contains spoilers for season one, episode eight of Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage.”
Kate O’Flynn, who plays the peculiarly indomitable Patricia on Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, didn’t even know what a Final Girl was before doing press rounds for the show. That didn’t stop her, however, from channeling big slasher movie energy while staying true to Patricia’s demure demeanor as she timidly shrieks along the darkened streets of the island while The Boogeyman plods after her, intent on her murder.
“My memory of filming that episode is just running and screaming,” she jokingly told me in an interview, though she also praised her character’s “amazingly innovative problem-solving” with the gasoline and the lighter, and that “doing that Final Girl trot and action hero thing as Patricia… just felt really fun.”
The entire sequence between Patricia and The Boogeyman is when I laughed the hardest during the show’s first season. Not only because of O’Flynn’s riff on the slasher movie as Patricia, but also because we get a dose of Mean Girls when she crashes book club and ends a face-off with her former classmate in a definitively violent way. “She’s over it at that point, she is over that whole dynamic,” O’Flynn said about her high school bully. “There’s something bigger and she’s able to let it go… by tasering it.”
Tasering gags aside, the latest episode of Widow’s Bay is also an emotional turning point for O’Flynn’s character. “I love the fact that Patricia gets that payoff… this is where she finds her strength and her courage, and she’s able to deliver the goods when it comes to The Boogeyman,” she told me.
“Those goods” involve not only shooting The Boogeyman, but keeping a shotgun on his corpse until his remains are properly burned to ash. Patricia is done with his supernatural serial killer nonsense, thank you very much, and this episode, O’Flynn explained, tees Patricia up for rest of the season.
“She breaks through that neurosis she has about caring what other people think, and she finds agency that carries her through to the end,” she said. “There’s less flapping from her… it’s a bit more serious in those last two episodes.”
The last two episodes of Widow’s Bay premiere on Apple TV on June 10, 2026, and June 17, 2026.
