Wynonna Earp: Tired Trope Avoids Purgatory

By: Kathryn Trammell

You know those kids you see sprinkled throughout videos on various social media feeds – the ones who may need that one special pair of glasses or that one special cochlear implant to be able to see and hear the world they’ve been experiencing for so long on some new unmuted level? We see their eyes light up and the purest of smiles brighten their faces because for the first time they’ve been given a very human experience that we don’t stop to consider until we see a bunch of babies whose lives change the minute they experience what they’ve been missing. This is the closest metaphor I can think of to explain how it feels to be a queer kid who sees themselves for the first time in a fictional character from a book, TV show or film. For some of us, the complete understanding of our kind of love isn’t fully realized until we meet a character with whom we can relate on a level that opens our eyes to who we are. These characters are our glasses, they are our cochlear implants and sadly, for many of us, they are what we need to experience a world that doesn’t accept us just yet.

When these characters cease to exist, as many of them do given the confines of an entertainment industry that prefers to bury them away, that ability to experience the world on the most basic human level becomes more muted than it was before. As we come to relate to them, we also fall in love alongside them because the love they have isn’t something we are lucky or brave enough to have experienced yet. This is why when that love disappears, some of us wrestle with our first dose of heartbreak.

This was especially true for 2016. Of all the years the LGBT community needed a show in which it could escape real-world prejudices and be accepted, it was 2016. But the land of TV overwhelmingly did not agree.

Enter, Wynonna Earp. In a year that seemed to turn its back on an embattled community, one show refused to take away what other shows willingly removed (eighteen times in only six months) the right for us to have a place to escape when our world got too ugly and real. Yes, Wynonna Earp gave us a pair of lesbians who lived to fight another day, but beneath the surface of this miraculous event they gave us a chance to experience TV the way everyone else gets to experience TV – to be equal to the majority of primetime viewing audiences. For that, we are grateful.

At first we were all too cautious to trust showrunner Emily Andras when she initially introduced us to her show. Wynonna Earp’s first episode aired on the heels of The 100’s now infamous removal of it’s iconic character Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) who’s death was made more unsuspecting given the shear amount of promises showrunner Jason Rothenberg and his staff made that his show’s brand of representation could be trusted. We all know how that turned out. So, when Emily made similar claims about her show, a still-grieving and cautious community had a difficult time believing her and many of us didn’t bother watching. We’d become tired of seeing shows boast about progressiveness whenever a character would come out to absolutely no reaction or opposition from the people around them, because we all know that this is not how coming out happens at all. As revolutionary as it may be, there is a level of dismissiveness that comes from a cultural struggle that is not acknowledged or represented. For those of us who decided to give Andras the benefit of the doubt, we realized that she would not so easily dismiss us.

For eleven episodes we waited for the bottom to drop out – for the love story between two women to end in some way that left us chastising ourselves for not having learned our lesson the first, second or third time. Then, the twelfth episode aired. Unlike the LGBT relationships featured on others show that catered to an audience similar to Wynonna Earp’s, Waverly Earp (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and Nicole Haught’s (Katherine Barrell) relationship looked surprisingly similar to our own. Except for a few demon revenants and a gun that kills them, the world Waverly and Nicole navigated as they built their relationship included the same kind of prejudices that force some of us into relationships that are easy, but unloving and others from coming out for fear of losing our friends, family and jobs. The episode titled “House of Memories” recognized these struggles in two very extraordinary scenes, neither of which I can honestly say I’ve ever seen on TV before.

In one scene, Nicole comforts Waverly with an outpouring of emotion after recognizing just how tiring it has been for Waverly to play the role of “other” for so long. Her entire life, Waverly has been the other Earp, the other sister and the support, but not the heir. She was the girl who could smile and wave, but can’t do anything beyond the small town status with which she has grown up. The return of her oldest sister, Willa (Natalie Krill), pushes her farther into this tertiary position after it’s revealed that both of her older sisters have the power to be the “heirs” within the Earp mythology. But this externalized conflict is merely a metaphor for the one within her, the one that began the moment she fell in love with Nicole Haught and began to fear that this beautiful yet scary part of her might further alienate her from her sisters who could very well react poorly if her secret relationship is discovered. So, when it is discovered (Willa walks in on Nicole and Waverly in the barn in the middle of their embrace), for that one moment, a broken, sad and skeptical community dared to trust Andras and let themselves put on their magical glasses and watch the scene unfold through Waverly Earp’s eyes. And we were rewarded.

Waverly, whose earlier declaration of “I’m exhausted,” echoed an entire community. She bowed her head in the same shame many of us have felt numerous times in our lives as her sister accused her of being “a gay.” This insult, this pain – this is true representation. This is revolutionary and it spurred in Waverly the intense urge to fight back the next time someone tried to shame her sexuality. We get to see another scene in which Andras gave her heroine the opportunity to accuse her aggressor of being a homophobe. That this episode aired during a week in which some people had difficulty even considering the possibility that homophobia could be responsible for killing 49 people in Orlando made the word so much more special when it crossed Waverly’s lips. For the first time in a long time, a community felt that they had been recognized and seen for the struggles that are specific to them. But for all this extraordinariness, Episode 12 paled in comparison to what Andras had in store for us when she gave us the gift of her season finale.

In Wynonna Earp’s final episode of Season One, a community that has joked since Officer Nicole Haught sauntered onto our screens that she should be safe from stray bullets because her job position entitles her to the bulletproof vest (something all lesbians on TV should be given upon their inception) had viewers holding their breath as, yet again, that fear was tested. The same sister who had in the previous episode accused Waverly of being “a gay” holds a gun at Nicole, threatening to shoot her. When she pulls the trigger, Nicole drops and we have that sinking feeling that, honestly, we’ve grown numb to. Instead of waiting to be betrayed, instead of waiting for the moments to pass where we again find ourselves blinking blindly at a screen swearing we will never again get invested in shows like this, Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) rips Nicole’s shirt open to reveal that the mythical lesbian bulletproof vest that has alluded so many woman this year alone has in fact saved one of us from death. The emotion the pours from Waverly as she doubles over in a sense of relief that is so tangible to us all is a testament that this show has in fact “saved a lot of hearts…mended wounds” that other shows have neglected since January.

Wynonna Earp is led by a showrunner who has inspired honest trust in her audience through online communication with her fans and an unabashed acknowledgement of a community that needs its struggles recognized as much as it does its relationships. It is that rare sleeping giant of a show that if given a second season (and a better air time during the week) could become the Buffy The Vampire Slayer of a new generation. Aside from its progressive brand of LGBT inclusion, Wynonna Earp is a show filled with heroes and heroines that are perfect despite the imperfections that make each of them so relatable and meaningful to more than just one kind of audience. In a sea of shows that boast unique storylines, plot twists and promises they fail to keep, Wynonna Earp has sailed in on a tugboat of skepticism carrying behind it the weight of a revolution that began the day it refused to add number nineteen to the list. It deserves a second season and we deserve to see that season play out.