There’s No Place Like Purgatory on ‘Wynonna Earp’ (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 4, Episode 3 of Wynonna Earp, “Look at Them Beans.”]
There’s no place like home. After coming through the portal from the Garden and finding out 18 months have passed, demon hunter Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano, who directed this episode), half-angel Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), and vampire Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon) reunite with Waverly’s girlfriend, (former) sheriff Nicole Haught (Katherine Barrell) and just binge some Property Brothers. Well, two of them wish they could do that. But, alas, this is Wynonna Earp, they live in Purgatory, and instead, one of them is arrested for murder.
Purgatory is very much like the Wild West with its new “frontier justice,” as Wynonna and Doc saw at the end of Episode 2, with people hanging from scaffolding in the street. “Retribution … must be seen to be paid,” Doc explains. (As Wynonna puts it, “the old timey version of pics or it didn’t happen.”) And what’s waiting for them in the local bar Shorty’s leads to the introduction of several new characters in town.
Cook for Freedom!
While Nicole clued Waverly in on how much time has passed, Wynonna and Doc find out what they’ve missed when they see Shorty’s renovations and Chrissy Nedley (Dana Christina) arrests Wynonna for the murder of her father, former sheriff Randy Nedley (Greg Lawson). She was the last one seen with him before disappearing for a year and a half.
The new sheriff (Ty Olsson) intervenes as the town’s residents are trying to hang Wynonna, but he just tosses her in a cell—with a half-demon—to await her trial. Her fellow prisoner brings her up to speed: demons came after the townspeople were evacuated and didn’t leave when the residents returned. The woods are filled with monsters. The government has set up a quarantine: demons can’t leave Purgatory, but regular people can.
(Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY)
Meanwhile, Doc returns, with news of what happened, to the homestead, falling into one of the traps Nicole and Rachel Valdez (Martina Ortiz-Luis) have set for the monsters. “At least if we’d have lived the past 18 months, it would be easier,” Waverly says, but Nicole disagrees because “nothing” was “easy” about that time. (And we should probably take note of her saying she saved “everything [she] could.” Nicole clearly went through a lot, but she’s not talking about it.)
Doc finds Mercedes Gardner (Dani Kind), who was supposed to be watching Nedley after Wynonna went looking for a door into the Garden, at a demon bar. She claims she tried to /”Meredith Grey” Nedley back to health but couldn’t and he took off into the woods.
Meanwhile, as Waverly tries posing as Wynonna’s lawyer, the new magistrate, Cleo (Savannah Basley), enters the station, takes note of Wynonna, and eventually declares the prisoners will compete for one “get out of jail free” card in the first ever Randy Nedley Memorial Chili Cook-Off. Wynonna gets help from Waverly (who tries making a vegan chili) and Nicole and steals her cellmate’s bacon, all while finding out more of what happened in the past 18 months. Cleo showed up, made herself magistrate, and elected her own sheriff, and Nicole was busy protecting the homestead and Rachel. Speaking of, when the sheriff shows up and mentions that he hopes Rachel’s safe, Nicole hurries back to check on her.
But Wynonna wins without the help—to her surprise, considering Chrissy’s one of the judges—only for Waverly to taste the chili and discover how bad it is after Cleo’s taken her away. Something else is going on….
For Nedley!
Doc crosses paths with the monster in the woods at a truck bringing alcohol into the town, and, as Nicole learns from Rachel, he distracts it when it nears the teen at the edge of the homestead. When he returns to the house and Rachel lets him inside (eventually, as Nicole freezes as the monster roars outside), he reports that he’s not sure it’s their enemy after looking into its eyes. And when Nicole produces a piece of Nedley’s shirt she’d found in a trap, Doc realizes the creature is actually Nedley. (That’s what happens when you get bit by a crab-like creature from the Garden?)
But it’s to that creature that Cleo plans to bring Wynonna, not freedom. When the former heir calls her out on not keeping her word, Cleo retorts, “What does an Earp know about keeping their word?” That confirms Wynonna’s earlier observation that she seemed to know her. “This is hereditary, daughter of Earps,” is all Cleo says before stabbing her and leaving her zip-tied for the creature to feed on.
(Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY)
Fortunately, Waverly, Nicole, and Doc show up in time to not only save Wynonna but also get Nedley back. Wynonna can only laugh as she watches them spray the creature with kombucha until their friend is himself again (but naked). “You made it home,” Wynonna tells him, and after getting him a shirt, they bring him to his daughter and advise him to get Chrissy out of town while he still can.
Chrissy does leave Purgatory, and when she is stopped at the border, a supervisor must sign off. He clears her, and she whispers that “they’re back” to … Jeremy Chetri (Varun Saranga)! (Is he as upset as Nicole was about Wynonna choosing to drug him and her friends to keep them out of the Season 3 finale fight?)
Doc returns to the demon bar and brings a bottle of whiskey from that truck to its proprietor (Noam Jenkins, Rookie Blue), who has taken a liking to the vampire. And Doc’s smart; he knows where the rest of it is, so he can not only sell it to the bar, but he can offer himself up as protection for the next order as well.
Finally, as the episode ends, we continue to see the effects the past 18 months have had on Nicole, who refuses to talk to Waverly about that time and keeps checking the traps around the homestead. (“She was alone for a really long time,” Rachel notes to Wynonna.) Then, when Wynonna moves out to the barn since the house is getting crowded, she’s surrounded by agents who put a black bag over her head.
Wynonna Earp, Sundays, 10/9c, Syfy
