Earp It Up

So my big old theory from before wasn’t technically correct but I did guess they’d need to be human to enter the Garden. So, huzzah. But the sake of my own sanity and anyone else who wants to read my attempts to understanding this stuff...(if you want to just jump to unanswered questions and thoughts about what they mean, it’s the last section)

1. The Proposal 

Let’s just get this out of the way because everyone and their mother is fixated on it. It was a good scene, it was earned. I do think a lead in scene was cut because they seemed to be referencing a conversation we didn’t see. But other than that it was a perfectly rendered scene. 

Wynonna: Gets to say "fuck" several times; sleeps her younger sister's father; drugs her friends' shots

Waverly: Meets her new parent...immediately starts talking about fucking her girlfriend

(Repost from my original Reddit post with some extrapolation)

Getting this out there now just to get it into the ether before the finale...Background (organized for convenience) on how I ruminated on this and then the theory itself is at the bottom.

Waverly Being "Promised" to Bulshar was a Red Herring

First order of business, since this plot for season 3 was laid out in the back half of season 2, I think a big misdirect was also laid out at that point. I kept coming back to Bobo saying last season he promised Waverly to Bulshar and how it made less and less sense like, each week. And then show played into it with that fake out video title “Bride of Bulshar.” We now know the ring was Julian's, not Bulshar's, which means the other half of that theory (Waverly being promised to Bulshar) must also have been a misdirect. So, who did Bobo promise Bulshar as a bride? And then I realized the hang up was on the word choice...

"Pure" Means Human

Bobo says “I promised him someone pure.” And the word “pure” kept sticking because the show wants us to associate it with Waverly (”angelic” or “holy”).  Because Waverly (via Julian) is the angel that guards Eden and Bulshar is the Snake, they don’t exactly match up. Not to mention, Bobo himself says of Waverly an episode earlier: “Your bloodline is not exactly pure” while the Fire Witch says in 310 she needs someone “pure...purely human” and jumps back into Nicole from Jeremy. Twice the show has equated purity with being human. And Nicole is implicated in one of those instances.

The Survivor

Then there’s that whole bit where Nicole is the only survivor in decades of massacres from a cult with a 100% fatality rate that just happened to be at the literal steps to Eden before Nicole eventually returns to the scene of the crime…Totally not weird. Waverly makes the point that it seems like evidence of predestination and Nicole seems to agree. The show has kind of just let us sit on that information: Nicole survived a massacre at the entrance to Eden, Nicole is pulled back to Purgatory as an adult, but Nicole has always been the "normal" one and is confirmed to be 100% human.

So My Theory Is...

Nicole didn’t “escape” the cult of Bulshar, they let her go. Fast forward 20ish years and she’s back in Purgatory, pulled there by some sort of instinctual draw. It was Nicole that Bobo promised to Bulshar (and lied about it being Waverly to Doc) because she’s purely human. Bulshar was not after his own bride, he just need a bride. I think Robin will take the Adam role (since we seem to be casting everyone as Biblical counterparts at this point) and, one way or another, Nicole (who seemed drawn to the Garden when she first saw the stairs until Jeremy had to tell her to back up) and Robin (also had a weird reaction to the woods and stairs) end up in the Garden as "Adam and Eve" (talk about a play on the whole Adam and Steve thing). If you want to take a walk outside secular tradition, there is precedent for this sort of thing in more vaporous mythology. In Norse mythology there are the only two humans to survive Ragnarok (the end of the world, as we would know it): a man and a woman, meant to be a mirror reflection of what we would know as Adam and Eve in a world reborn.

Julian comes in, deus ex machina, to seal the Garden in Waverly’s place. Seems great. Problem solved. But, Nicole and Robin are locked inside with the Snake (what a sitcom situation). So cue gay rescue mission next season. (There is a built-in escape strategy here though if they eat the fruit, they’ll likely be ejected from the Garden again).

Hey y’all.