The Many-Splendoured Witch
WYNONNA EARP – Episode 105 – Diggin’ Up Bones – SPOILERS ⁓
Wynonna’s dream
After Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) wakes up on her couch, screaming, Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) tries to calm her sister down. “You can’t keep doing this,” she tells her sister, “killing people and pretending like it doesn’t affect you”. Wynonna walks away and stops in a doorway where Willa’s height was measured each year. “One piece at a time,” she says, “that’s how people slip away. Daddy said revenge was a balm for the soul. If I kill the evil that took him and our sister, then we can dream, and remember, and it won’t have to be sad.”
Wynonna’s dream – the Earp’s dining room as it was in 2000.
An attempt to get evidence of Bobo Del Rey’s crimminal activities, yields only trivial results, but Ambrose (Tyrell Crews) watches Wynonna stand up to Bobo, and becomes the first of the revenants to ask her for help. It turns out that he’s an old friend of Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon), and that Levi (Christian Goutsis) is the love of his life. Levi and Ambrose (aka Fish) promised each other that if they were ever “struck down by Peacemaker”, they would meet at a prearranged time and place the next time they “regenerated”. Levi (the guy Doc Dragged across the Ghost Triangle boundary line at Bobo’s behest in episode 1.4) missed their meeting, and Ambrose is worried.
Waverly keeps tabs on Bobo
In exchange for her help, Fish tells Wynonna he has a photo of the seven revenants that attacked her family back in 2000. He suggests that Wynonna go see Vinnie the Vulture (Josh Bertwistle) who will likely know what happened to Levi. Before she goes to see Vinnie, Doc asks her: “Have you ever tortured anybody before?” and warns that “Hurtin’ and killin’, Wynonna, they are two very different things.” Doc says these things in his usual, ambiguous way. He might not want Wynonna to find out what he did to Levi, or he might be truly concerned for her safety. Vinnie doesn’t survive his encounter with Wynonna. His twin brother, Big Bubba, will appear in “House of Memories” (episode 1.12).
About to be sent to wherever Peacemaker sends revenants, Levi’s last words are: “You’re gonna be the one to break this curse, Wynonna. For all of us.” After that, Wynonna has a conversation with Dolls about allowing revenants to “make their peace”.
WYNONNA: “Look, I killed three in a day, including the one who helped us get these pictures, and you know what? He wasn’t terrible. He looked into my eyes, and I offered him a chance to make peace, and I felt better.”
DOLLS: “Great plan. Only thing is, Revenants don’t understand what ‘peace’ means.”
WYNONNA: “Well, maybe only a few take a shot at coming clean, but I’ve gotta offer it. I can’t fill up on revenge. I need some peace. For me, for my sister. You do it your way, I’ll do it mine.”
Dolls and Bobo’s lawyer, Ms. Stone
She tries to get some sympathy for her position from Doc, who responds by explaining his own motivations. One is reminded that Doc and Dolls have similar approaches to law enforcement, though, unlike Dolls, he seems to concede that there might be a better way.
WYNONNA: “If I’m gonna keep killing them and not go crazy, then I need more than revenge.”
DOC: “Goddamnit, Wynonna! They’re bad people.”
WYNONNA: “So I just ignore they’re people at all?”
DOC: “I spent over a hundred years in the dark, at the bottom of a dried up old well. Do you know what thought I turned over and over in my head? What I lived on? The sheer knowledge that I would pay back the bitch that made me what I am. This monster.”
WYNONNA: “You’re not a monster.”
DOC: “But a lesser man than Fish.”
Constance Clootie
The “bitch that that did that” to Doc is Constance Clootie (Rayisa Kondracki), aka The Stone Witch. She is Bobo’s very efficient lawyer and is referred to as Ms. Stone in that capacity. In exchange for the means to leave Purgatory, Bobo has agreed to reassemble the bones of two people for Constance. The bones were widely scattered, probably to keep anyone from putting them back together, and we are not told who did that. Connie has a personal relationship of mutual convenience with Bobo, in which she is sometimes dominant, and sometimes submissive.
CONNIE: [to the skeletons] “It’s almost time lovies. Uncle Bobo is finding you. All of you. And then it will be just like we planned.”
BOBO: “Alright, that’s enough, Constance. Don’t get hysterical.”
CONNIE: “Let me take them. They’ll be happier with me. Won’t you let me?”
BOBO: “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? What I would like, Connie, is the lead to get out of this goddamned prison. My lead, that you’ve been promising me for years.”
CONNIE: [slaps him] “Tit for tat. Like we’ve always said.”
BOBO: “I put your boys back together, you give me that lead.”
Constance and the skeletons
Bobo (Michael Eklund) now has the power to attract metal objects to himself, and he uses it to (briefly) snatch Peacemaker from Wynonna. He is the only revenant who has demonstrated this power. In an intense scene with The Stone Witch, he sucks the heel of her shoe. “Tell me, what is it with you and those damn Earp girls?” she says. “You’re ridiculous. Always chasing one of them with your tongue out. Suck it up, revenant. All of it. You wanna know power? Suck it up.” So he might have drawn this power from the witch. In “I Walk the Line” (Episode 1.13), we will learn that Constance has reason to be jealous.
Levi was a professional photographer, and might have taken this photo, displayed in Judge Cryderman’s office.
That Earps cannot be trusted is suggested twice. Vinnie the Vulture says Earps are “always trying to cut filthy little deals whenever it suits them.”, and a guard named Dickerson (Marty Hanenberg) at the Purgatory Civic Building expresses similar sentiments. “I know better than to take anything at face value when there’s an Earp in the vicinity,” he tells Wynonna, “especially if they’re claiming to look out for you.”
Purgatory’s City Manager, Judge Cryderman (David LeReaney), is clearly corrupt and possibly in the pay of Bobo Del Rey. He and Wynonna don’t like each other much, and Cryderman has a photo titled “The Death of Josiah Earp” in his office which shows the seven-member hunting party that also took Wynonna’s father and sister. Josiah was Wynonna’s great-grandfather.
The 90 minutes TV special WYNONNA EARP: VENGEANCE can be streamed on TUBI.
WYNONNA EARP: TALES FROM PURGATORY, an Audible Original, will be released on 17 October, and can be pre-ordered from Audible.com.
** — Revised. Originally published on 6 May 2016