WYNONNA EARP… It’ll All End In Tears

Anyone remember When a Stranger Calls? The 1979 film starring Carol Cane, not the 2006 misfire? Back in those ancient days when phones were attached to walls and heavy enough to kill a man and landlines were a thing, a young babysitter finds herself the target of a serial killer. She receives call after threatening call, and when the police trace their source, it is revealed that the killer was inside the house with her all along.

Terrifying stuff for its time. The monster hidden inside the walls behind which you think you are safe. Or in this case, inside the sister you thought you had returned from the dead, because boys and girls, Willa is the monster inside the house, and she and Bobo (Micheal Eklund) have a plan that promises to leave a lot of dead bodies behind… Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) and Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) included.

‘Cause Willa ain’t right, kids… even more so than just being mostly amnesiac and socially awkward. There’s something wrong there. She’s too violent, too adept at violence, for someone who has been just kept in a cult in the woods. Too bloodthirsty. Too certain of herself, when she should be uncertain, and she’s actively pushing herself between Wynonna and Waverly. Sure, her childhood memories of Wynonna would be stronger than the much younger Waverly, but still.

I wrote those words last week, and it’s a bit of a balancing act our cast and crew tries here, making Willa (Natalie Krill) pretty awful one moment and a lost and damaged soul another. If it doesn’t work — and if by “doesn’t work”, I mean I already trusted Willa about as far as I can throw a rhino — it’s only because we know the people she’s being awful to, and there’s no reason for her to be so rude and dismissive of people who are trying to be helpful and kind to her. Her mistrust of Dolls (Shamier Anderson) comes from… where, exactly? Her damn near homophobia when it comes to Haught (Katherine Barrell)? Her first instinct to strike out in cruel words and physical violence stands in stark contrast to the kind and innocent woman Wynonna found in the woods, and her somewhat — read extremely — unnerving connection to Bobo gain her little sympathy or understanding from this reviewer.

Somewhere out in the wilderness, in a place called the Swan Reservoir, there stands a treehouse… where a little girl was held by a demon. There, something happened. Something that looks a lot like a little girl being shaped and warped by Bobo Del Ray into — at the minimum — a weapon, if not, gods help her, a partner. In more ways than one, because Bobo has been ahead of everyone from day one, because not only is The Girl Not Right, she’s straight up a villain.

His villain.

To get to the heart of this, we step back to the days before the attack on the Earp homestead and take a good long look at Ward Earp. The more we see of him, the more he looks angry and violent weak, but most of all, scared. He’s far from the hero his grandfather was, and he cuts a deal with Bobo to save his own life, as well as the lives of his daughters. It all goes to Hell — pun intended, of course — but it seems that Ward discovered from a letter that Wyatt wrote to a friend that the way to break the Curse was to have the Heir cross the boundaries of the Triangle, willingly standing beside the Revenants, on the night of the Winter Solstice. He cut a deal to do just that with Bobo, but either Bobo didn’t trust him to keep the deal or instead of just grabbing him — and providing cover for his actions by making him look like a prisoner — the Seven grabbed Willa as well. When Wynonna accidentally shot Ward while trying to save him, Bobo seized the only remaining chance of escaping the Triangle he had left: Willa.

The Heir is the Lead.

And all Bobo had to do was wait. Wait for Willa to reach her 27th birthday and become the Heir, and Bobo has lots of experience with waiting. Of course, seeing as he’s a demon and all, he seems to have Stockholmed the hell out of Willa, as she reveals in the final scene of the episode that she’s awfully cuddly with our resident Evil. And if that’s making your stomach churn a little, considering that not only is he something like 100 years older than she is, if you think about how he started this plan and made her this way when she was a child, well, it’s always good to know that things can be even more horrible then. I guess.

Of course, because she was a child it was probably easier than one might like to think. Consider that she had been torn from her sisters and watched her father die in front of her, by the very definition of monsters. Bobo, whom she had seen interacting with her father in something resembling a pleasant way, effectively “saved” her from the monsters, and took her to a “safe” place. With her sisters thinking she was dead and having given up the search, how hard could it have been for the admittedly charming Bobo to convince her that he was the only one who truly cared for her? How hard would it be for him to convince her that he was unjustly imprisoned in the Ghost River Triangle?

How hard would it have been for him to twist her young mind into something she thinks is love?

But then Constance Clootie comes along and wipes her memory and gives her to Lou, throwing Bobo’s plan into ruins. No wonder half his interactions with Wynonna had elements of seduction alongside his threats… killing her would have meant eternal captivity in the Triangle if he couldn’t find Willa again. And he searched for her, no doubt, even allying himself with the Witch he couldn’t know took her from him in his attempts to find her. Her reappearance enables him to put his escape plans in motion, and good Lord, those plans are nasty ones indeed.

See, Bobo has a Revenant named Big Bubba working for him, and Bubba has a penchant for biochemistry of the poisonous-gas kind. We first get a glimpse of his work from a disturbing distance, as a woman at the bar claws strips of flesh from her face and collapses to the floor. It’s a particularly chilling bit in a show that only rarely has gone to the body-horror well so graphically, and made more so by the fact that we only see it in a wide shot. We’ll get a closer look at Bubba’s place, with Doc (Tim Rozon) as the audience for a man disemboweling himself under the effects of the stuff, and while the actual stabbing of himself is just out of frame, the copious amounts of blood he sprays about and smears on the glass of his tank isn’t.

Bubba is, of course, the figure who knocked Doc out last episode, and also the twin of Vinnie, who met his end in “Diggin’ Up Bones”. He’s as charming as his brother was, and a less-than ideal host for the trussed-up Doc. Not only has he claimed Doc’s hat for his own, but he’s got Doc giving him knife-throwing lessons; lessons that Doc is emphatically imparting to avoid gaining some unpleasant new holes in his person. Luckily Bubba is a decent student, if not the brightest of Revenants, because as soon as he’s passed on his latest concoction to one of Bobo’s lackeys, he finds out the dangers of not paying attention to what his knife throwing practice has actually hit.

Meanwhile, Wynonna is discovering that Willa’s return is making Peacemaker into a less-than effective weapon in her hands, which doesn’t exactly help her feelings of being replaced by Willa. Waverly’s feelings for Willa are also decidedly mixed, but for a wider range of reasons, starting with the fact that Willa is basically a total bitch to her all the damn time. It’s only the basic goodness that is Waverly that keeps her from completely kicking Willa to the curb, even though she does manage to remind Willa that as far as older sisters go, she wasn’t a great one even when they were children.

And ultimately, that’s what is the great tragedy of Willa’s return and Bobo’s plan. Wynonna and Waverly want their sister back, and are willing to put up with a lot of terrible behavior that they excuse in Willa, but wouldn’t in anybody else. Willa is a terrible person to pretty much everybody, and basically telegraphs her hidden evil at every opportunity, and the Earp Sisters — the REAL Earp Sisters — give her so much leeway because she’s family. This is the part where it will end in tears, because I don’t see Willa having a heroic heel-turn moment, but I can see Wynonna doing something that will break her heart to save the world.

On a lighter note, to quote Dolls: Daaaammmmnnn. Everybody on Team Earp cleans up niiiiiccccceee. Both Dolls and Doc rock the tuxes like the stylish fellows they are, and Willa, awful as she is, is lovely/evil in black. Waverly manages to be both sexy and adorably sweet in teal, and Officer Haught frankly stuns in purple. If there was any question that our cast is straight-up gorgeous, well, check your eyes.

And then there’s Wynonna. In red. Damn, indeed.

Ahem.

Dolls, of course, has no problems with his eyes — well, aside from the whole yellow monster eyes thing, but that’s beside the point — and for fans of the Wynonna/Dolls pairing, the kiss that everyone saw coming should be rather satisfying. For those rooting for Doc, well, the look on his face and Wynonna’s face should have some small satisfactions as well.

But lovely as they are, they are massively outnumbered by the other guests at the party Bobo has arranged, and when he arrives to tell them all that the champagne has been poisoned, he turns them all on Wynonna in exchange for the antidote. It’s pretty much the Wynonna Earp zombie episode at this point, with the town itself against our hero, and evil bastard though he is, you have to give Bobo credit: he’s good at being evil.

And there we find ourselves in the final moments of the episode. Wynonna being chased by the townspeople, as Willa and Bobo walk hand in hand into the nightmare world that the Revenants escaping the Triangle will be if they succeed.

Things do look bad, don’t they? WHY THE HELL HASN’T THIS SHOW BEEN RENEWED ALREADY?