Wynonna Earp Season 4 Mid-Season Finale: Holy War Part 2 Recap

Wynonna Earp season 4 mid-season finale, explained

Six episodes into a twelve-episode order, Wynonna Earp season 4 stopped for breath, and it did so with the kind of cliffhanger the show has always favored: a dead sheriff, a dead matriarch, a dead Nicole Haught and a proposal, all inside one hour. "Holy War Part 2" aired on Syfy on August 30, 2020, directed by Ron Murphy and written by Brendon Yorke. The second half of the season did not arrive until March 5, 2021, so for six months the episode had to carry the whole story.

The season opened on July 26, 2020, and its first two episodes quietly rearranged the board. After the Earps climbed out of the Garden of Eden, the early episodes seemed to be heading toward the history of Wyatt Earp and Peacemaker and the myth of Eden and Eve. Then the story jumped eighteen months ahead and came back to Purgatory, where the town looked very different. The Clanton family, old enemies of the Earps, now held most of it and used the Reapers, the Earp family's own ancestors, as their muscle.

Black Badge had sealed the area off behind a quarantine, and Jeremy, the group's resident genius, was running the local division after being taken in. Doc Holliday's reputation took a hit as well, since the season kept reminding viewers that the legends of Wyatt Earp and Doc were a good deal less chivalrous than the Westerns suggested. All of that setup pointed at one fight, and the finale is where it lands.

Where the finale sits in the series

Wynonna Earp is based on Beau Smith's comic book series, was developed for television by Emily Andras and premiered on Syfy on April 1, 2016, with Melanie Scrofano as Wynonna, Dominique Provost-Chalkley as Waverly, Tim Rozon as Doc Holliday, Katherine Barrell as Nicole and Shamier Anderson as Deputy Marshal Dolls in the first three seasons. The show was shot in and around Calgary, Alberta, with Didsbury doubling as the town of Purgatory.

Syfy announced the fourth season at San Diego Comic-Con on July 21, 2018, and on February 5, 2021, between the two halves, the network announced that season 4 would be the last. That timing colors the finale in hindsight. The second half ran from March 5 to April 9, 2021, and brought the series to 49 episodes, with a Tubi special, Wynonna Earp: Vengeance, following on September 13, 2024.

Seen that way, the mid-season finale is the last point at which the series had no idea it was running out of road. It spends its goodwill freely, on a wedding proposal and a joke about a frog, and a season that was about to end on a shorter clock gets more poignant for it.

Wynonna and the Clanton peace deal

The Clantons had a real grievance. The family was wronged at the O.K. Corral, and their anger was aimed at Doc Holliday in particular, which Margot Clanton spells out. Doc, however, makes a peace with the Clanton sheriff, who is also a member of the family, and for a few minutes it looks as if the town's two families might lay down their guns.

Wynonna then kills both the Clanton heir and the sheriff anyway. Her reasoning is blunt: she is tired of being the Earp who always gives something up. The killing wrecks the truce Doc brokered and whatever warmth had been growing between the two of them this season, leaving them on opposite sides of the romance as well as the war.

Waverly, Nicole and the frog

Nicole is not the person she was eighteen months earlier, and the finale explains why. She struck a bargain with the Clantons in an attempt to save Waverly's soul, and the family hexed her in return. Having sacrificed that much to protect the homestead, she gets help from Ned and Jeremy, who try to bring her back with magic, and in typical Wynonna Earp fashion the method is a frog.

The idea of killing Nicole and then trying to revive her through an amphibian only works on this series, and it works because the show commits to it. It goes all the way to a glittering ghost Nicole who speaks to both Waverly and Reaper Billy. Waverly then uses her mysterious powers to kill Margot Clanton and save the day, and the proposal that fans of WayHaught had waited years for finally happens, with a yes.

Rosita comes back

While the Clanton plot peaks, a second thread pays off. Rosita returns on the hunt for Peacemaker, closing the question of what became of her after she tried to steal Wynonna and Doc's baby. The episode explains that Creepy Phil rounded up a posse to kill her, and that she has been living on a tiny rock quarry that the revenants avoid, since stepping off it would likely be fatal now that the Earp curse is over.

Wynonna trades Rosita to the Evil Nuns in order to get Peacemaker back, the two fight over their history and then make up, and Wynonna fires the kill shot at the head nun. Rosita chooses to stay with the other victims of Wyatt Earp. She also reveals who she planned to sell the baby to: Margot Jean Clanton, which feeds directly into Wynonna's rage at the Clantons.

Where each Earp stands after Holy War Part 2

• Wynonna: kills the Clanton heir and the sheriff after Doc's peace deal, and loses Doc's trust in the process.
• Waverly: kills Margot Clanton with her new powers, and the season asks how powerful and how dangerous she has become.
• Nicole: dies under the Clanton hex, is brought back with the help of Ned and Jeremy, and says yes to the proposal.
• Doc Holliday: sees his attempt at peace destroyed by Wynonna.
• Rosita: back in the story, staying with the other victims of Wyatt Earp, and the source of the news about Margot's plan for the baby.

Holy War Part 2 review: does the mid-season finale work?

It does, mostly. Wynonna Earp season 4 wanders more than any earlier year. It leaves the Eden mythology behind, takes a time jump, adds Rachel to the team and hands Nicole some of the most serious storylines of the series, yet it keeps the puns coming and never loses its sense of fun. Rachel brings a younger energy to the group, and the amount of WayHaught on screen is generous, with the couple now headed toward a marriage.

The time jump deserves credit too. Skipping eighteen months lets the writers show the cost of the Garden of Eden ending without spending three episodes on it: Nicole's guilt, the Clantons' grip on Purgatory and the Black Badge quarantine all arrive already in place, and the viewer learns about each through what the characters do instead of a recap. The risk is that the audience has to take the missing months on trust, and a few of the big reveals, such as Rosita's quarry exile, are delivered in dialogue.

The weak spot is Jeremy. He is on screen constantly and does important work, but the season still owes him a backstory, and the finale does not supply one. With six episodes still to come in the second half, that gap has room to close.

Nicole's arc is the finale's real engine. A character who started as a cheerful Purgatory police officer now carries a secret, a curse and a proposal in the same hour, and Katherine Barrell sells each beat. Pairing that with Waverly's killing of Margot gives the proposal weight: the couple says yes at the moment each of them has done something she would struggle to explain to the other.

The episode's best move is moral, not magical. Wynonna was allowed to be right about her exhaustion and wrong about the killing in the same scene, and the show lets both be true without an apology. That is a harder note to hit than a frog gag, and it explains why the finale feels heavier than its jokes suggest.

Sources

• Wynonna Earp (TV series), Wikipedia — Checked against: seasons, cast, showrunner and air dates.