Last week, “Beach Reads” elevated Widow’s Bay yet again, giving us a witchy party from hell that pinballed between triumphant glee and agonizing embarassment. (Mostly the latter.) But the Apple TV show, one of the brightest surprises on streaming right now, hit yet another new high with “What to Expect on Your Trip.” The episode shifts the focus back to Mayor Tom Loftis as he navigates an unwanted, disorienting, frequently terrifying emotional journey—assisted by magic mushrooms so potent you’ll need to go to a cursed island to find them. We open on a patch of black mushrooms in the snow. A figure appears in the background—we can’t tell who it is, but based on the hair and clothing, it isn’t a character we know—and falls to the ground, moaning, before crawling to the plants and gobbling them up.
In Widow’s Bay, it’s the morning after Tom’s sea hag attack, Patricia’s cocktail disaster, and the discovery of Reverend Bryce’s suicide in the church. At the town hall, Tom orders Dale to issue a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew, community fireworks be damned.
Tom has also confined Evan to his office, both for safety reasons and because he’s tired of the kid disobeying him. But it’ll be a challenge to hold him there, especially with the easily distracted Ruth keeping an eye on him. Bad vibes are percolating between father and son. Evan plots his escape. © Apple TV At that moment, though, Tom has to head to the nearby church. There’s a memorial for Bryce underway, and Patricia and Wyck are searching his cluttered office. They aren’t finding much, though Tom notices Bryce carved “My eye is open” onto his desk; he also finds a pile of black mushrooms. As Tom picks up the phone to check on Evan, he notices on the log that Bryce tried to reach him the night before… and had made repeated calls to another number, too.
