WYNONNA EARP – Episode 301 – Blood Red and Going Down – SPOILERS ⁓

Sheriff Nedley (Greg Lawson) and Deputy Lonnie (Chris Casson) sit in a squad car at the edge of town with a radar gun looking for speeders. Nedley asks Lonnie: “You been holdin’ that radar gun in your lap all night? Boy, did you wanna have a family someday?” (Radar guns emit low level microwave radiation. A 1995 NIOSH study found there was insufficient data to determine the effect of the use of traffic radar on the health of police officers.)

A bus approaches, and Lonnie says: “We didn’t even clock ’em.” Three vampires emerge from the bus and Lead Vamp Petra (Clare McConnell) asks Nedley for permission to enter the Ghost River Triangle. The Sheriff says yes because they are able, with a touch, to make him obey them willingly. As Dolls will say later, once touched, people “turn into vampire-loving groupies”. Dolls is immune to the glamour spell because, as Jeremy puts it, he’s “basically a dragon”, and Wynonna is protected by Peacemaker. The bus continues into Purgatory, but not before Lonnie is entirely exsanguinated.

Had Nedley not set his speed trap, would the vampires have had no one to grant them permission and been unable to enter the triangle?

Across town, Wynonna is looking for information about Bulshar at Pussy Willows, the same bar she went in “Everybody Knows” (episode 207) looking for the revenant she thought might be her baby’s father. She has Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and Nicole (Kat Barrell) covering her retreat with a sniper rifle.

NICOLE: “You don’t even like the Dragunov. You said it lacks grace.”
WAVERLY: “I don’t need grace. I need steely, Soviet precision.”

It is not clear if the rifle came from Black Badge, or from Nedley’s office.

In the 2024 film “Wynonna Earp: Vengeance”, Waverly and Nicole both use sniper rifles to fend off hellhounds and Nicole is the one with the Dragunov (though the rifle is not mentioned).

19 weeks after Bulshar was resurrected, the demon has not made his presence known. It’s been just as long since Wynonna sent baby Alice away to a place of relative safety, and Doc (Tim Rozon) is having trouble adjusting to things. Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) and Doc have been training, every night all night. “He won’t touch me unless we’re training,” she tells Waverly, “and he wont talk to me unless he’s angry.”

Wynonna gets a call and meets Nedley in front of Pussy Willows where sixteen dead bodies have been found. Nicole says all the victims died simultaneously, stabbed by a serrated blade which was not found. (This makes it likely that there were multiple assailants, though Nicole does not reach this conclusion.) After death, the bodies were arranged in a pattern, and that pattern was also carved into the skin of at least some of the victims.

Officer Haught tells Wynonna: “Black Badge Division’s been tracking these massacres since the 1920s. They call it the Cult of Bulshar.” This makes Wynonna immediately suspicious, and Nicole continues: “It’s not like that. When I first heard the name Bulshar — when Faux Mercedes said it right before you shot the widows — it twigged something in me, like I’d heard it before. So I asked Dolls, and he gave me some old BBD files.” Later, Nicole begins to suspect she was once involved with the Cult and suppressed the memory. “I’m starting to think there was a Cult of Bulshar survivor once,” she tells Dolls, “and it was me.”

Wynonna spots what might be one of the killers in the bar. He disappears quickly, but on his way out leaves a bloody handprint on a rodeo poster featuring Wynonna’s mother, Michelle Gibson. At the end of season two, Wynonna took her motorcycle to an isolated spot in the mountains where she had an imaginary conversation with her mother. (She’ll have another one of those next episode.) Now she decides to actually pay her mom a visit. Michelle (Megan Follows) is unwilling to talk about Bulshar and warns her daughter “You’re gonna get your little sister killed.”

Doc is captured at Shorty’s and wakes unglamoured, but tied to a stripper pole. Before escaping, he recognizes his captor (Chantel Riley), whose true identity will be revealed in “Jolene” (Episode 305). The Contessa’s arrival reinvigorates Doc’s libido.

When she returns to the homestead, Wynonna is knocked on the head and packed into a coffin for transport to the place where the vampires are having a Ball, the purpose of which is to separate descendants of the Purgatory families whose ancestors sided with Wyatt Earp against (then Sheriff) Clootie. Those people are to be presented to Bulshar to “do with as he pleases”. The rest are to be vampire food.

Dolls (Shamier Anderson) rescues Wynonna from the coffin, and has brought along his “Nocturnal Exsanguination Clearance Kit” issued by Black Badge.(In the course of events we learn that Wynonna lost her virginity in a canoe, and spent a month on tour with Nine Inch Nails.) The vampires are quickly dispatched by thrown wooden stakes. People return to normal once the vamps that mesmerised them die.

The title of this post is part of what Nedley says to a vampire he is about to kill: “Get out of our town,” he tells the creature. “Purgatory is for the living. Mostly.”

One of the vampires, Otto (Lindsay Merrithew), tries to hide under a tablecloth. He tells Wynonna that Bulshar (Jean Marchand) has returned to “finish what he started”, and is allowed to escape to face the demon empty-handed. Bulshar is not happy and forces Otto to swallow a seed-like object the size of a golf ball.

With Dolls’ help, Wynonna is able to get her mother’s prison files from Warden Young. As a child, Waverly was led to believe that her mother left home voluntarily. She did not. Wynonna drives her sister home intending to explain what really happened, but as she hands Waverly a prison pass, something makes her swerve, and the truck flips. As “Darkness Falls” by Margaret Lewis plays in the background, an unknown someone pulls Waverly from the wreckage and drags her away, leaving Wynonna in the wreck.

---

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.