Comedy
Widow’s Bay
Apple TV+’s horror-comedy ‘Widow’s Bay’ takes us to a deceptively bucolic island that hides some serious issues. The same could be said for the series itself.
John Creasy is a good soldier. When he was in the U.S. Army Special Forces, he did three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that, he did private security contracts with the CIA. When he gets hired for a job, his employers usually ask, “Where can I get 10 more of him?” But truthfully, you only need one.
That was the past, though.
Four years ago, Creasy was on a job in Mexico City. He and his team were tasked with obtaining an asset. The intel was good. Creasy’s plan was solid. They’d just been given the go-ahead when something went terribly, terribly wrong.
Armed assailants in face-obscuring helmets captured Creasy’s team. They attempted to take down Creasy, too, but he managed to evade his would-be captors. Unfortunately, his team wasn’t so lucky. Creasy was forced to watch through surveillance cameras as each member of his team, a bag placed over his or her head, received a bullet to the head.
Creasy was removed from active service after that, pending treatment for severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
Unfortunately, he never got treatment—or if he did, it didn’t do him much good. Creasy sleeps with a bag over his head now, one eerily similar to the ones placed over his comrades’ heads. He has horrific nightmares every night. He drinks away his pain every day.
He’s depressed enough to try to kill himself by driving his car into the cement support pillar of a bridge. But when he wakes up from the accident, Paul Rayburn, one of the few people from his past still keeping tabs on Creasy, offers him a different way out.
Rayburn believes that Creasy isn’t a guy you need to light a fire under to motivate. Rather, if you stack up the wood near Creasy, he’ll light it himself. Rayburn plans to do just that.
Rayburn takes Creasy to Rio de Janeiro, where he works as a security contractor. He’s just been hired to prevent a terrorist attack ahead of an upcoming election. And he believes that it’s the perfect opportunity for Creasy to get himself back in form.
Unfortunately, that’s where things go terribly, terribly wrong once again.
The terrorists don’t target the new, unoccupied luxury condos as intel suggested. Instead, they go for Rayburn himself, blowing up the very occupied luxury condos where he and his family live.
Creasy isn’t there when the bomb goes off. He’d gone on a bender earlier that evening and was sleeping it off in a cab. But Rayburn’s teenage daughter, Poe, wasn’t at home either.
Poe, in the throes of teenage rebellion, had snuck out to go to a party with her friends. She fell asleep and was attempting to sneak back home unnoticed when the explosion knocked her off her feet.
Poe watched her dad—waiting for her at the entrance of the condo—go up in flames. She saw the building collapse, killing her mother and two younger brothers. And she also happened to catch a glimpse of the terrorists who caused explosion.
When Creasy catches up to Poe the next morning, he tells her to keep quiet about what she saw: He knows that the terrorists will come for her. And he knows that once she tells government officials what she knows, they won’t bother protecting her from those extremists.
Creasy will protect Poe at all costs. More than that, he will kill every single person involved in the Rayburn family’s deaths.
Creasy didn’t just light the firewood Rayburn stacked near him. He became the firewood. John Creasy is the Man on Fire.
Have you ever seen a big, muscular, threatening-looking guy go all soft and gooey while holding a baby or a puppy? That’s sort of what I think about with the Man on Fire concept.
This series, based on the character created by A.J. Quinnell (and previously portrayed by Denzel Washington in the 2004 film of the same name), is all about a tough, stoic military guy risking his life for a little girl.
Granted, Poe isn’t so little: She’s a teenager. But that doesn’t matter much. John Creasy will do whatever it takes to protect her from harm. He’ll put up with her precociousness, her stubbornness, her general teenage attitude if it means that she gets home safe. And then he’ll take out anyone who ever threatened her for good measure.
As such, viewers can expect a lot of violence in this series. In the first episode alone, we witness a suicide attempt, point-blank gunshots to the head, Creasy nearly beating a man to death and an explosion that kills a building full of innocent people, including children.
Alcoholism also plays a role here. Creasy is deeply depressed, so he self-medicates with booze. But perhaps his dedication to Poe will help him out of the funk that he’s been living in for the past four years. Perhaps even after Poe returns home, Creasy will fulfill Rayburn’s hope of returning to the man he once was.
That would certainly be a positive outcome in all of this, but it doesn’t necessarily take away the fact that this isn’t an easy show to watch. Besides all the violence I already mentioned, there’s a lot of foul language to contend with. There’s still potential for Creasy to fall off the wagon with drinking. And other iterations of this story have certainly had some less-than-happy endings.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
After suffering through four years of PTSD, John Creasy is given the opportunity to return to security service again. But after a terrorist attack results in the death of the one person still trying to help him, Creasy determines to kill everyone responsible.
We see the event that caused Creasy’s PTSD: While on assignment, unknown assailants take down Creasy’s team. Creasy himself, watching the operation from an offsite location, gets attacked too. He fights back, killing or knocking out his opponents with guns and nearby bricks. He pulls the pin on a grenade strapped to one mercenary’s chest and then shoves the man into some other oncoming attackers, killing them all in the explosion. His team isn’t so lucky. They’re lined up on their knees with bags over their heads. The first victim asks Creasy to tell his wife that he loves her, but he’s cut off when a gunman shoots him in the head at point-blank range. We don’t see the other deaths, but it’s implied the rest of the team is shot down, one by one.
Creasy still has nightmares of the event. He takes pills upon waking up, downing them with alcohol. And we see him continue to drink booze to the point of inebriation on a daily basis. (At work, he operates a forklift while drunk, knocking over merchandise in the warehouse.)
One day, as Creasy gets into his car for work, he seems to make a decision. He cuts the wire for the airbag on his seat. Then, unbuckled, he purposely drives his car into the cement support pillar of a bridge. Creasy survives, waking up in a hospital.
Rayburn, who still believes in Creasy, offers him a job following the suicide attempt. They’re tasked with preventing a terrorist attack ahead of an upcoming election in Brazil.
The government official who hired Rayburn doesn’t trust his appointment of Creasy. He tests Creasy by asking him to field strip a gun. Creasy struggles to perform this task, and the man orders one of his guards to attack Creasy from behind. Creasy fights back, but poorly. The man calls off his guard, feeling as though his point has been made.
Terrorists instead plant bombs in an apartment complex, blowing up the building with all its residents in the middle of the night. Poe, Rayburn’s daughter, witnesses the attack from across the street. She’s blown off her feet by the explosion, but she watches her dad get consumed by the flames. Understandably, she experiences feelings of survivor’s guilt and depression following the deaths of her family (her mom and two little brothers died in the attack, too).
A security guard gets shot and killed. Two thugs attempt to mug Creasy at knifepoint. They hold the knife to a woman’s throat when he doesn’t comply. Creasy manages to distract them from the woman and begins to fight them. He knocks one man unconscious. He’s about to crush the other man’s skull with a brick when the woman stops him, telling him they should just leave. He obliges. A girl crashes a motorcycle (she’s OK but bruised up a bit) when a caravan of vehicles runs a red light.
Creasy warns Poe not to tell officials what she witnessed at the terrorist attack until after they’ve guaranteed her safety, since he knows that the terrorists will probably try to kill her. Sure enough, we see someone hire a mercenary to eliminate Poe.
A teenage girl rebels against her parents because she’s angry that they’ve moved so many times for her dad’s work. However, her dad never stops showing her how much he loves her. And it seems that he might be getting through to her.
We see Creasy drinking throughout the episode as a way to deal with his depression and PTSD. He pops some pills too, apparently for the same reason. Poe attends a party where many underage characters drink alcohol (perhaps including her). Teens snort cocaine, but Poe doesn’t participate, instead walking away to a quieter area to be alone. Two characters joke about the reasons why they drink alcohol. Some women wear bikinis and dance at a beach bar. Teens wear swimsuits at a pool party.
Creasy wears a cross necklace. At a low point, he goes to a church, perhaps seeking some solace, but the place is boarded up. Creasy comforts Poe after her family dies.
There are seven uses each of the f-word and s-word. We also hear three uses of “a–hole” and one misuse of God’s name. Someone flips his buddy the bird.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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