‘Wynonna Earp’ Stars on That Major Waverly Twist and the Intervention for Wynonna

Melanie Scrofano - Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 10
Spoiler Alert
Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 4, Episode 10 of Wynonna Earp, “Life Turned Her That Way.”]

Wynonna Earp must deal with a serious threat that hits very close to home in the March 26 episode: The demon Jolene (Zoie Palmer) is back to torment half-angel Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) once again.

While Waverly, her sister Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano), and Waverly’s fiancée Nicole (Katherine Barrell) are shocked Jolene’s back — the half-angel had saved herself last time, and she does so again this time in a much darker way — Scrofano wasn’t.

“She was such a great impactful character and she’s such an incredible actor that I’m not surprised [creator] Emily [Andras] would want to play with that storyline more,” she tells TV Insider. “It’s so rich, so it just made perfect sense to bring her back and because by bringing her back, we also get to see how Waverly has evolved.”

Oh, and does Waverly evolve!

The Beginning of a New Journey

After quite a bit of taunting from Jolene for her to just “become what you were always meant to be” and endangering Wynonna, Waverly does transform into something else: a dark angel version of herself. This form of Waverly has no problem delighting in going about destroying the world (but not before making sure Jolene won’t be around to see it).

“Your journey is over, Wynonna Earp,” she tells the demon hunter when they come face-to-face. “And mine has just begun.”

Now that, Scrofano says, shocked her just as much as her character. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I know there’s this side of Waverly,’ but it didn’t click until we saw it. Then it became really heartbreaking to see your baby girl, someone you know as this wonderful, reliable source of love and humanity become this dark soulless empty-eyed version of herself,” she says. “It was really tragic.”

Dominique Provost-Chalkley Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 10 Waverly Earp

Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY

Trusting Friend and Foe

Earlier in the episode when Waverly is missing, both Wynonna and Nicole want to be the one to go after her. But due to the equipment on hand and the memory-altering fog surrounding the house in which Jolene is keeping her, only one of them can. And after Wynonna had been the one to go into the garden after Waverly at the beginning of the season, leaving Nicole to spend 18 months alone (due to time passing differently in the garden), the now-sheriff again insists on doing so this time.

Trusting Nicole to find Waverly is easy for Wynonna in “Life Turned Her That Way.” “They both have so much more in common than they ever realized at the beginning of the show,” Scrofano says. “They both understand the depths each other are willing to go to to protect Waverly, the person that’s most important to both of them. That bonds them in a way. Obviously, Wynonna wants to be the one to save her but the fact that she lets Nicole do it, she’s starting to realizing that she has to let go of it and share the wealth that is Waverly. She would not have done it before this season. Nicole has really earned Wynonna’s trust at this point.”

It’s not just the similarities that make Wynonna and Nicole such a great duo. “Because Nicole’s so opposite to Wynonna, there’s something very soothing to Wynonna about that,” Scrofano continues. “I bet you there’s something soothing about Wynonna to Nicole because they fill out the gaps within each other. Wynonna is the wild Nicole can’t let herself be and Nicole is the steady that Wynonna doesn’t know how to be.”

Savannah Basely Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 10 Cleo Clanton

Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY

Wynonna also has to put her trust in a member of the Earp-hating Clantons, Cleo (Savannah Basely), to find Waverly. Cleo spells one of her family’s Reapers — Billy (Billy Bryk), who was trying to help the Earps — to target Jolene so Wynonna can use him as a guide through the fog.

“Part of the curse is that she’s tasked to do things that are impossible,” Scrofano says. “She’s at the point where she has to trust her enemy, the origin of her family’s enemies. She’s gotta be desperate. One thing Wynonna’s really good at is just trusting her instinct and saying, ‘I’ll think about this later. I’ll deal with the pain and the horrible thoughts later. Right now, if I’m moving, even if it’s with my enemy, towards the person I need to save, at least I’m doing something.’ That’s how she maintains her sanity.”

A Much-Needed Intervention for Wynonna

“She genuinely loves her job now. She loves killing demons,” Scrofano says of her character this season. “She’s good at it. That’s her identity. It’s the one thing she can say she can do that no one else can and that gives her purpose.”

But she may be doing a bit too much of that killing, at least in her loved ones’ minds. Episode 10 opens up with Waverly and Nicole holding an intervention for Wynonna, who’s spending all her time drinking and hunting demons with her gun Peacemaker.

Wynonna Earp Waverly Season 4 Episode 7

Michelle Faye/Wynonna Earp Productions, Inc./SYFY

Nicole and Waverly are “really, really, very genuinely concerned about Wynonna,” says Barrell, who’s happy the Syfy drama had that intervention scene. “One of the things on the show is we always sort of glorify this drinking, partying, not giving a s**t about anything attitude that Wynonna has, but it was incredibly important from a story perspective for us to address the very real, dark side of that type of behavior.”

“In media, we can kind of glorify the drunk person who doesn’t have their s**t together, but there’s a lot of pain and heartache that goes on behind the scenes when you live your life like that,” she continues. “We finally have acknowledged the reality of Wynonna’s coping mechanisms and how deep they run. It was really nice to see that journey for Wynonna. Then as characters witnessing it, it’s something we’ve known was going on for a long time behind the scenes for her but to see it get that bad and to see it so blatantly that she’s really spiraling and to see her family step in and intervene, it’s going to be a really powerful message and open up a lot of conversations about alcohol abuse and drug abuse and what we use to cope with the hard things in life and how destructive that can be.”

Wynonna Earp, Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy