What Actually Happened To Will In The Widow? The Twisty Mystery, Solved

At the very beginning of Amazon Prime Video's The Widow, the destiny of the series seems fairly obvious. This is a show where heroine Georgia Wells (Kate Beckinsale) will learn she is correct — her husband Will Mason (Matthew Le Nevez) really is alive, despite reports of his death three years prior following a fiery plane crash. Will, was likely kidnapped by shady people, like Pieter Bello (Bart Fouche), who has the comically villainous nickname “Mr. Tequila.” The trick of the Amazon original will be figuring out why a nice man like Will was abducted by such nefarious forces and kept from his wife for years.

By The Widow's seventh episode, “Will,” when Georgia finally tracks her husband down, you realize just how incorrect all of those assumptions are. Yes, Will is very much alive, but he was never captured by evil men. Hell, Will wasn't even technically in the plane crash that supposedly killed him. So where has Will been for the last three years? Alive, well, and operating as the worst husband on the world. Just look at all the evidence.

Sixth episode “The Spider And The Web” drops some some major bombshells that seem to corroborate any "Will Was Abducted By A Big Bad" suspicions. Here, it's confirmed the missing man’s boss, Judith Gray (Dr. Who’s Alex Kingston), was in cahoots with Congolese general Azikiwe (Babs Olusanmokun), a crooked military leader who has been using soldiers and kidnapped children to man his own cobalt mine. Azikiwe then smuggled the cobalt out of his country in aide vehicles supplied by Judith, “knowing they wouldn’t get checked crossing the border [to Rwanda],” Georgia’s father figure Martin Benson (Charles Dance, Game Of Thrones’ most fearsome patriarch) explains.

What Martin doesn’t explain in this moment is that the Democratic Republic of Congo, where much of The Widow takes place, is the world’s real-life leading cobalt supplier. Cobalt is a key ingredient is the batteries that go in smart phones and cars. Because of the high demand, Congo has raised the cobalt tax, infuriating miners. So, Azikiwe — and therefore Judith — are making a fortune bypassing the country’s increasing financial policies.

In “Spider,” Georgia and Martin assume Will was silenced by Azikiwe and Judith once he figured out their government-conning plot and threatened to expose them. That is not at all what happened.

Instead, as “Will” reveals, its titular character eventually realized Judith was up to some unsavory dealings and blackmailed her into letting him join the enterprise. Although Will claimed he was simply trying to help his boss, the power move is obviously a way to bolster his ego after following his veteran wife from army base to army base for most of their relationship.

After a year, Judith found a way out of her forced partnership (read: bribery chokehold) with Will. As we learn throughout The Widow, the plane crash at the center of the series was actually a bombing carried out by Azikiwe. The general used the “accident” as an opportunity to eliminate an enemy politician on the flight — every other victim was collateral damage. Because Judith was working with Azikiwe, she was aware of the plot, and booked Will a ticket for the flight. Judith tried to kill Will. However, the aforementioned Pieter Bello caught wind of the plan and told Will not to get on the plane. That was Pieter’s way of repaying Will for keeping his name out of the Judith blackmail scheme. Somehow, Will was still on the manifest for the plane and therefore pronounced dead following the crash. With one botched murder attempt, Will was off Judith’s radar forever.

After Will escaped his near-death situation, Pieter hid Will, now overcome with guilt for allowing the doomed plane to take off, under Azikiwe’s nose in the general’s mining camp. Pieter then smuggled Will to Rwanda, where he would be far from Azikiwe. The exact details of the smuggling are unclear, but Will eventually settled into a comfortable passport-less life in his new home country.

This is when Will officially wins his Decade's Worst Husband award. The Australian decided not to inform his wife he was alive (“I called and I just couldn’t speak,” he offers as explanation). Will claims his silence can be blamed on guilt and fear, but that’s not the whole story. By the end of the Wells-Masons’ conversation, Georgia realizes Will now has a new life partner — Gloria (Balindile ka Ngcobo), whom viewers are led to believe is one of Will’s captors for most of Widow — and a baby. The baby is a few months old, meaning she is about the same age as Violet, Georgia, and Will’s late daughter who died at 3 months old.

Although Georgia’s final face-to-face argument with Will may sound like she’s accusing him of cheating during their marriage, that’s not what’s really happening. Instead, Georgia is coming to terms with the fact that her husband abandoned her to recreate the life they had — only this time on another continent and without the tragic baggage of Violet’s death. That is why Georgia yells, “It’s always just been the path of least resistance for you, hasn’t it?”

So, Will blackmailed his way into a massive international criminal scheme, nearly got murdered for it, hid in a camp that abused child soldiers, hightailed it to Rwanda, hid there, and started a brand-new family. All while Georgia — who only glimpsed Will in the premiere episode news footage because he was doing Pieter a favor —mourned her husband in a Punishment Cabin in the Welsh mountains for years before going on a globe-trotting, life-threatening, friend-killing adventure to “save” him.

If Georgia never dates again, no one can't blame her.