WYNONNA EARP – Episode 201 – Steel Bars and Stone Walls – SPOILERS ⁓

A few minutes after the final events of Season One, Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano), Doc (Tim Rozon), and Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) subdue and dispatch a demon, but not before it takes a bite out of Doc’s hat. Meanwhile, Dolls (Shamier Anderson) is taken into custody by Agent Lucado (Kate Drummond), whose desire to capture revenants for research brings to mind Maggie Walsh from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Before his arrest, Dolls convinced Lucado’s boss — a Mr. Moody (Kevin Hanchard) — to call off the nuclear strike on Purgatory that Lucado had ordered. Dolls is taken to a Black Badge safe house (the Old Bread Factory on Cherry Brick Road), but is to eventually be imprisoned at a Black Ops facility called Black Rock on an island in the Baltic Sea. According to Agent Eliza Shapiro (Rachel Skarsten) the life expectancy after arrival at that place is about two months.

Wynonna encounters Eliza while searching Dolls’ hotel room for clues to his whereabouts. The two have an interesting wrestling match, and Eliza wins.

ELIZA: “You can’t be Black Badge. You couldn’t sneak up on a corpse. And your holds are atrocious.”
WYNONNA: “I’ll have you know I’m kind of a big deal around here. I’m the Earp Heir, destined to fight Wyatt’s revenant demons. End a curse.”
ELIZA: “I took you out with a lamp.”

Like Dolls, Eliza has been genetically modified, but just how is not specified. They both display lizard-like eyes when their powers kick in. Eliza says that she and Dolls would “devolve” without regular medication.

The Earp sisters try to get into the Old Bread Factory using Eliza’s credentials. At the same time, Waverly, disguised as Liz Wallace Windsor of Scotland Yard, bluffs her way past security with a wheelie bag containing the detached head of the demon that took a bite out of Doc’s hat. Nicole (Kat Barrell), who is waiting in a getaway vehicle outside, suggests (via phone) that Waverly’s English accent is terrible, but it’s actually pretty good. (Provost-Chalkley was born in Bristol.) Waverly finds a Black Badge lab holding a variety of captured demons including one that giggles and resembles a girl in her early teens.

The lab seems similar to The Initiative from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One lone researcher (Jeremy, played by Varun Saranga) is working there, and Waverly’s attempts to flirt her way into his confidence are ineffective, but she does find out how to open the facility’s outer doors. Then she tries to knock Jeremy out, but only succeeds in making him bleed a little. “We can’t bleed in Here,” he tells her. “Because it’ll smell it.”

The ‘it” turns out to be a Bulgarian Devourer of Souls which, when confronted by Waverly, becomes strangely subservient. Waverly’s eyes turn black, just like they did when she touched the black goo at the end of the first season. Earlier, after kissing Waverly, Nicole told her: “You Taste different.”

Since guns are prohibited within the Black Badge facility (a rule that Lucado ignores) Doc brought dynamite. It is old dynamite and attached to the lining of his coat, and age makes the stuff easy to set off. Lucado backs down and Dolls is freed after he demonstrates his humanity by not killing Lucado. Dolls takes a swig of the medicine Doc brought along, and is himself again.

Dolls escapes, but the rest are confronted by Lucado, who is prevented from killing them by the mysterious Mr. Moody, who summarily shoots Eliza dead, and then insists that all the others, including Jeremy, affix their thumbprints in blood to a Black Badge contract. This could well be another Buffyverse reference (to Wolfram and Hart, the evil law firm that first appeared in the premiere episode of the Buffy spinoff Angel). Also, like Buffy, Wynonna is torn between two lovers.

Moody also offers to help Wynonna catch the remaining sixty-two revenants. “Bobo Del Rey has been dispatched,” Moody explains, “and and his revenants are all scattered. You’ll never find and kill them all. Not in your lifetime. I’m being generous, Wynonna. You deal with the dozen or so demonic horrors that got into the Triangle when your sister opened the border, and could be we help you find a way.” Moody remains unaware that getaway driver Nicole knows about all this. Waverly swears on her mother’s grave that no one else was involved. (It is unclear if Waverly knows this, but her mother is not dead, but won’t appear in the series until “Blood Red and Going Down” (Episode 3.1).

That very sensitive dynamite Doc brought along was left behind in a storeroom next to a crate with a label indicating it had been shipped from London to New York and weighs 200 pounds. The signature on the label appears to be that of Robert Svane. (More information concerning Svane will become available in “No Future in the Past” (Episode 2.8). Later, a hand wearing a Victorian finger glove extends itself from a vent in the crate and uses a long fingernail to set off the explosive.

Showrunner Emily Andras, who also wrote the spisode, told The TV Junkies: “So the truth is that Black Badge is incredibly powerful, they have Dolls on charges of treason and so he can’t just go home to Purgatory. That’s the first place people look. If The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones taught me anything it’s that prisoners, when they escape, try to go home to their families. So there’s just no way that Dolls is going to be able to move back into the Earp Homestead and become a part of Purgatory again. This is obviously a major challenge.”

At the end of things, Wynonna is sitting on Willa’s bed weeping, wearing a t-shirt that reads “Coffee Loves Me” and holding Waverly’s stuffed rabbit when Dolls signals her to let her know he’s all right.

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All 49 episodes of WYNONNA EARP can be streamed on AMC+. The 2024 film WYNONNA EARP: VENGEANCE can be streamed on TUBI.

WYNONNA EARP: TALES FROM PURGATORY, is available from Audible.com.

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** — Revised. Originally published on 6 December 2017