‘Wynonna Earp’s Emily Andras on Waverly’s Growth and THAT Ending

Nivea Serrao May 14, 2016, 9:00 am

Spoiler alert! Don’t read ahead unless you’ve watched Friday’s episode of Wynonna Earp, lest the Stone Witch sets her sights on you…

The Earp sisters are doin’ it for themselves! Friday’s episode of Wynonna Earp saw both Wynonna and Waverly (Melanie Scrofano and Dominique Provost-Chalkley, respectively) face off against two very dangerous—and very powerful—foes on their own. Luckily each of them had a little assistance from two unexpected sources.

In Waverly’s case, her helping hand comes from none other than Earp family friend Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon). Unfortunately it only comes after he’s used Waverly and her new role as “Keeper of the Bones” as bait to lure the Stone Witch—who’s after the skull in Waverly’s possession—and her henchmen to the Earp ~~murder house~~ homestead so he can finally kill her. But as it turns out, Waverly doesn’t really need any help as she not only faces the Constance Clootie herself, but even destroys the skull in question, thus giving up her role and foiling the witch’s plans. Her efforts also allow Doc, who’s now learned how to weaken Constance, to land a bullet in the Stone Witch’s shoulder, but as he later discovers, he’s sustained the same injury.

Meanwhile, over at the Sheriff’s office, Wynonna joins forces with Officer Haught (Katherine Bell) after the Black Badge Division forces Agent Dolls (Shamier Anderson) to leave Purgatory just as they’re making headway on their search for the seventh revenant. However as the night wears on, Wynonna realises that the revenant she’s tracking is also the person responsible for three dead women. A quick visit to the morgue confirms her suspicions when she finds a tiny mark in the shape of an ace of spades on the woman’s neck—which just happens to be the calling card of the mysterious revenant she’s gunning for. And if things couldn’t get creepier, it would appear that this particular bad guy has an effect on the Earp heir, making her nose bleed when in his presence. Later, after answering Waverly’s frantic summons, Wynonna promises to fill Haught in about all the supernatural weirdness while dining on pancakes. Only as Doc later discovers, the duo never makes it town, leaving behind an empty cop car and lots of blood.

With so many big developments taking place in the episode, TV Insider caught up with showrunner Emily Andras to talk Doc’s thoughts on the Earp sisters, the Black Badge’s motives and that crazy cliffhanger ending.

You ended on a huge cliffhanger in this episode. What are we building up to in the next half of this season?
Wynonna set out these very specific goals for herself early on in this first season, which she is gonna specifically target the seven revenants who attacked her homestead and killed her father and her sister. That’s been a very clear cut journey for Wynonna as far as her focusing in on the revenants that she thinks are number one on her hit list. She’s had an okay time of it, but what we are revving up to is she has one more revenant on her hit list and as we’ve seen, he seems to have a very specific effect on her. We saw her nose bleeding when she picked up specific crime photos. Obviously there’s something different about this last of the seven. What are we going to say, except that obviously she and Nicole Haught drove off in the patrol car at the end of the episode and something probably fairly terrible has happened to them, considering that it’s empty and there was a lot of blood there.

Would I be right in assuming that she and Officer Haught might have been taken by the seventh revenant?
I would say so.

One of my favorite things about this last episode was that we got to see more of Waverly and Doc’s relationship. Now that she and Wynonna have spent some time with Doc, what do they make of him?
I agree. I absolutely love Waverly and Doc’s relationship. I was really happy with [Episode 7] because I felt it was a very strong Waverly episode. It was about her deciding what kind of person she’s going to be and making some changes in her life, both with her friends but also as a hero, so to speak. What I like about Waverly and Doc is, Waverly being this eternal optimist, she always sees people as the best parts of themselves. She really seems like a person who would be kind of naïve on some level, and maybe a little bit easily suckered, but she is the only person right now who has seen Doc for exactly who he is. She knows that he’s kind of a con man, and that he is self-centered and a narcissist and will do whatever it takes to get what Doc wants. In this episode was we almost saw her break a little bit at the end there, where she knew that Doc had manipulated her and her friends to get what he wanted, which was at least an attempt at vengeance on the Stone Witch, the woman who gave him immortality and then put him at the bottom of a well. Waverly, for all her innocence, has a clearer line on what makes Doc tick than anyone else. Wynonna is obviously very attracted to Doc so because of that those emotions always get in the way. I don’t think she’s a sucker. Wynonna’s lived a very complicated life on both sides of the track, so she understands. She just understands Doc in a way that maybe he is a lot more like her than anyone else she’s sort of dealing with day to day.

And what does Doc think about them?
They truly believe Doc when he said, in Episode 5, the thing that kept him alive in the dark, at the bottom of a well for a hundred and thirty years, were thoughts of vengeance. That’s the only thing kept him from going insane, so he has come out determined to fulfil that promise to himself. Along with that promise comes the vow not to let anyone get in the way. Regardless, these are the two descendants of the best friend that Doc every had, Wyatt Earp. He has been softened by his time with the Earp sisters, and time will tell whether Doc is on their team or not.

So Doc could go off to serve his own purposes.
I think so. Doc is a survivor. Doc does what Doc needs to do to get Doc what he wants, but after seeing this episode no one can question that he felt terrible about what happened to Waverly and her friends. When Waverly called him on it, yes, he had regrets. On the other hand, he’s not giving up his quest to find the Stone Witch. He’s a complicated character.

Now that Doc knows that hurting her, hurts him, how will it effect his approach to going after her?
That is a great question. How deep does his desire for revenge go? Is he willing to sacrifice his own life to also destroy hers? That’s something we really have to examine going forward. When does revenge become obsession in a way that causes you to sacrifice yourself? That’s definitely an ongoing thing we’re going to be looking at in the later half of the season.

Wynonna Earp - Season 1

Considering that the skull the Stone Witch has been after has been destroyed, is her master plan over?
The Stone Witch is a pretty wily nemesis so I wouldn’t count her out of the equation. She has a lot of witchy tricks in her witchy bag, so stay tuned.

Waverly was briefly Keeper of the Bones. Now that she no longer has the skull, is she still fulfilling her role? Or has it changed somewhat?
I love that she gives her role up so easily and destroys the skull for the greater good, so to speak. It’s hard to say. Waverly is slowly trying to fulfil the role that she wants to fill, versus the role that other people have put upon her—whether that is the good girl throughout town, Champ’s girlfriend, or Keeper of the Bones. We’re reaching a point where Waverly has to decide what Waverly wants to be, maybe for the first time ever. That’s a really fun journey to witness.

That’s one of the things I love about her. As the heir, Wynonna has had this role handed to her, where as Waverly is carving out her own role.
That’s it, right? It’s one thing to be a hero when you have super powers or you have this magical gun, but real bravery to me, is deciding to fight on the side of good even if you don’t have any special abilities or you don’t have any super powers, but you still try to do what’s right and try to make a difference. That’s what I love about Waverly’s character, is she’s still determined to do the right thing and become a hero with absolutely no advantages except adorableness, of course, and smarts and intelligence.

How about Wynonna? Now she doesn’t have Dolls as a backup for this episode. What did that mean for her to go up against this revenant on her own?
Nothing good, that’s what I would say. Going forward, we’re going to see a Wynonna that is maybe outmatched, and that’s going to be terrifying.

Yeah. Because she has dispatched most of the seven quite quickly.
There’s a cockiness that comes with that success, and we’re going to see throughout the rest of the season that Wynonna has some challenges ahead and she’s gonna need all her wits, all her smarts, and maybe all of the people around her to help her go forward and really triumph.

What can you tell me about what’s going on with Dolls’ addiction and the Black Badge Division?
Dolls is a lot more complicated than he, at first, seems. We are definitely going to revisit all of that, and it might be a surprise to find out why he takes that drug and what it implies. It’s definitely an ongoing mystery.

Can you tease anything about the Black Badge’s motives?
The Black Badge is very self-serving on a very grand level. Are they the good guys? Are they the bad guys? Any big government agency probably knows what it is to make sacrifices and choices to get what they want. Dolls is very loyal to that agency for reasons that haven’t become clear yet. That’s going to be interesting to see if they have a further presence going forward. Right now it kind of feels like Dolls is working alone, which is interesting, but how long can the demonic activity and craziness in Purgatory and the Ghost River Triangle go unnoticed as things start to implode? That’s what I would say we should keep an eye on.

What can you tell me about next week’s episode?
I would say hold onto your butt for Episode 8! It is one-hundred percent the most crazy, non-stop, terrifying rodeo episode. It’s our mid-season episode. Watch it with the lights on, watch it with a friend, but whatever you do, watch it. You’re not gonna want to miss it. It’s blistering, from start to finish.

Wynonna Earp, Fridays, 10/9 on Syfy.