It has been a long two years, but it is finally here! Season 4 Episode 1, ‘On the Road Again’, of Wynonna Earp aired last night and it has been such an emotional rollercoaster ride to get here. Well, we have never exactly been here doing recaps on Fangirl Den for Wynonna Earp, but what better time to change that than with this first episode. Ok, let’s do this.
Previously on…
We had to wait 2 years, but we’ve got this…I think?
-There was a proposal with no answer
-Bulshar tried to get into the garden, broke the curse and turned into his true Slytherin form to bite Wynonna.
-Wynonna drugged everyone
-Waverly was dragged into the garden and Doc went to save her
-Valdez was carved onto the wall under the stairs
Did you think that we would start the episode with a basket of puppies? Nope! We get a sinister intro shot of a stone throne in the garden, which looks more like the salt flats than an English Heritage rose.
Moving on swifter than a kick to the box, it is time to gear up to get our fam back with the pool table being used as a weapons locker with the best weapon of all included, whiskey. That thing has really seen a lot!
Nedley stands by waiting for orders while Wynonna arms up, and well so have we, we have all been waiting two years for this moment aka hair porn.
The stairs are not so invisible now but there is a distinct lack of a red door in the archway. At least we know it does not go to The Red Room…
Wynonna doesn’t really stick the landing after trying to walk on thin air, but I still say its top shelf for that moonwalk up to the edge. 9.5 for that one.
Why is it that whenever Waverly is screaming for Wynonna I feel a sudden tree in my eye? Waverly is chained up, with actual chains this time and not in a cage, but what is it with people and trying to silence our angel? I guess this is not the aftermath she had in mind when she proposed to Nicole.
New intro time! Yup, it has changed with it being a new season and all. Sinister creepy people in pictures who look all white, an angel in a dress with wings out, Waverly’s background is now Stonehenge and Nicole now has Waverly’s old background of a map showing Purgatory. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!
Wynonna can’t be kept down too long though as evil demonic crabs that are not of your average garden variety start popping out of the ground. They had better get a doctor for that. Wynonna may have been trained to shoot by Doc Holliday, but Nedley wasn’t and after some serious drifting, fast and furious style, they are back at the Homestead looking for first aid kit but they are fresh out.
Maybe Jeremy stole it when tagging the wall during a forced evacuation with sniper laser pointing mercs. The Homestead is ‘Gays Only’, but the mercs didn’t get the memo.
Working with that they got, Nedley decides to go full-on ‘She’s the Man’ with his first aid kit and pulls out the absorbent pads with wings. A step in the right spot means Wynonna finds a ring on the ground, Bulshar’s/Julian’s/Waverly’s/Nicole’s ring and realises, with the help of Nedley, that Waverly proposed and she just wants Nicole to be ok. Well, she is and isn’t; she’s alive on a moving train which is wired to electrocute.
The phone calls coming from within the house with Mercedes making a horror movie entrance by throwing a knife at Wynonna from the kitchen, who abandoned Kate after possibly getting it on with her (Mercedes will not sleep with and tell it seems) when the Mercs in Black showed up.
Nicole isn’t alone on the train, she has Kate for company, who performs a Tarot reading for Nicole on the Lightning Train. Only thing is that she needs something belonging to Waverly, and with the ring gone, Nicole is the only thing there belonging to Waverly.
While Mercedes rewrites history with what she did when Mercs appeared, Wynonna is searching Valdez on Google, but that’s about as useful as asking Siri to call Doc Holliday. They change tact and go looking for Dolls’ super-secret Wynonna file which Nedley hid in THE COUCH in his office. That couch has seen some amount of action. I hope no one tells Nedley what actually happened there.
Dolls kept a photo on him, well in his files anyway, of what happened after Maldito was evacuated. Purgatory was evacuated. Does that mean that it is about to become Maldito 2.0? and that the mercs with the weird taser were BBD?
Maldito wasn’t the only thing Dolls kept records on, and Wynonna finds records on all his fallen colleagues and just so happens so have a file on one Gloria Valdez, who is slightly deader we’d imagined.
After the Tarot card reading on a moving train, Kate has decided the train is just the Stagecoach she needed to get away from Doc whereas Nicole wants to jump out of a moving train like she is in Dauntless – partially to get away from this conversation on Kate and Docs sex life – but also to torture Wynonna.
Valdez’ file includes some blacked-out experiment notes which mention a ‘Hellmouth’ and ‘garden?’ and pictures of a top-secret base with a codename and a satellite picture, putting Mercedes real estate procurement to good use as it’s in a condemned town a few hours away. It is worth noting that this page of science experiment notes is on page 69. Whoop there it is. I’m laughing all over again.
Kate is surprisingly helpful and almost gets herself BBQ’d opening the door for Nicole so that she can be an utter BAMF and pull a James Bond stunt by jumping out of the train and into the snow.
Looks like Wynonna is on her own for this BBD raid. Mercedes just threw a knife for the first time that day and Wynonna can’t be sure she didn’t want to go all Hansel and Gretel on her, and Nedley, well he needs a fainting couch stat. He has the utmost faith though in Wynonna and said ‘nobody fucks with our family’ which fork yeah!
Did somebody call for Doc Holliday? And what is that commute time like from the stairs to the garden, seriously! Anyway, he is here to save Waverly, who is chained to a stone which is tightening around her faster than a boa constrictor. The chains go down a well with a Ratking head attached to it, and it is this which is keeping Waverly stuck to Stonehenge.
Wynonna is getting nowhere. Stuck at the tracks with a flat, she has a breakdown and gives herself a pep talk from the best Doc and Waverly impressions that she can muster to keep herself going, only to be interrupted by a clock to the face from Nicole.
Wynonna can barely get a word in edgeways with Nicole going off on one at her for being left out of it…again…and now her kinda fiancee is missing in the Garden of Eden after she was roofied and stuck on a moving train in her sleep and forced to jump out of it a la Tris Prior to try and save Waverly. That is a lot for a Monday morning! Wynonna finally explains her plan and the cards were right, there’s another way into the garden. Nicole has some conditions though. Basically Wynonna can’t go all Wynonna again and then we get the absolute best thing which has ever happened in our lives. Wynonna calls Nicole ‘Daddy’ and oh wow did my head just explode like Lucado’s!
Anyone ask for a creepy stone throne? Well, its no Iron Throne that’s for sure, but the red doors are still standing guard over it and everything is all creeptastic in Creepville. Waverly is being affected by the garden and whatever is in there with them, which turns out to be some spotlights down in a secret garden basement and a scientist who looks like he’s just coming off the set of The Exorcist. There is a nice new creepy well that demands fresh human blood, but Mr Creepy BBD guy prunes off his own head with some garden shears, which seem to be the only thing they are good for given that there is a distinct lack of flora in the Garden of Eden.
Doc has Waverly try and Jesus their way out by reviving creepy guy, but it doesn’t work and then the garden basement turns into a fury rave looking for her next meal. At least they have a fresh body to stick in the lemon juicer!
BBD black site 2.0 is empty but Wynhaught still has some secrets to spill, mostly about the angel ring that Waverly proposed with. Want another fan payoff? Well Wynonna Interruptus this! Maybe she does it because she needs to learn how lesbian sex works. Nicole says ‘like I would tell you first’ when prodded over her answer, so does that mean that she hasn’t given Waverly her answer yet, or just that she is still pissed at Wynonna, or that it should be Waverly to give Wynonna the big news. Either way, whiskey apparently isn’t the answer that’s being looked for and a perfectly good hip flask is sniped away.
I guess now is a really good time to get some shots in, but Wynonna doesn’t have Peacemaker any more, which Nicole notices right away and then plays up being the Daddy, which it turns out she really likes being called. Cool cool cool. I cannot with this. My brain is firing off in every direction every time ‘Daddy’ is mentioned.
It is back to the Purgatory Garden Club now, with co-founders Waverly and Doc, who seem to be forgetting more and more the longer they stay in the garden. Is this because it is Paradise and you need to eat an apple for knowledge, so you lose all knowledge of the outside world? I know, catholic school am I right? Anyway, Doc has meditated his hunger away and our tracker is losing North. Now that they’ve sat down, its time to have a brief heart to heart for Doc to apologise for his actions in season 3, because let’s face it, Docs decisions were probably not the best, but at least he is now making up for them by going after Waverly to save her from the garden. Doc thought can’t seem to remember Nicole or Wynonnas first names and tries to sleep it off with a snow nap.
I guess there are going to be some trust issues worked through here with Wynonna and Nicole over Wynonna not telling Nicole anything, which seems about right for Wynonna. I am just so happy that we don’t need to wait till 407 for the Wynhaught scenes because they are some of the best in the whole show. At least Nicole still has Wynonnas back (for now) and says ‘Sniper no Sniping’ and clocks someone for the second time in this episode. I am really here for this BAMF Nicole that we are seeing in this episode.
The ‘Best Friend Squad’ need to find out who this sniper is, and quickly, if they are going to have any chance of finding the back door to the garden. Good thing they have a security badge on them that says ‘Valdez’
Has Nicole met her quipping match in the teenaged sniper that she just knocked out and tied to a chair? Possibly. Regardless, Wynonna’s had enough of the snarky teen anyway and just need answers. Answers need to be paid for though, and adorably, Nicole starts to count out her McDonalds drive-thru money stash to give to her, but there’s no McDonalds here. Good thing Nicole’s jacket acts like her backpack and she has some ‘to go’ bars hidden away. When the protein bars don’t work, coercion does the trick in the form of holding the badge hostage in addition to the teen who it turns out is hoarding her mother’s security badge. Yup, this girl is A Valdez. We get bonus points for that right?
They work out a deal. the teen, Rachel, wants to find out what happened to her mother and Wynonna wants into her mothers’ lab, so it’s all hunky-dory, right? Well maybe not.
The gardens stomach is growling again, but the lemon is fresh out of juice, that leaves Waverly with only one choice, to use some of her decidedly not fully human, half angel blood to try and feed the garden herself, which it really seems to like because it burps out some water lilies and starts whispering her name.
The snarky three are busy wandering the tarps in some kind of weird Fireflies medical unit, with Rachel explaining that not only did she know Agent Xavier Pamela Dolls, but he saved her after BBD went all Maldito on their own building and gassed everyone. No talking, no stepping on the grates, don’t touch the goo. That’s what Rachel said, right?
Waverly did something else to the Garden when she let it eat a little bit of blood, it gave her a podium with four books in a ‘Create your own Adventure’ style story where she could choose one book out of ‘Nicole Haught, Waverly Gibson, Doc Holliday or Wynonna Earp’. It looks like she picks up one book, following the rules to the game, but we don’t see which one. The books are all wrapped in dark leather with a ribbon poking out the top, so are these bibles? Who knows, I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.
Wynonna seems to think that all other noise is OK and throws her Beaver Blaster at the window of the lab after they can’t get in, waking up the occupants who are really not as dead as they look.
ZOMBIES!
Oh, I do love a good Zombie story and a good EDM Rave Zombie fight! They go all Ellie and Dina on the Zombies asses with Nicole getting 100 points per headshot and Wynonna throwing Beaver Blasters like there’s no tomorrow. As long as they all remember to aim for the head they will be ok and should be able to get away from the swarm. Wynonna, being all Wynonna and all, forgets one of the two important rules, DO NOT STEP ON THE GRATE, and thinks she’s a goner but Nicole ‘Nopes’ Wynonna out of there and takes her place, the grate instantly falling and leaving Nicole to fall into the darkness.
Doc finally must have felt the cold from the snow nap and wakes up to find a cherry blossom tree out by The Red Room doors but is interrupted from calling out Waverly for it by some shouts that drive him back to the creepy garden basement where he finds a rather naked Nicole Haught with a braid a la season 1.
That was A LOT for a season premiere, especially with it being our first in two whole years! I have so many questions. A few were answered in the episode from last season, like ‘WHO TF IS VALDEZ?’ and ‘WHERE IS NICOLE?’ but where is Jetri? Where is Chrissy Nedley? What happened to Nicole? I have way more questions, and they will only start to get answered on Sunday at 10pm on Syfy with episode 2, ‘Friends in Low Places’.
-Written by Christine
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