Wynonna Earp Recap 2.7 Nightmare Daddy

Previously on Wynonna Earp: The Widows were breaking seals all over town until Wynonna shot one in the arm, nobody likes Tucker, not even the demons wearing his sisters’ faces, one million episodes ago Bobo told Waverly that she’s not an Earp, and one episode ago everybody took a nap and woke up with Wynonna’s belly in their faces and they all had feelings about that.

Now Wynonna is kicking down doors again. She and Dolls are looking for Tucker, but instead they just find the Gardner sisters doing an unconvincing impression of victims. Like “Help us. We fell asleep in our own home it was terrifying.” They can’t even convince Wynonna that Tucker has gone rogue even though that’s actually true. Wynonna and Dolls are all “We’ll be watching you,” and then they head out, and then Mercedes takes her head out, by which I mean the head of the Stone Witch. She’s just holding this head and talking about Wynonna’s Magic Gun and “We should have claimed new faces when we had the chance.” As if anybody would willingly give up Dani Kind’s face. It mostly just sounds like they’re still plotting the same breaking-the-seal thing they’ve been plotting this whole time.

She is no use to me; I am only interested in heads with faces.

Elsewhere, an absolute nonsense plot that will never make sense is waking up, and it has the worst moustache that has ever existed. It’s a cowboy-boy and a cowboy-man and they live in a cold barn covered in cobwebs and they are here today to hold Doc Holliday accountable for “crimes.” It’s so stupid. But it will also give us some nice character moments so I’ll allow it.

Seriously what the fuck is this mustache.

At the homestead, Wynonna is eating yogurt and Waverly and Jeremy are talking about the Widows. Black Badge apparently “hadn’t gotten around to examining them yet”? And they were “sealed” in that container for a century? They were not sealed at all! They reached an arm right out of the box! That is not sealed! Black Badge is so incompetent I can’t even handle it. Anyway, the thing I thought was freeze-breath last week was actually paralyzing venom, and Black Badge didn’t know about it because they are bad at the one specific thing they exist to do.

Your Doc/Dolls fic is actually pretty good, but who is this hunky scientist character supposed to be?

Dolls has brought a doctor over to check on Wynonna because she got a little dizzy after kicking down Mercedes’ front door. And also because she’s pregnant. But mostly because Melanie Scrofano wants to show us, with her face, Wynonna’s simmering terror and guilt at the inescapable fact that this pregnancy is really happening and there will be a baby at the end of it. A baby who might be Doc Holliday’s, but actually might not be. She tells this to Waverly first, because they are remarkable characters that actually talk to each other. Waverly says “He’s gonna shoot EVERYTHING,” a line that I somehow missed the first time I watched but was my favorite the second time I watched. This show just keeps on giving.

Such a good face. If I was Mercedes I might steal it.

While that conversation is going on, Doc is outside smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out how to be a proud papa, when the cowboy-boy from the beginning of the episode does a few ghost tricks then brands him on the back and tells him he’s going to die. Doc just believes this and doesn’t question it at all or tell anybody about it. Like I said, this plot is nonsense.

He goes back inside to “put his affairs in order”, which for him means being absolutely perfect to Wynonna. He is very clear that he’ll take on whatever she wants him to, and the writing is so good in this scene. He isn’t saying “I will take responsibility for my child”, he’s saying “I will be here for you,” which is exactly the thing Wynonna needs to hear because I think this pregnancy is very disembodying for her? She never had a chance to get used to it before it took over everything, but Doc doesn’t for a second talk to her like she’s anything other than Wynonna, and it’s so good that she can’t bring herself to ruin his day by telling him he might not be the dad. If only she knew that his day was already ruined by a ghost baby cowboy maybe she wouldn’t have felt so bad?

I want this shirt.

After their conversation, Doc stalks off the property to deal with his ghost cowboy problems, but Waverly assumes he’s sad about Wynonna telling him about there being other potential daddies, and she’s also maybe a little worried he might be thinking about shooting those potential daddies. She follows him and calls in Nicole to keep Wynonna company slash keep Wynonna out of trouble. Mostly the second one.

Dolls and Jeremy are staking out the Gardner house. I don’t know why Dolls brought Jeremy. Stakeouts are boring and Jeremy is a talker; it’s really not a great combo. He is waxing poetic about Doc’s eyes and Wynonna’s hair and how beautiful their baby will be and is it too early to set up a babysitting rotation, and Dolls is considering breathing fire at him. The important thing that happens in this scene is that Jeremy finds a scrap of Widow in in his pocket and now they can do some science to it.

Nicole shows up at the homestead in civilian clothes looking like some kind of absolute dream girl just as Wynonna is heading out. She has been ordered by Waverly not to let Wynonna out of her sight, and she is as always very eager to please Waverly.  They are going to a bar. Nicole, correctly, is equal parts intimidated at the prospect of bar hopping with Wynonna Earp and psyched to be hanging with the cool kids.

ABSOLUTE DREAM GIRL.

Waverly finds Doc at Shorty’s and immediately says “You can still hang out with us even if you’re not the daddy!” Doc just marches out with a sack of guns to go deal with the ghost cowboys he still hasn’t told anybody about.

Now for the fun part of the episode! Or, the more fun part of the episode, I guess. The entire episode is pretty fun. Wynonna and Nicole are at the bar. Not Shorty’s. Pussy Willows. It’s a strip club! And Wynonna apparently worked there at some point and drank there approximately one big belly ago. Nicole accidentally stripper-shames her while casually stripper-shaming in general, but Wynonna has pretty much heard it all and for once doesn’t take it to heart. She’s got more important things on her mind. One thing, in particular: the dude she had a one night stand with some twenty eight weeks ago who conveniently is still at this bar. The plan is to steal a glass he’s drinking from to get a saliva sample for the purpose of establishing the paternity of her child. Nicole is impressed. And increasingly drunk. And she is about to get drunker, because it turns out one night stand boy is a revenant.

I’m cool. I can hang. I know the lingo.

Wynonna walks us back through flashbacks from last season when she killed Jack the Ripper or whatever and then got hammerfaced and went adventuring, sex-wise. She says this dude was nice. That seems unlikely, to be honest. As she’s finishing up that story and Nicole is finishing two more beers, Waverly calls. And boy howdy, Nicole The Drunk Policeman does not have a poker face. Waverly gets her full Spencer Hastings on and within seconds figures out where they are. She is not happy. I am happy, though, because as much as I loved Gooverly and continue to love Supportive Sister Waverly, I’ve also missed these glimpses of her intense Type A side. And I’m also happy with the Wynonna/Nicole chemistry. I like how this show throws characters together in different combinations and just lets them exist. Also, it’s a fact that Melanie Scrofano elevates everybody around her, so giving Kat Barrell this much screentime with her is making me appreciate Nicole more and more. Anyway. before they can promise to be best friends forever or formulate a plan to deal with Waverly, Revenant Boy approaches and calls Wynonna “Woman” and we already hate him.

At the Black Badge office laboratory/armory/et cetera, Doc is arming himself with one of every gun, and Dolls is congratulating him on his paternity situation in a medium-aggressive way. Jeremy breaks up their tense bro-ment to ask them to do a science thing to the Widow fabric he found earlier. I don’t really understand what was supposed to happen here? He’s talking about isolating the venom to create a vaccine, but then he’s chanting and doing a binding spell he says was supposed to lure the Widows there so they can kill them? It doesn’t work, obviously. He does succeed in binding the three of them together though. And that’s when the ghost cowboys show up.

Jeremy you really need to stop leaving your fanfiction around.

They hoist Doc up in a noose and the binding spell makes them all kind of tumble around in ways that don’t seem particularly consistent but at least result in some pretty fun physical comedy. Eventually all that tumbling leads to him getting out of the noose and trying to punch the main ghost cowboy, but his hand goes right through him. Dolls punches him just fine though, maybe on account of his lizardness but who really knows.

Back at Pussy Willows, we find out the revenant’s name is Jonas, and he’s awful. His entire personality is saying explicitly rapey things. Even Now-Very-Drunk Nicole doesn’t have time for his bullshit. Wynonna socks him one and Nicole shoots the lights out in a super extra move, and they make for the parking lot. Wynonna takes Nicole’s keys and calls her a cute drunk, a thing I think we can all agree with, especially when she says they ought to “skip-a-doodle” out of there. He catches up with them of course because they are walking at the speed of Pregnant Wynonna. He’s all “Is that my baby? THIS IS THE DAWNING OF A NEW ERA.” Wynonna is just like “Actually this is the dawning of me shooting you,” so he tries to escape but runs smack-a-doodle right into Waverly’s car door. She gives everybody a good scolding, and they take the revenant for a ride.

I’m not saying boys are the worst, but I’m not NOT saying it.

The boys are finally talking about this ghost cowboy thing. By which I mean they are asking why the ghost cowboys are after Doc, not why the ghost cowboys exist in the first place. Doc is like “Well, my records show that the only crime I committed in 1882 was those two times I banged a judge’s wife.” Instead of being like “Well, that’s a dumb reason for ghost cowboys,” Dolls basically calls him a slut and gets mad at him. He’s like “You’re a father now, you can’t just go around banging women one hundred and fifty years ago! A real man would go back in time and not do this!” Jealousy is a bad look on the otherwise beautiful Xavier Dolls. Ghost Cowboy shows up again all “Reckoning is upon you,” to which Jeremy replies “Nope!” and runs away, dragging Doc and Dolls with him on account of the binding spell. Unfortunately there are a lot more ghost cowboys where that one came from, and they soon find themselves surrounded.

Doc is officially charged with two counts of “seduction with the intent to fornicate,” a crime I think we have all been guilty of in our hearts. Dolls does that TV speech people always do that goes “Doc Holliday is the worst! But. He is also… the best.” It doesn’t really work. What works is that the brand Baby Ghost Cowboy put on Doc at the beginning reminds Dolls of the U.S. Marshal’s star, so he whips out his badge, pulls rank, and pardons Doc of his fornication situation. Dolls also realizes that the ghost cowboy is real life Marshal Bass Reeves, but never asks why Bass Reeves would become a ghost cowboy punishing people for fornicating one hundred and seven years after his own death. The ghost cowboys are just like “Okay! Bye!” and this plot never bothers to make any sense at all. But it ends with Dolls being nice to Doc and Doc smiling that smile he only gives to Dolls, so, like I said, I’ll allow it. They have a beer together and tuck Jeremy in, and in that corner of Purgatory everything calms down for the night.

Son, I hope you’re not thinking of bring a beard to a moustache fight.

The girls have driven Jonas the revenant out to the middle of nowhere and are considering a non-lethal solution to his knowing about the pregnancy. Unfortunately for him, he would rather gloat in slimy detail about sex that Wynonna remembers as consensual but that he was using as a weapon then and is still using as a weapon now, because he is a rapist. He also says he’s heard rumors of revenants and humans cross-breeding, but has never actually seen it happen. Like, we’ve seen a lot of revenants. Some of them are evil, some are just dumb, but this one is just a total dick. And he’s saying all this awful stuff to Wynonna, and her face is just everything all at once. Like, he’s exhausting and disappointing and so predictable in the ways he is awful. He’s one boring demon but he could be one million boring men. So Wynonna shoots him. Because it doesn’t matter if he fathered her kid or if Doc did, because genetics don’t make you shitty and they don’t make you great, you have to make yourself those things. And the people that love you matter infinitely more than the people that made you.

And I guess Waverly has figured out those same things, because she finally tells Wynonna what Bobo told her: that she is not an Earp at all. Which is whole can of worms, but mostly: of course she’s an Earp. She has owned that name and that legacy when nobody else would, and she’s helped and fought when that same legacy chose somebody else instead of her. There is nobody who is more of an Earp than Waverly. But probably what is true is that Waverly is that half-revenant child there have been rumours of but never any proof, and probably her “real” dad was Bobo Del Ray, and probably that will matter in some kind of way. But there is no universe in which Waverly is not Wynonna’s sister in any of the ways that matter.

Sisters. Not even this trash clothesline can keep them apart.