WYNONNA EARP – Season 3 Episodes 11 & 12 – SPOILERS

The touch of Waverly’s ring brings Charlie back from the dead. Later she touches him with the ring again and cures his amnesia. Charlie, it turns out, is actually Julian, so Wynonna inadvertently had sex with Waverly’s dad. (This is a bit like what happened in LOST GIRL Episode 5.2 with Bo and her step-mom Persephone.) After Charlie/Julian re-discovers himself, he takes the ring from Waverly’s finger and puts it on his own. Later, after he uses the ring to heal Nicole (she was stabbed by a beekeeper) he gives the ring back to Waverly because his own ability to use it was depleted. Charlie is later killed, and after that happens, Waverly puts the ring on Nicole’s finger in what seems to be a marriage proposal, but they are interrupted by Wynonna, and Nicole never gets to respond. That ring seems to always find Nicole.

Revenants capture Wynonna and offer her to Bulshar (Jean Marchand) as “fealty”. (Tribute would be a more accurate term.) She is brought before Bulshar and his supporters, and is surprised to find out that Mercedes (Dani Kind) has become Bulshar’s new wife. Wynonna asks her if she’s banging him. Mercedes answers: “Gross. Ugh. No. I’m just his lady friend. That’s one of the good things about this arrangement. There’s none of that me-conqueror; you-spoils-of-war kind of shit. He doesn’t even care. The whole wives thing is just for show.” Mercedes then explains her rationale for being a Bulshar collaborator. (This is easily the best scene of the season.)

MERCEDES: “What you’re missing is that this whole thing is [thinks for a bit] an Apocola-tunity.”

WYNONNA: “No.”

MERCEDES: “Okay, it’s the Titanic. You’re floating on a door in the middle of the ocean. You just have to hold Leonardo DiCaprio’s head underwater just long enough to ride it out.”

WYNONNA: “You have lost your shit.”

MERCEDES: “Wynonna, look at my beautiful, beautiful face.”

WYNONNA: “Your skin is like butter.”

MERCEDES: “And I just got it back. Now what? I’m supposed to just get it melted off again because old ball-sag over there just wants to claim God’s abandoned backyard? Nope. No, Mercedes is here to play ball.”

WYNONNA: “With the demon who cursed my family? I won’t do that. I keep fighting.”

MERCEDES: “Yeah, we know, sweetie. Your eye-bags have fighter written all over them. Look, the martyr-complex thing isn’t working for you anymore. He’s got your gun.”

WYNONNA: “I’m not my gun.”

MERCEDES: “You’re a stubborn ass who refuses to get that she’s already lost the war. Time we started thinking about just surviving this. For Waverly. For your baby. — I never asked. Was it a boy or a girl?”

WYNONNA: “You’re such a coward.”

MERCEDES: “And your friend. You know, I dig your punch-first-ask-questions-never vibe. I even kinda love you. But I will not let you get me killed. Again. And if being a coward’s what it takes to get through to the end of the world, then chickenshit me up.”

To illustrate to Mercedes what being a collaborator looks like, Wynonna begs Bulshar to make her his lieutenant. She reaches out to touch the demon, and he pulls away, becomes angry, and orders his minions to lock her up. The sight of Wynonna begging for her family’s safety makes Mercedes realize the error of her ways.

MERCEDES: “That was the first time I’ve seen him like that. Scared. Was he scared? That’s the first time I’ve seen you scared.”

WYNONNA: “I am. [pauses] He yanked his hand away.”

MERCEDES: “You think Bulshar can’t touch you?”

WYNONNA: “I think I can’t touch him, or something bad happens, to him.”

MERCEDES: “That’s your advantage. That’s what you’ve got.”

WYNONNA: “What happened to ‘chickenshit me up’?”

MERCEDES: “You happened. You always happen, Wynonna.”

Judging by their protective equipment, Bulshar’s beekeepers must be wrangling some really nasty bees. The beekeepers come after everyone, and their attack results in the deaths of Bobo and Charlie. One of them tries to ascend the stairs in the woods at Bulsar’s request, but gets its head chopped off (by whom or what we do not know). Bulshar says this is because the beekeeper is not mortal; nevertheless, plenty of them appear to die of bullet wounds. Bulshar is able to get a sample of Wynonna’s blood, and this enables him to break the Earp curse. It makes Bulshar mortal, and also makes all the revenants vanish.

Jeremy (Varun Saranga) has concocted a chemical that makes the wearer invisible to the beekeepers, who must not have much of a sense of smell, because we are also told that it smells like Nedley’s hockey bag. Wynonna drugs everyone but herself and Waverly and the two of them tiptoe through the beekeepers to confront Bulshar.

Doc (Tim Rozon), whose text made Kate come back to Purgatory, glamours Tabitha and Reid (Emily Dallas and Jay Northcott), two tourists who wandered into the bar looking for their dog, Penny. Kate and Doc feed on them, but Doc still craves Charlie’s blood, so he and Kate visit the fire station to find out where Charlie went. Doc gets the information, but (for some unknown reason) shoots the fire chief anyway, who in turn shoots Kate. (Is it normal for fire chiefs to carry guns?)

After escaping from a circle of holy-water-soaked rope (He possibly is no longer bound by such things?), Doc hands Charlie the sword he found in Gibson’s greenhouse. Charlie tells him that, if his soul been “truly compromised”, he would not have been able to hold it. Doc has his soul back, and he didn’t have to face the trials that Buffy’s Spike needed to go through to achieve that. Apparently all he had to do was drink the blood of an angel.

The final confrontation with Bulshar happens at the stairs in the woods. Wynonna kills him with the flaming sword that Waverly drew from the stone stairs. Before he dies, Bulshar turns into a giant cobra-like creature and bites Wynonna, but Doc turns up just in time and sucks the poison from the wound. (Vampires are sometimes useful.)

A force field appears preventing Waverly from leaving the stairs, and vines (or tree roots?) grab her and pull her into the garden. Doc takes off his gun belt and walks through the force field and into the garden to help Waverly. (It is interesting that Doc could enter, but Wynonna was prevented from doing so.) In any event, this ‘garden’ does not seem to be much of a paradise.

Let’s talk about the flaming sword. Bulshar makes that sword from peacemaker, then inserts it into the stone stair. Does that mean that peacemaker was a flaming sword to begin with, and was converted into a Buntline Special by Juan Carlos? That would mean that Wyatt’s gun likely had magical powers even before the beginning of the Earp curse.

Heading into Season Four, Bobo and Charlie (aka Julian) are dead. Michelle doesn’t know that and is still searching for Julian. Waverly and a disarmed Doc are in the garden (whatever that is). Mercedes is caring for a wounded Kate. Jeremy, Nicole, and Robin, who were drugged by Wynonna for their own protection, have been taken by someone named Valdez, and Wynonna and Nedley have armed themselves and gone searching for them.

QUESTIONS: Wynonna was wearing Doc’s guns at the end of the last episode. Will she make a habit of that? Without revenants to pursue, and with Bulshar dead, what will Wynonna do? She has a flaming sword but who will she use it against? Who is Valdez? Will the ring allow Waverly to communicate with Nicole? And what happened to Penny the dog?

NOTES

Rayisa Kondracki (Constance Clootie in “House of Memories“) has an as yet unspecified role in the psychological drama BLACK CONFLUX, the story of two people whose lives run parallel to each other for a long while, and eventually intersect. Dennis (Luke Bilyk) is a “self-loathing outcast”, and Jackie (Ella Ballentine) is a “promising teen determined not to turn out like her convict mother”. Writer/director Nicole Dorsey told CBC Radio: “So we have Jackie, she’s dealing with the trials of adolescence, and her emerging womanhood, and then we have Dennis, who’s having issues with his psyche.” Two LOST GIRL valkyries, Olivia Scriven and Kate Corbett, are also in the cast. BLACK CONFLUX is currently being filmed in Newfoundland.

Gerrick Winston (Fire Chief) is a doctor in Rob Grant’s horror flick ALIVE, which stars Thomas Cocquerel and Camille Stopps as gravely injured patients in a semi-deserted, run-down hospital. The two are unable to move and are barely able to communicate. They have no memory of who they are, how they got there, and they don’t know where they are. Together they try to piece together what happened to them, while a man (Angus Macfayden), who seems to have ulterior motives, cares for them. A trailer is available on YouTube. ALIVE will next screen at Grimmfest in Manchester, UK on 7 October . (Director Rob Grant and Writer/Producer Jules Vincent will be in attendance for a Q&A after the film.)

Jann Arden (Bunny Loblaw in “I Fall to Pieces“) has launched a new weekly podcast with Arlene Dickinson. THE BUSINESS OF LIFE will cover such topics as entrepreneurship, motherhood, writing, and relationships. Dickinson said in a press release: “We are bringing everything we’ve learned through our lives and careers to the table and are embracing the opportunity to be honest with ourselves and our listeners. We are not holding back on anything.” In the first episode (below), Arlene and Jann talk about overnight engagements and relationships with a major age gap. Can they ever really work or are they doomed from the start? A new episode happens every Saturday.







