‘Wynonna Earp’ Stars on Being Tempted by Love, Kicking Chickens and More Purgatory Craziness
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 4, Episode 9 of Wynonna Earp, “Crazy.”]
As we close in on the end of Wynonna Earp‘s Syfy run (still hoping it continues elsewhere), the March 19 episode gave us another item to cross off our wish list: Nicole Haught (Katherine Barrell) is once again sheriff of Purgatory!
Elsewhere in “Crazy,” demon hunter Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) faces off with a genie (Nikki Duval), who must grant the wishes of a man (Ennis Esmer) eating people’s brains in order to become the smartest guy in town. His focus turns from the winners of Shorty’s trivia night to Wynonna for her street smarts. In the end, he dies on his own, and Wynonna kills the genie with Peacemaker (or as the genie calls it, “a psychotic gun for a master”).
With stars Scrofano, Barrell, and Tim Rozon (who plays vampire and gunslinger Doc Holliday) along for the ride, we break down the episode, which marks the midway point of the second half of the final season (did you get all that?).
Temptation
Wynonna and Doc remain on the outs after she broke his code by shooting Sheriff Holt (Ty Olsson) in the back in the midseason finale. And so when it looks like a vampire is responsible for the recent deaths in town at first, she’s thrilled.
That “gives her hope that maybe Doc isn’t quite as pure as he claims to be, that maybe there’s hope for them,” Scrofano tells TV Insider. “Because if Doc isn’t perfect, then he’s perfect for Wynonna because she’s so flawed. But if he’s killing people, then ‘you’re just like me, pal.'”
Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY
That’s because Wynonna’s not in the best state of mind in Season 4. She’s more than happy to go out with Peacemaker and kill demons. “She genuinely loves her job now,” the star continues. “She’s good at it. It’s the one thing she can say she can do that no one else can and that gives her purpose.”
At the end of the episode, the genie does try to tempt Wynonna by offering to make Doc love her again. (The hunter turns her down.) “There’s a brief moment” where the demon hunter wants to say “yes,” Scrofano reveals: “Just like when she shot Holt, she wanted to take the easy way out … but I do think she’s learned from shooting Holt and what that meant and what that did, and she’s grown.”
Sheriff Haught Is Back!
As we learned at the beginning of Season 4, during the time jump Holt was voted in as sheriff over Nicole in Purgatory. And in “Crazy,” a video emerges of just how she reacted to the news: not well. It earned her a nickname that’s fairly self-explanatory: Chicken-kicker. But hey, we don’t blame her! She was dealing with a lot at the time, including that her love Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) was trapped in the garden (with Doc and Wynonna).
Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY
“She just lost confidence and trust in herself and her identity and she lost every sense of who she was,” Barrell says. “It was really important to me that that’s what that moment with the chicken represented on a bigger scale: just her not even recognizing herself anymore.”
Nicole has now reclaimed the title of sheriff for herself. It doesn’t matter who did or didn’t vote for her, she decides in “Crazy”: “I’m still going to be your sheriff because I made a promise to serve and protect every single person in this town, even those that break the law … or don’t like me because I’m an outsider, because I’m gay.”
“This was the final stage in her healing because she takes a lot of pride in doing everything by the book and everything perfectly, and she has very high standards for herself, so it was really nice to see Nicole make a big mistake that was pretty earth-shattering to her and then choose to be OK with the fact she made a mistake and let it go and move on,” Barrell explains.
Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY
Easy Forgiveness
Nicole and Doc also clear the air about the deal she made to hand him over to the Holliday and Earp-hating Clantons in exchange for getting Waverly out of the garden. But he never held it against her after he learned the truth two episodes ago.
“Doc’s the most understanding in those types of moments. He understands sometimes you gotta look out for number one and he doesn’t have any ill-will towards her,” Rozon says. “By forgiving her so easily, [he can] forgive himself for some of the choices he makes. This guy can’t be judging anybody after some of the things he did.”
Keeping that secret for as long as she did and the guilt she felt for making that deal were weighing on Nicole, “but just having to face that for herself was a huge part of the healing process,” according to Barrell. The sheriff needed that forgiveness from Doc.
Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY
However, as Barrell adds, “We don’t give Doc enough credit. He gets blamed and really berated for making a lot of big mistakes, which he does, but he’s the first to forgive. Just him being him — and having been alive for so long — really gives him some perspective into humans and making mistakes a lot of the other characters just don’t have.”
Solid WayHaught
Something that stands out in these episodes, especially with the Wynonna and Doc drama, is how stable Waverly and Nicole’s relationship is. Nicole even faces the embarrassment of the “Chicken-kicker” video to help her fiancée in “Crazy.”
“They’ve really grown up a lot in Season 4,” Barrell says of the fan-favorite couple. “Having gone through everything they did with the garden and the [18 months they were apart], we see a maturity with both of them and a real stepping into the next chapter of their lives — into marriage, into adulthood — on a whole different level. It’s nice to see them so grounded and feeling so solid.”
Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY
They’ve even taken on parental roles with Rachel (Martina Ortiz-Luis), in such a way that we see they’re not exactly her moms. We see that in this episode as Nicole knows the teen has the chicken-kicker video on her phone despite claiming she’d deleted it.
“They were the young, new ones: Nicole was young to town and Waverly was struggling with her identity — her sexuality at first and then even being an Earp, which was the big one for her,” Barrell recalls. “Now they feel really solid in knowing who they are and what they believe in and it’s nice to see them take on the care of somebody younger and shepherd Rachel along and become more of that adult figures.”
Wynonna Earp, Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy
