‘Wynonna Earp’ 4.07 Review: Crazy in Love

This post contains spoilers for Wynonna Earp.

After four seasons of demon killing and doughnut eating, Wynonna Earp is coming to an end this spring. But rather than cry over spilled whiskey, let’s just try to savor every episode we have left, starting with the midseason premiere, “Love’s All Over,” which returns us to Purgatory for a largely silly adventure about love gone wrong.

Picking up over a month after the events of the midseason finale, the episode finds Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) exactly where we expected she’d be: off the chain with a bottle of whiskey and Peacemaker as her closest company. But while Wynonna seems to be nurturing her darkness after falling out with Doc (Tim Rozon), Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and Nicole’s (Katherine Barrell) world is filled with light. After securing a proper engagement ring for Waverly (and the couch they shared their epic first kiss on), the happy couple is now preparing for their upcoming engagement party at Shorty’s.

But when Wynonna shows up to the pre-engagement party festivities hours late, a frustrated Waverly demands to know where she’s been. With Wynonna not willing to tell the truth — which is that she was drunkenly hunting demons in the woods alone — Wynonna claims she’d been busy planning the couple's bachelorette party. No one is buying Wynonna’s lies, but Waverly and Nicole humor her anyways by allowing Wynonna to drag them to a strip club at noon on a Sunday.

At the club, an already drunk Wynonna gets drunker, but it isn’t until the sisters share a drink with one of the male dancers, Dimitri, that things really take a turn for the worse. When Dimitri starts bemoaning the fact that love doesn’t exist, a cynical Wynonna seems inclined to agree but Waverly firmly insists he’s wrong. So, Dimitri proposes they bet on it, and Waverly — our sweet baby girl — agrees.

Now, should Waverly know better than to make a deal with a stranger in Purgatory — especially when the person she’s betting against has scars on his back where wings obviously used to be? Yes, of course she should! But Wynonna Earp is a show where good people always are making bad decisions, so we can’t say we're too surprised by this turn of events.

Though the terms of the bet are vague, it doesn’t take long to discover the strings attached. Upon sealing the deal, Dimitri slips into Waverly’s pocket of vial magical red glitter that causes anyone who touches it to fall madly in love with the first person they see. Of course, Dimitri forgets to include the magical glitter instruction manual or to even alert Waverly of her new powerful possession. As a result, before Waverly even begins to suspect there’s anything supernatural going on, she’s already accidentally spread her love glitter around Purgatory, causing Nicole’s love for her to go from from tender to terrifying, and for the town homophobe Bunny Loblaw (Jann Arden) and Glory Hole proprietor Amon (Naom Jenkins) to also fall for the nephilim. Meanwhile, Wynonna and Doc get bitten by the love bug too. But unfortunately, they don’t have eyes for each other. Instead, Wynonna gets fixated on Amon, the character equivalent of the word fetch (he's never gonna happen!), and Doc on Cleo Clanton (Savannah Basley), the new Clanton heir who remains directionless after her mother and brother’s deaths.

All of these raging romantics prompt a lot of enjoyable slapstick shenanigans in the hour, but overall the execution of the gimmick feels slightly shallow. Though we do gain some deeper understanding of characters through their love-crazed adventures, “Love’s All Over” feels largely like a filler episode, more focused on having fun than moving the story forward in any meaningful way. While normally we have no problem with an entertaining filler episode, with only five more installments of Wynonna Earp to go and so many big questions still unanswered — Will Waverly have to take her rightful place in the Garden? Is Eve still set on destroying the world? And whatever happened to Robin (Justin Kelly) and Kate (Chantel Riley)? — it’s difficult to not feel antsy to dive right into heart of the show's intricate, unpredictable mythology. Fortunately, toward the episode’s end, “Love’s All Over” begins to deliver of this desire.

As expected, the chaos the love glitter creates climaxes at Waverly and Nicole’s engagement party, where Wynonna accidentally douses all the guests in a glittery love bomb, leading them to unite in one big love fest, including Doc and Nedley (Greg Lawson) sharing a surprisingly sweet slow dance. But the real benefit of this magic glitter, at least for fans, is that it’s strong enough for Wynonna and Doc to forget their fight and share a dance that they look like are hoping never ends. (We refuse to believe it's just the glitter’s magic behind the doting looks in their eyes.)

 While everyone’s swapping partners on the Shorty’s dance floor, Waves calls upon Dimitri — who is apparently not only an exotic dancer and delivery driver, but also a former Cupid — to help her set things right. As Dimitri admits to Waverly, after Amon broke his heart, he lost the passion for being Cupid and used the bet with Waverly as a way to transfer his powers and get out of the love game. Waverly is able to eventually convince Dimitri to take his power back, but only if she first helps him break the love spell by shooting spitballs onto the infected love birds’ derrieres. (Apparently, “love lives in the butt” and a Cupid’s saliva is the only antidote to love glitter. The more you know!) Sadly, as soon as the spell is lifted Doc storms out of Shorty’s and once again leaves a rejected and unmoored Wynonna behind.

But Wynonna has never been someone to sit around and mope. So Wynonna does what Wynonna does best: run from her problems and toward a very, very bad decision. This time, that bad decision is sleeping with one of the only other people who appreciates the “arousal architect” that is Doc Holliday as much as she does: Amon. But their common interest in Doc isn’t what really draws Wynonna to Amon. It’s the fact that, unlike the undead cowboy, Amon doesn’t need her to be anything she isn’t. “All I want is to stop feeling guilty for what I am, when what I am is necessary,” Wynonna explains.

 We knew after Wynonna shot Holt Clanton (Ty Olsson) in the back that things would be rough for our favorite demon-slayer, but Scrofano’s delivery of this line just about breaks our hearts — especially because, at least for now, she’s right.

­One of the unexpected consequences of Cupid’s magic is that while under the influence of it, Doc gives Cleo an inspiring pep talk about creating her own legacy outside of her mother’s influence, and the new Clanton heir ultimately takes his advice. Unfortunately for our heroes, though, Cleo decides that her legacy does still include avenging her family against the Earps. And after Rachel (Martina Ortiz-Luis), who doesn’t need any magic glitter to act on her heart, frees her invisible reaper beau Billy (Billy Bryk) from Shorty’s basement during the raucous engagement party, Cleo potentially has another powerful ally to help her in this quest. 

We only hope Wynonna faces her own demons soon so that she’ll ready to face whatever the Clantons are cooking up to throw her way.

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