WYNONNA EARP –Episode 102 – Keep the Home Fires Burning

SPOILERS ⁓ Dolls (Shamier Anderson) and Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) go revenant hunting in the big city. Dolls insists that Wynonna use a government issue weapon, and both that and the trip turn out to be a bad idea. Red (David Haysom) bites a finger off his date (Millie Jayne), then Wynonna shoots him with a conventional gun that has no long term effect on him. Red shows up at Shorty’s later looking for Peacemaker, and we learn that Wynonna’s gun burns revenants if they handle it, and that to be sent to hell, a revenant must be shot between the eyes. Also, when Red was swallowed up in flames, blood from his wounds did not accompany him to the afterlife.

The revenants quest for Wyatt’s gun in the first episode is explained by Bobo Del Rey (Michael Eklund) when Levi (Christian Goutsis) tells him what happened to Red. “Let me get this straight,” Bobo says. “Malcolm kills her uncle, lures the heir back home, and now this? How many times do I got to tell you idiots Peacemaker can’t be touched by revenant hand.” Levi stutters a bit, and says “But we just thought…” and Bobo gets angry. “Don’t! Ever! Think!” he says emphatically. “I do the thinking… for all of us. You hear me?”

Levi gets a new mission: to get Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon) to use his presumably human blood to to summon a shadow creature that was once the outlaw Jim Miller. Wynonna is the intended target, and Miller needs something with Wynonna’s scent for tracking purposes, but Doc is caught mid-robbery and gets away with nothing but Waverly’s notebook and a pair of Champ’s jeans. When Miller demands to know who the target was, Hank tosses the notebook at him, and Miller goes after the heir’s sister.

Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) pays Doc’s tab out of her tips. She thinks Doc is a good guy, an assessment with which Holliday himself disagrees. “I got a good feeling about you,” she tells him, “and I’m an excellent judge of character.” Waverly says that line almost exactly the way Gabrielle would have said it in the first season of XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS. Even the hand gesture is reminiscent of Xena’s sidekick.

Doc is concerned that the Earps will learn his true identity and find out what he did to Wyatt. (What he feels guilty has not yet been revealed.) The Earps know him by his middle name (Henry). Bobo and the rest of the revenants know he’s Holliday.

For protection, the Earp sisters move into the old Earp homestead, and Wynonna spots a doorpost with marks where the height of the Earp children were measured from time to time. Willa and Wynonna have incremental height measurements on that post, but Waverly does not.

WAVERLY: “I’m not on there, am I?”
WYNONNA: “Probably rubbed off.”
WAVERLY: “Yeah. It’s what I used to tell myself.”

Dolls shows up and notices that a small mobile hanging in the kitchen with parts made of ammmolite, a substance (he says) is prized by the Blackfoot for its ability to ward off evil. (Medicine Bear Arts discusses the significance of Ammolite to the Blackfoot in some detail.) The Earp homestead was built on a bedrock of the stuff to ward off revenants.

Six-year-old Waverly had an imaginary friend who talked her into burying a talisman to stop her mother and father from fighting. This neutralized the protections on the property and resulted in the abduction of her sister Willa and the death of their father. (This implies that their mother, who left when Waverly was four, still had contact with the family two years later when the attack happened.) Waverly remembers that she buried the thing next to the grave of a hamster named Pikachu, and that the name of her not-so-imaginary friend was Bobo.

Peacemaker is used to kill the Jim Miller shadow demon. Miller was a contemporary of Wyatt Earp, but did not die by Wyatt’s hand. He was killed by a lynch mob in Ada, Oklahoma in 1909, while Wyatt Earp was living in Los Angeles. (Miller did kill someone named Joe Earp, who was likely not related to Wynonna’s family.)

Waverly digs up the talisman; tosses it beyond the homestead’s fence-line; and the protection of the ammonite is restored. Later, when Doc replaces the Earp’s mailbox, he is unaffected by the ammonite, and the Earps know for certain he is not a revenant.

Wynonna’s future relationship with Doc is hinted at when Waverly remarks: “He’s definitely one of the good guys,” and Wynonna responds: “Everything in my body tells me he’s one of the bad boys. My entire body.”

Another character gets a spectacular introduction. Sheriff’s Deputy Nicole Haught (Kat Barrell) pops into Shorty’s just as Waverly is accidentally sprayed with beer from one of the taps. As Haught helps Waverly get untangled from her wet shirt, “Secular Love” by The Casket Girls plays in the background. The lyrics might foreshadow events that will happen in Purgatory some years later.

“Secular love on heaven’s trail
God’s eye view and the devil’s in the details
Up above on heaven’s trail
Stairways, bridges and doors
And the key to my heart is yours”

Dolls explains that Black Badge worked with her grandfather Edwin, who only lasted 11 months, but almost killed all 77 of the revenants. When Wynonna suggests that people ought to know what they’re up against, Dolls shows her a photo of a crater that was once Maldito, New Mexico. The town was nuked to “contain the story” after news of the existence of “hellspawn” got out. (The Maldito crater seems similar to the crater Sunnydale became at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) Wynonna is disappointed to discover it was Teddy and not Eleanor Roosevelt who created Black Badge Division.

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Miscellaneous Info

David Haysom (Red) will be Stan Nelson in Michael Peterson’s horror thriller SHADOW OF GOD, which stars Mark O’Brien as an experienced exorcist who finds himself at odds with a powerful “holy being”. Shaun Johnston (Juan Carlos in five episodes of WYNONNA EARP) is also in the cast.

Katherine Barrell (Nicole Haught) is auto mechanic Jess Barro in the romantic comedy SHIFTING GEARS. After agreeing to participate in a car restoration show, Jess learns that an ex-boyfriend is her main competitor. SHIFTING GEARS will premiere on The Hallmark Channel 23 March at 8/7c.

When Doc tries to pay his bar tab with nineteenth century coins, Shorty (Peter Skagan) refuses to accept what he calls “pirate booty”. An American silver dollar from the 1880s would be worth at least $30 in today’s currency, no matter what it’s condition, so Shorty passed up a profit.

This episode might have a connection to the song “Keep the Home Fires Burning” written by Ivor Novello & Lena Guilbert Ford.

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

The 90 minutes TV special WYNONNA EARP: VENGEANCE can be streamed on TUBI.

All 49 episodes of WYNONNA EARP can be streamed on Netflix

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** — Revised. Originally published on 12 April 2016.