Purgatory gears up for a 10th-anniversary celebration of a high school hockey championship, but for “Wynonna Earp,” there’s always going to be a catch. While Wynonna has to handle a new threat in “Gonna Getcha Good” that involves an old classmate ripping out his own liver, Doc Holliday tries to give a friend a little help.
Waverly and Wynonna were very different teenagers
We already know, thanks to Wynonna always reminding the audience, that Wynonna didn’t have the best childhood or teenage years. She was the town outcast, which was a hard place for a teen to be.
Waverly, on the other hand, was the queen bee of Purgatory High.
The episode opening, Waverly in her old cheerleading uniform doing a routine in slow motion for Nicole Haught, is how the show lets us know that she was cheerleading captain in high school. She also happened to be prom queen and valedictorian for those keeping track.
And Wynonna? She hung out under the bleachers and got blamed for everyone’s problems. It’s no wonder Wynonna left town as fast as she could, and Waverly hung back, getting her education through correspondence courses and staying in the town where everyone loved her, even if they didn’t love her family.
WayHaught hits a rough patch
While we’re on the subject of Waverly - that opening scene would make you think she and Nicole are in a good place, but WayHaught fans saw them hit a little bit of a roadblock in this episode.
Nicole is on duty when Waverly wants to have a little fun, and a WayHaught kiss in the middle of town gets Waverly reprimanded by Officer Haught, who doesn’t want to mix her personal life with her work life. It causes the two women to clash as Nicole arrests a young man for shooting upskirt videos of cheerleaders as Waverly suggests that she let him be.
Nicole, as a matter of fact, has a particularly rough episode as Tucker gets released to his big sister (turns out he’s the younger brother of Wynonna’s friend Mercedes, who is now being haunted as well, and might have got her neck snapped by the lady in black) and she gets attacked by a demon in the police station.
One good thing about Nicole’s rough day at work?
The sheriff tells her the secret to getting by in Purgatory - let the ordinary people pretend that they don’t know demons overrun the town and make sure to play the long game with kids like Tucker. He even reveals that he’s hoped Nicole will become sheriff when he retires. Now, despite the tension between Waverly and Nicole, it’s nice to see Nicole get some recognition.
Be careful what you wish for
The monster of the week is a kind of evil genie. It’s the kind of demon that grants wishes and then comes to collect a debt in 10 years. (“Supernatural” fans might recognize the similarity to the Crossroads demon there, though this one looks more like a scarecrow.)
As it turns out, the big tenth anniversary of that high school championship season is something of a lie.
It was the demon who made the star players of the hockey team win the game. For ten years, they’ve all enjoyed every success they’ve wanted, but now, it’s time to pay up - in vital organs.
It’s Wynonna’s latest love interest, Perry, who is one of the last people targeted by the demon, and though he valiantly tries to reverse the spell the team used to get their wishes granted. It’s Wynonna who decides to make the smart play and want the entity back into the trophy that housed him before.
The question here is: though Perry is now safe, will the demon emerge again to collect in another ten years, and is Wynonna now a target?
Doc is not Purgatory’s newest drug dealer
This wish-granting-demon appearing in Purgatory does give us a nice, new revelation about Doc.
He hasn’t hired Rosita so that he can become the biggest drug dealer in town. Instead, they’ve been using the lab under Shorty’s to concoct the drugs that keep the lizard side of Dolls at bay.
In fact, Dolls is the friend that Doc wants to help in “Gonna Getcha Good.” Doc hired Rosita to reverse engineer a serum for Dolls, though so far, they haven’t got it quite right. Doc also suggests to Wynonna that instead of killing this demon, they catch it and use it to their advantage to help Dolls.
This might all seem like Doc and Dolls are suddenly best buds, but as Doc points out when Wynonna challenges him, he didn’t do any of this for the man, but for her. It’s sweet, but it also leaves the audience knowing that Wynonna, despite being the woman in town everyone else hates, is going to remain caught between two of the most interesting men to pass through Purgatory.
Waverly goes dark again
In addition to weirdly eating her own lipstick and not remembering it, Waverly also attempts to choke Tucker when he basically stalks her, and then, we get the reveal that she’s kidnapped Dolls while collecting shiny objects.
We know that Waverly is different, but everyone else is going to start noticing too, especially if she keeps letting her eyes go black in public. What’s she up to with Dolls? What’s with the shiny stuff? And is Waverly even aware of the changes that have taken place? It almost seems like the other entity takes over and Waverly leaves.
The verdict and what’s next
It seems impossible for each episode to top the last, but so far, “Wynonna Earp” is hitting it out of the park every week.
In addition to being fun and entertaining, it’s just upping the ante and deepening the mystery without sacrificing any of the stories every week. “Gonna Getcha Good” definitely gets you.
4.5 out of 5 stars
In next week’s “She Ain’t Right,” Wynonna will finally find out that something is going on with Waverly, and it will pit sister against sister.
