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‘Wynonna Earp’ S2. E3: Haught vs. the Patriarchy

Previously on “Wynonna Earp,” Waverly got a serious case of the munchies and chowed down on a baby demon spider, Wynonna and Waverly discovered a Hellmouth fissure that attracted demon spiders, a Revenant, and some black fog ghost things, and Doc gave Wynonna the emotional Heisman. This week starts with the gif that launched a thousand ships. It’s Waverly as you’ve never seen her before. Specifically, in a cheerleader outfit (she was both head cheerleader and prom queen in high school, we learn, because natch she was) doing a cheer for Nicole, whose face pretty much mirrors my own, which was something like: OMG this is happening and am I allowed to actually be watching this? Full props and kudos to 1) Dominique Provost-Chalkley, who looks absolutely fabulous, and 2) the cinematographer/director, who uses strategic pauses to highlight Dominique’s frame and face. The dialogue that follows is 100% true:

Waverly: I didn’t know if that was your thing.

Nicole: Baby, that’s everyone’s thing.

Audience: *Is dead*

Yaaaaasssss. Moar of this, please.

Actually, Nicole doesn’t quite understand it’s a private show until Waverly explains it for her. They then adorable together for a while until Wynonna shows up and Nicole flees like a high school boy whose girlfriend’s parents have come home. The Wynonna-Nicole friendship has really taken a hit since Waverly and Nicole started dating, which sucks. Whatever happened to top shelf conversations drinking liquor on the floor of the sheriff’s office? Wynonna, who, lez be real, has been pretty self-centered of late, is concerned about the Satanic ritual they found at the condo and still moping about Dolls’ absence, but Waverly is an optimist. Goooooo Wynonna!

Meanwhile, at Purgatory High School, a guy in a hockey jersey named Bryce (the guy, not his jersey. Probably the jersey is Stan, or Howard) is bitterly reminiscing about the price he paid for winning the trophy he’s looking at in a case until some monster with a burlap sack of a head (covered with maggots, for good measure) pops up to whisper deep, husky nothings in his ear and make him pull out his own liver, which of course immediately kills him.

Sheriff Nedley and Nicole show up to investigate, but Nedley wants the case passed over to Black Badge and for Nicole to sweep the apparent murder under the rug. The camera pans left to Wynonna, who is lazily snapping pictures with her iPhone and cannot be bothered to take the killing seriously, and then to Nicole, who is quietly dying inside. She’s trained for this, she’s committed, she’s a professional, and Wynonna is…munching on a donut. The knife in Nicole’s heart is serrated and just went another inch in deeper.

Also, those leggings.

At the newly re-opened Shorty’s, Doc is pressuring Rosie to work on his mysterious side project faster, but the bar is hopping and she’s got stuff to do, like make the liquor rain down like mana from the sky for the thirsty denizens of Purgatory. Wynonna arrives to talk to Doc about the dead body at the high school, but she runs into Mercedes first.

Mercedes sniffs heartache on her like a bloodhound smells blood and decides to help Wynonna get over it (it being Doc) by luring over a cute guy from the other side of the bar. Coincidentally the guy, Perry Croft, was the dead guy Bryce’s friend and a member of the same 2007 championship winning ice hockey team. Pass, says Wynonna. I prefer my guys to be over a century old or half lizard. This dude looks too normal.

When she finally finds Doc and tells him about the case, he’s apathetic. He’s still busy passive aggressively keeping her at arm’s length. Wynonna admits she can’t sleep at night anymore for worrying about all these demon creatures from the Hellmouth running around Purgatory. Turns out the weight of the world on your shoulders is heavy and also causes insomnia. (Side note: Wynonna is totally becoming Buffy Summers, amIright? The Chosen One who fights all the Big Bads that have been let out of the Hellmouth, who feels the onerous weight of the duty bestowed upon her by her position?)

Back at BBHQ, Jeremy is looking into what the broken seal in the church was and what it means. No seriously, do we have to have this guy on the show? Isn’t this Waverly’s job? Anyway, Wynonna is unimpressed by the fact that he has squat to add to the case and tells him so. He tries inartfully to wheedle any information about Dolls out of Wynonna, but she gives him the brushoff because duh, bros before hoes.

The only clue they have so far is that Bryce died looking at the trophy case, but of course they don’t know it’s a clue yet. Foreshadowing. After Jeremy leaves, Wynonna gets a very unsubtle booty call from Perry. But of course, because it’s Purgatory, Perry is busy exsanguinating a shaved rabbit into a bowl, which brings up a very important question: how long would it take to shave the body of a rabbit using a straight razor? And also, did it have to be shaved, or could he have gotten away with just a trim?

Back at the Homestead, Wynonna and Waverly exchange banter as Wynonna gets ready for her date with Perry. Waverly just wants everyone to be happy and at their peak. Is her demon superpower optimism and enthusiasm? Because it seems pretty inhuman. As Wynonna heads out for her date, she tosses her lipstick to Waverly. Whose eyes go black and eats it. Ewwwww, the forces of Darkness thrive on Maybelline and demon spider babies.

Om nom nom nom.

At Purgatory High, Mercedes is rallying Purgatory’s finest for Homecoming and Perry is acting sketchy. After another hockey player asks him where Bryce is, he takes off into the school, abandoning Wynonna, but she catches up to him and they share a heartfelt conversation about how the people of Purgatory don’t really move on from the past.

Wynonna asks about Bryce, but just then the hockey team member, Skip, shows up to announce that Bryce is dead. He cries that Perry promised to fix the situation as Perry tries to shush him and bundles him out of the school just as Waverly shows up. Dressed like a hooker. Okay, I said it, Waverly sometimes dresses like a hooker, and this is one of those times.

Wynonna invites Waverly to come along and investigate the case, but Waverly declines. She’s waiting for Nicole to get off work. Wynonna’s ears immediately perk up. She doesn’t want Waverly losing herself in Nicole the way that she lost herself in Champ. Waverly needs to live her own life, not live for her significant other. It’s an excellent point, but Waverly fires back that Wynonna has no right to give relationship advice, based on her own terrible taste in men and relationship failures. Pot, meet kettle.

Inside the school, Waverly bops Nicole with cotton candy and it’s soooo adorable, except Nicole is in Officer Haught mode and has serious issues with PDAs when she’s on duty so she gently waves Waverly off. Waverly looks back at the trophy case and My Precioussssss Trophy calls to the demon in her.

This prompts her to smooch Nicole and might have sparked a public row between them, but just then Nicole spots a guy, Tucker Gardiner, filming up the skirts of some teenage cheerleaders. He looks awfully bored for someone committing a sex crime. She demands he hand over his iPhone for evidence, but he tries to clumsily blackmail her by saying that he has her and Waverly kissing on camera. This sets off a scuffle that ends in her cuffing and hauling him off, but really it’s mostly about Nicole feeling disrespected and underappreciated and having that chip on her shoulder about Black Badge.

 

No means no, Waves.

Wynonna finds Skip crumpled in a heap in front of his house. Both he and the door to his house have symbols painted in blood on them, courtesy of Perry. Just then, the burlap sack monster shows up wanting to make Skip pull out his own liver and honestly, Wynonna misses the opportunity for some good jokes about sack races. Wynonna draws down on him with Peacemaker, but is distracted by trying to stop Skip from disemboweling himself. When she turns back to the monster, it’s gone. So is Skip, who is hightailing it away from the house.

Back at the Sheriff’s office, Nedley releases Tucker, much to Nicole’s horror. Nedley explains that Tucker’s family, the Gardiners, are good, important people to the town. He also chastises Nicole for the kissing incident with Waverly and suggests that the office first aid kit needs restocking. Nicole counters, “Did I hit my head and wake up in patriarchical bullshitland?” Uh, you mean the same quietly malignant sexism that permeates all aspects of our society in subliminal yet toxic ways? Every day we wake up in that land, my friend. Tucker, walking free past her, says, “I want her charged with harassment. Such a nasty woman.” And then I yelled at the screen and had to take a minute to collect myself because arrrrrrgh all the associations with that phrase. Nedley puts Nicole on desk duty as a lesson not to mess with the Gardiners. I hope they have a magical amulet and a portal to another dimension.

Wynonna happens to also be at the sheriff’s office, so Nicole takes the opportunity to ask about Waverly. She’s been “different” since Willa was “sent down” (translation: Your sister sometimes looks like she wants to kill people and eat demon spiders ever since you murdered Willa using your magic gun).

The thing about her that Nicole loves, that sweetness makes her Waverly, seems to be missing sometimes, Nicole explains. She’s sometimes hard and cruel. Wynonna dismisses the change in behavior as PTSD from watching one of her sisters kill the other, but Nicole knows it’s something else. Still, Wynonna chooses to be a dick about it instead and suggests to Nicole that she’s just bitter she’s not on Black Badge anymore. Stay classy, Earp.

Back at the Homestead, Wynonna tells Waverly and Doc about what happened at Skip’s house. Wynonna desperately wants the burlap sack monster to be the Big Bad that broke the seal in the church because if not, that means it’s just one more low-level monster that they’re dealing with for Black Badge while a Bigger Bad lurks in the wings waiting to take on Purgatory.

Perry arrives moments later, excited to find that Wynonna is a “paranormal warrior” (or as Wynonna says a moment later, “Wynonna Earp, demon detective,” which should be the theme of season 3 and involve a seedy, booze-soaked office like that of Jessica Jones). Perry tells them the backstory of the burlap monster: four 17 year-olds (Skip, Cam, Perry, and Bryce) tired of losing hockey games all the time cast a spell that summoned the burlap monster. For ten years, the monster told them, they would have whatever they wished for. Now that those ten years are up, it’s killing them as repayment.

Waverly identifies the monster as a Marzanoik (where is she getting these books with this information? Paranormalbooks.com?), a bringer of good or bad fortune that lives in a vessel; in this case, the trophy. The obvious answer is to destroy the trophy and thereby destroy demon, but Doc has a different idea: use the Marzanoik to help Dolls. Turns out Doc’s underground lab is actually intended to synthesize the drug that Dolls needs to stay alive, but they need the blood of a pure demon to do it. New plan: capture the demon without killing it.

Doc and Perry head off to get Cam but on the way find that Cam is dead. That leaves only Skip and Perry left of the original four. Meanwhile, Waverly runs into Tucker outside of Skip’s house while searching for Skip. Tucker wants Nicole to lay off him…and also takes the opportunity to tell Waverly that her same-sex relationship is wrong.

You don’t tell Demon Waverly that, however. She lifts Tucker off the ground while strangling him, then takes his medical necklace and drops him to the ground, immediately reverting to the bright, chipper non-demon Waverly to call Doc and tell him she knows where Skip is. I like Demon Waverly. She’s got moxie. And super strength. To round out the search montage, Wynonna fights Purgatory High’s current ice hockey team for the demon trophy and this is my new work desktop image:

 

We find Skip in the drunk tank at the sheriff’s office, being supervised by none other than Nicole, whose day is about to get way worse because the burlap sack genie has come for Skip. As Skip starts digging out his own liver, the genie monster throws Nicole around like a rag doll using his telekinetic powers.

Wynonna, Doc, and Perry arrive to the rescue just in time. Perry tries to stop the genie monster using a rune and a spell in high German (okay seriously, where did he find that spell, the Internet?), but the monster just forces the rune to burrow into Perry’s chest while Wynonna waves the trophy in its face and tries the words, “There’s no place like home.” Those being insufficient, she pulls Peacemaker instead, but Doc reminds her that they need the demon alive for Dolls, so Wynona says the real magic words: “I wish you’d get back in the Goddamn trophy.”

Nicole is left cleaning up the mess in the sheriff’s office when Nedley arrives to offer the following wisdom: everyone in Purgatory pretends not to notice that the town is overrun by demons because they want to stay there. They like it there, God knows why. So there’s a mermaid poultergeist every once in a while. Oh well. (Please let this be in a future episode. Please let this be in a future episode.)

Nedley wants Nicole to replace him as sheriff when he retires because no matter how cool Black Badge sounds, someone has to deal with the mundane parts of Purgatory: the speeding tickets, the barroom brawls, etc. Nicole is just the person to do that. He hands her a file (on Tucker) and reminds her to think of the long game. I don’t know, I’d rather be Batman than Commissioner Gordon, but Nicole is a sucker for Duty with a capital D.

Back in the Gardiner household, Tucker is still pouting about both Nicole and Waverly, but Mercedes lays the smackdown on her brother: leave her friend Wynonna and her compatriots alone. Tucker whines and leaves, but Mercedes is quickly overtaken by the black fog ghosts, who appear to snap her neck. Awww, I liked her.

Back at Shorty’s, Wynonna tries to prod Waverly a little about her relationship with Nicole. She’s willing to dismiss it all as a figment of Nicole’s imagination, however, until Waverly asks for her lipstick back. Houston, we have a problem. Wynonna knows she gave Waverly that lipstick, and Wynonna doesn’t miss Waverly watching the demon trophy like Gollum watching the One Ring to Rule Them All. Wynonna heads off and Waverly filches a Martini shaker to add to her collection of other things she’s been collecting magpie-like ever since the demon side of her emerged.

Meanwhile, in Doc’s underground lab, Doc explains to Wynonna what she had previously not known: that Dolls asked Doc not to tell Wynonna about the lab because if Agent Luchado found out it would be just Doc who took the fall, not Wynonna. But Doc’s not doing all this for Dolls. He’s doing it for Wynonna, an admission that he still has feelings for her despite all his efforts to keep her at arm’s length. He knows that Wynonna is a good person, too: rather than using the burlap sack genie monster to wish away the Earp curse, she kept it around to try and save Dolls (okay wait, why couldn’t she do both?). Wynonna desperately wants to see Dolls again, but Doc says the medicine drop has to be out of town. Dolls can never come back to Purgatory or he’ll be caught immediately.

But surprise! Hooker Demon Waverly actually has Dolls captive in the barn along with her magpie collection. Roll credits.

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