Sexy, Scary, Sad, Haught: Wynonna Earp’s Summer Finale Was a Love Letter to Fans (and Beacon of Hope)

Wynonna Earp, Syfy’s premiere gun-slinging, lady-loving, demon-hunting hootenanny, closed out its short summer season late Sunday evening, and holy Purgatory was it a blast. There were frog exorcisms; there were demon nuns; there was reconciliation; there was betrayal. Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) got back her gun. Doc (Tim Rozon) said his peace. WayHaught (Dominique Provost-Chalkley + Katherine Barrell) got engaged. And that was just the mid-season finale! Blink at all six episodes that made up Season 4A’s protracted run, and you’ll see the afterimage of another Earper miracle.

Premiering in the Spring of 2016, just as The Magicians (RIP) was wrapping up its first season run, Emily Andras’ lady-ballsy Chosen One Western has long been the little engine that could. Not only have its fiercely dedicated fans brought it back from the brink of ruination more times than an outlaw revenant come back from Hell—this summer’s hard-won fourth season, snatched from the jaws of ex-post-facto-cancellation after a fan campaign that included literal billboards in Times Square, is just the latest victory in the Earpers’ trophy case—but, as the good gay will of all of tumblr underscores, Wynonna Earp has, season after season, been the kind of show that makes watching (and writing about!) television fun. If the finickier bits of its plot haven’t always held together perfectly, so what? The brassy, fuck-the-man confidence with which Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) and her ragtag Purgatory posse—family, friend, and celestial demon-slaying weapon alike—have stormed across the television landscape these last four years has more than made up for it. Well, that, plus the scorching hot chemistry that from the start has been smoldering, with increasingly graphic intensity, between Waverly and Nicole, Wynonna and Doc Holliday, and Doc and, well, everyone he and his pistol have ever crossed paths with. As Saint Andras who gave the world WayHaught is my witness, that’s all, uh… definitely helped.

That isn’t just prurience talking. As the half dozen episodes of this summer’s run proved, Wynonna Earp returned from the almost-dead with an almost eerily complete understanding of all the ways in which its most intimate relationships—carnal and not—make it the shit show it is. (That’s a good thing.) These relationships have never not been central to the series’ foul-mouthed charm, of course—Wynonna and Doc’s semi-casual Season 2 sexytimes, recall, resulted in an actual baby whose fate has guided their actions, good and bad, ever since—but for six straight Sunday nights this summer, starting with Waverly and Nicole’s internet-breaking stair sex and ending and ending with Wynonna shit-talking her way back to Peacemeker (well, and with Waverly and Nicole’s engagement), they seemed to gain even greater narrative importance. Like, sure, that stair sex was realistically hot. But it also served the dual storytelling purpose of preemptively paying off the desperate deal Nicole made with the Swamp Witch (Paula Boudreau) during Waverly et al’s eighteen-month absence, and of setting up the murderous surge of angelic power the comes over Waverly when she finally connects the dots and finds herself willing to perpetuate the Earp/Clanton blood feud if it means being able to save her one true love. Similarly, while Wynonna and Doc’s sexy moments are more or less limited to a single barn make-out sesh with Wynonna in a set of high-waisted lingerie that seems entirely inadequate to the task of keeping her warm in a barn bedroom on a cold winter’s night and, like, a few charged looks across a bisexually lit demon bar, the emotional intimacy of their generations-long connection is tested again and again, until finally Wynonna shoots a man Doc had hoped to make peace with in the back and it breaks for good.