Today’s episode was frankly all over the place and easily one of the show’s weakest in my opinion.
We start with the fallout of the car accident, which wasn’t an accident at all but a trap. The car apparently helicoptered quite far off the road and came to a halt roof first next to a cliff. It’s not clear how Wynonna came to lie halfway down said cliff with nothing but a dislocated shoulder. Was she flung from the car? Did she not wear a seatbelt? How did she get halfway down the cliff without a detour through the windscreen?
Waverly meanwhile gets abducted by a wood-dwelling revenant who can steal voices and promptly steals hers. He’s got a booby-trapped hut in which he also keeps the disembodied limbs of his victims lying around. It’s a blatant and lazy way of signposting that this guy is an evil monster. Really? If he really wanted to eat them, he would chop them up and put them in the freezer.
Waverly in a cage sans voice.
So Wynonna hallucinates her mother, who is kind of mean to her and gives her one of those “tough love” talks about survival and self-sufficiency. Under Mama’s guidance, Wynonna “relocates” her own shoulder, as one does on TV like it ain’t no thing. Then she climbs up the cliff as though that ain’t no thing either. And off she goes with a tyre iron to save her sister.
Back in downtown Purgatory, Jeremy is messing with Dolls’ drugs, but it’s not clear how or why. He’s also researching the massacre of last week and determines that all those people died within seconds of each other, so they likely were killed by a very fast monster. Scientifically, I don’t know how you would determine this. I’m fairly sure you can’t pinpoint time of death with that degree of accuracy if you find the body hours after the fact. But Jeremy is magic, so maybe he intuited it.
Doc has to step in because Nicole is useless.
Officer Haught drives around presumably looking for Waverly and conveniently comes across the wreckage of the car. You’d think being a highly competent police officer, she’d take charge of the situation, but she just stands around like a lemon and waits for the men to arrive. She does get a nice line when Dolls tells her to trust Wynonna’s instincts and follow her path (“Do you trust Wynonna’s instincts?” – “I helped her kill a revenant she had sex with…”), but other than that she’s mostly useless.
Wynonna kills the big bad of the week (well, not really, he falls down a hole and is pierced by stakes – she’d really need to Peacemaker him to get rid of him for good). They then go back to the wreckage of the car and Nicole gets to go abseiling. Which is cool, because we know she likes climbing. But then a minion of Bulshar appears out of thin air and cuts her rope, so Wynonna has to save her by grabbing on to the rope, which should be near impossible with her bare hands and recently “relocated” shoulder.
Dolls says a brief goodbye before he kills himself by…exhaustion?
Meanwhile, Dolls fights the minion and eventually ends the fight by breathing out a giant fireball, which appears to leave both the minion and Dolls dead. Huh? Just like that? I guess all the stuff about Jeremy and the medication was supposed to be some sort of foreshadowing, but this scene came out of nowhere. And then the others stand around him in complete shock – just like the rest of us – and Waverly’s all like: “Oh, he’s dead. Can we go home now?” I was yelling at my TV about maybe doing some CPR, but they seemed unimpressed. So Dolls is probably dead now, but the whole thing was so competely out fo the blue that I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. Did they really just kill off a main character in the last five minutes of an episode that barely featured him doing anything interesting at all, for the sake of defeating an overpowered enemy introduced in the same episode? Dolls deserved better.
Stray thoughts from the wife
WTF? How did we go in one episode from Waverly being abducted by cheesy demon of the week to Wynonna climbing up a sheer rockface in an evening gown with a dislocated shoulder, to the Little Mermaid, to random guy getting decapitated in a grotesque way, to ridiculous caper with a spike trap, to Bulshar showing up with an OP henchman, to gut-wrenching character death? Talk about whiplash!
It’s hard to discuss much of the rest of the episode after that ending. So many questions! Like: How did he die? Was he burnt? Because he didn’t look even slightly singed.
Was it exhaustion? He didn’t suffer from that problem last time he breathed fire. In fact, lizard/dragon!Dolls seemed to possess some sort of superhuman strength.
Why did they stop performing CPR? Have the characters ever done a first aid course? You don’t stop the CPR until the ambulance arrives. You take turns if you have to.
How did Waverly know with such certainty that he was dead? She didn’t even take his pulse! Was it because she’d heard him cough a little before? Did Jeremy tell her in the earpiece?
How the heck did Jeremy know anything was wrong? Why did this suddenly become a plot point in this episode? What happened to the build-up?
I hope they fill in some of those blanks next episode because that was wholly unsatisfying.
Gay and nerdy, she loves a good tv show, movie or video game with lesbians in it. They're not as few and far between as they were in the 90s when she grew up, but there's still a need to catalogue the stuff that speaks to her little gay heart.
1/5
