Previously, Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano) and Officer Nichole Haught (Katherine Barrell) departed the Earp homestead in the officer’s car. Minutes later, Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon) found the car rolling along, empty, with doors wide open and bloody handprints marring the car’s white exterior.
The episode picks up right where the previous left off. The police car has managed to drift to a stop and Doc carefully approaches, hand on his gun. Inside, there are more bloody hand prints and the car’s police radio is damaged. On the windshield, under a wiper blade is a playing card: the jack of spades. A noise startles Doc, prompting him to draw and cock his pistol, but it is only a horse.
In a dimly lit room, Wynonna slowly wakes up. Her first thought is to call out to her sister Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and Doc, but it is the medical examiner, Dr. Reggie (Ryan Belleville) that comes to her side. After checking her memory, he asks her if she remembers anything about the accident, reassures her that memory loss is completely normal after trauma, and that she cannot have any visitors at the moment. He sits on the bed to deliver some bad news, but before he can say anything, Wynonna realizes she cannot move her legs. Dr. Reggie gives a short report: damage to spinal cord and paralysis from the waist down. Understandably, Wynonna begins to freak out, her breaths coming shorter and faster.
At the Purgatory sheriff’s department, Doc runs through the building to get to the makeshift Black Badge offices, screaming frantically for Agent Dolls (Shamier Anderson). Before he can reach the back space, Sheriff Nedley (Greg Lawson) walks out to intercept the screaming man. Doc tells him “they have been taken” in a very excited, not very quiet way. Agent Dolls opens the door and steps out to the hallway to the horrible news that “the fiend himself” has his deputy agent and a local sheriff’s deputy.
Wynonna clings to Dr. Reggie’s arm and pleas with him to be wrong – she loves her legs! In mid argument, she turns and looks at her IV bag and asks what is in it because she feels wrong. Dr. Reggie asks if she is feeling hungover, implying the accident he referred to earlier was due to her drinking and driving, but assures Wynonna she did not kill anyone. She begins to remember, the details fuzzy, but she is sure that Officer Haught was driving. She then asks where Nichole is. Dr. Reggie shushes her to take her vitals and writes notes. She then asks if he is actually a “full on doctor” to which he replies that the morgue duty is simply part of a rotation. With a suspicious look in her eyes, she jokes about once wanting to go to medical school but getting booted for a “solid D-minus”, and then she asks where he attended. He responds with Queens for his undergraduate followed by Princeton Medical. She demurely tells him she is lucky he chose to practice in Purgatory. He grabs her IV line to inject something while bragging that he is in the process of pioneering a “radical new procedure” to increase certain brain functions while shutting down others. Wynonna surreptitiously pinches the IV line and pretends to get sleepy, but when he mentions removing emotions that cause patients to become irrational, she confronts him, calling him a cane-bearing revenant and a fraud because Princeton doesn’t have a medical school. He argues back that “people think that all it takes to become a doctor is smarts” but what it really takes is boundary pushing. He gets very quiet, right up in Wynonna’s face, and says there is something terribly wrong inside her and “the doctor will search until he finds it.” An instant later, he is standing, smiling, and whistling as he walks out to prepare an operating room.
Alone, Wynonna pulls her necklace out and holds it like a security item, using it to calm her erratic breathing. A noise startles her and she realizes she’s not alone in the room. She sits up and pulls back the curtain beside her bed to find Bethany with a bloody bandage on her neck.
Back at the sheriff’s department, Agent Dolls tells Waverly and Doc that he will call the feds and request “discreet resources and boots on the ground” to which Waverly responds that they need “choppers in the air,” along with stronger measures, to get Bobo Del Rey (Michael Eklund) to release Wynonna. Doc throws down the playing card he took from the police car and informs her that it was not Bobo but Jack that has the two women. The Jack of Knives, according to Doc, was never really a man; he grabbed women and took them to a cave to be disemboweled and sent letters to the newspapers to taunt Wyatt Earp. Waverly questions what he is like as a revenant because he was already a serial killer as a human. Agent Dolls picks up the card and pulls out the file that contains the photo of the seven revenants that attacked the Earp homestead the night that Wynonna and Waverly’s father was killed. He makes the connection between the spade on the card and the spade on the last unidentified revenant. Waverly takes off toward the door, ready to do battle to get her sister back, but she is stopped by Agent Dolls telling her to stay behind and do research; not only is the research her strong suit, but she also has a broken arm from her last encounter with the supernatural (see Episode 7). Agent Dolls promises to bring Wynonna home safe and then recruits Doc to help track Jack since he did so once before alongside Wyatt. Doc is caught by surprise since the two last parted as enemies (see Episode 6).
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As the two men exit the building, Sheriff Nedley delivers the good news about Officer Haught: she was found on the side of the road and is currently alive, but only after being resuscitated by first responders. Sheriff Nedley grants Agent Dolls permission to visit Officer Haught on the condition that he gets the man responsible – an implied but understood permission to kill.
Bethany tells Wynonna she has been “in the hospital” for maybe a week and is thrilled to have a man such as Dr. Reggie looking out for her. When Wynonna informs her that Dr. Reggie is not a real doctor, he is a serial killer, and they are not in a real hospital, Bethany begins to get scared, but Wynonna reassures her that they can escape – she just needs a wheelchair. As Bethany sits up to get out of bed to find a chair for Wynonna, footsteps and whistling echo in from the open door. Wynonna tells Bethany to run and get help, but she instead lies back in bed, apologizing to Wynonna that she is not brave like her. She closes the curtain, shutting Wynonna out. Dr. Reggie arrives and, with a smile, walks past Wynonna to transfer Bethany down a long, dark hallway.
Johnny Lidell’s “Take Some Love” plays as Bethany is waking up on the operating table. On the table by her head is a tray of blood and bits. The surgeon’s tray is covered in bloody gauze, vials of blood, and used tools. The camera pans down Bethany from her still groggy face: her chest is cracked wide open, exposing her organs. She watches and protests as Dr. Reggie steps up, shoves his hands down in her open body, and pulls out a kidney. Her heart-rate begins to increase, to which Dr. Reggie says “I can’t lose another one.” His response is to shove his whole arm into her abdomen, prompting blood curdling screams from Bethany.
Bethany’s screams pull Wynonna’s attention toward the door. She then becomes determined to make her legs work, certain the IV drip has been causing her paralysis.
Dr. Reggie stares in dismay at the corpse on the table in front of him as the heart-rate monitor sings a monotone flat-line. He rages through the makeshift operating room, knocking over tables and trays. He tries to compose himself, wiping blood from his gloved hand over his face, telling himself that he can “fix the next one.”
At the real hospital, Sheriff Nedley objects to Agent Dolls questioning Officer Haught without first getting the OK from her doctor, but Nichole calls out from inside her room that she wants to help. When asked what she remembers, she dreamily says “Waverly Earp, smiling at me from the front porch” before giving details about the abduction. A man flagged down the police cruiser on the side of the road, but she doesn’t remember anything about him or what happened immediately thereafter. She does remember being blindfolded and carried through the woods, really out of it from being drugged. After that, she woke up covered in dirt on the side of the road. Agent Dolls presses, asking again if she is sure that she doesn’t remember anything else, which visibly agitates Nichole. Doc steps in and offers up his question: What did the abductor smell like? He guides her through a short exercise, having her close her eyes and think back, focusing on his scent. Her response is spoiled fruit and gasoline, which triggers another memory: he kicked her and called her “the wrong kind” because she did not fit his victim type. The consensus in the room is that Wynonna must be exactly his preference because she was not found. Waverly, who tagged along to the hospital, runs off in tears.
In her bed, Wynonna wills her toes to move after removing her IV, which has remained pinched, from her arm. She succeeds in twitching her toes and, in celebration, throws her body out of the bed to crawl to a tray of tools.
Doc comforts Waverly in the hospital hallway, responding to her crying about Jack having a lot of knives by saying “she’s got us.” Agent Dolls walks up to say the report on the officer’s clothes came up as ethyl and alcohol; Agent Dolls suggests designer drugs whereas Doc suggests liquor. Waverly calls Doc a genius.
At Black Badge, Waverly rolls out a map of Purgatory. There are tunnels that were found during the new sewage system dig that were used during prohibition (a time that Doc exclaims he was glad to be in the well during when Agent Dolls explains what it was). Using the tunnels as a base of operations fits with Jack’s pattern of previously using caves, but locating the tunnels is a problem. Waverly has a lead on who to ask about the location of the tunnels: a revenant by the name of James “Whiskey Jim” Byers (Joris Jarsky). Doc knows Whiskey Jim and tells Agent Dolls that he runs “the best kind” of operation in town: an illegal fight club.
As a bouncer leads Doc and Agent Dolls into a crowded club, he explains there are two rules that need to be followed. No, the first rule is not ‘do not talk about it’ because, as Doc points out, “how’re fellas gonna know where it is?” Doc only manages to reveal the first rule, do not bring “the law”, before the bouncer informs them that Whiskey Jim is coming. The two watch the bare chested fight currently in the ring. When Agent Dolls asks Doc if the fighters are burly men or revenants because he can’t tell, Doc lets him know that Whiskey Jim likes to “mix things up” and fight humans with demons for the “whimsy” of it.
Whiskey Jim arrives, a short man flanked by two body guards, and Agent Dolls learns that Doc owes Whiskey Jim money. Agent Dolls immediately flashes his badge, offering to pay off Doc’s debt for information. Whiskey Jim gives Doc the evil eye as he says “rule number one, moron,” before turning and leading the two back to his office.
Dr. Reggie walks in to find Wynonna waking up. She is hiding a scalpel in her hand while complimenting the man on the drugs in the IV. Suspicious of her attitude, he picks up what looks to be an older pair of pliers crossed with a nut cracker off the tray of tools and tests Wynonna’s reaction by using it to crush her toe, drawing blood. Wynonna manages to not react, instead retorts more attitude, which just pulls another smile from the fake doctor. He decides that her medication needs to be upped and injects the IV bag with another clear liquid. He sits on the bed that once belonged to Bethany and asks about what happened after Wynonna shot her father. In addition to being committed, Wynonna was subjected to shock therapy, which intrigues Dr. Reggie. He asks more questions but gets sarcastic jokes in response. He returns to the tray to pick up a very rudimentary looking saw and notices Wynonna’s necklace on the floor. She assures him he must have dropped her necklace as she has not been out of bed since waking up and convinces him to give it back. When he gets close enough with the necklace opened up to slip over her head, Wynonna leans forward in the bed, scalpel at the ready. Dr. Reggie pulls back and walks out instead.
Whiskey Jim sits with his feet propped up at his desk as Agent Dolls makes his case for getting the information about the tunnels. Jim declines to help because Jack has “a very sharp blade” and Bobo’s blessing. Doc requests some form of arrangement be made to which Jim giddily suggests that Agent Dolls and Doc face off in the ring with one leaving in a stretcher while the other leaves with the information. Doc turns to Agent Dolls and finally reveals rule number two: “don’t come if you ain’t willing to fight.”
Dr. Reggie returns to the “hospital room” to find an empty bed. He leaves back down the darkened hallway yelling for Wynonna.
Outside the ring, Agent Dolls warms up for his fight against Doc Holliday. The shirtless, muscular man takes a moment to flex his pecs and smile at Doc, who gets a very sour look on his face and nearly drops his cigarillo from his mustachioed mouth. He half-heartedly throws a few punches in the air before removing his own jacket. Whiskey Jim approaches him with a package from Bobo and tells him to read it quick. Inside the paper bag is a taped together shredded Black Badge document. It is a detailed report from Agent Dolls on Doc that mentions his unique immortality and calls him a specimen that “will require extensive testing.” Along with the document is a photograph. The information infuriates Doc and lights a fire in his soul. He enters the ring on a mission.
Unlike his opponent, Doc is wearing a blue under shirt. He raises his fists in a stance reminiscent of a 19th century boxing match while Agent Dolls starts fast talking about needing a plan to make their fight look real. Doc replies “who says it ain’t?” and throws the first punch, catching Dolls off guard. Dolls responds with a feint and a defensive blow and works the crowd, pumping his arms to more screams.
A lid is pulled off a whiskey barrel to reveal Peacemaker. From inside the barrel, Dr. Reggie smiles down on the gun, but only momentarily as Wynonna appears behind him with the scalpel to his throat. To save himself, the fake doctor uses Officer Haught as leverage, claiming Wynonna will never find her without him. She offers a new deal: his cooperation will mean a swift return to Hell whereas torture is always an option. When Wynonna maneuvers herself in front of him, she notices the scalpel nicked his neck and bright red blood has blossomed. Since revenants have been proven to bleed black, Dr. Reggie is obviously human. A new fear takes hold of Wynonna just before she is pulled backwards into the shadows by an unseen force, similar to Bobo’s telekinetic powers. A cane sword plunges in the doctor’s back as Jack (Greg Bryk) saunters in.
The battle inside the fight club ring continues, at times showing in slow motion. Doc recovers from a blow by stealing a bottle of beer from a bystander and then breaks the bottle to use as a weapon. Agent Dolls expertly disarms Doc and lands a shot directly over Doc’s bullet wound. The crowd holds up Doc who sways as he stands on his own. Dolls, seemingly being friendly, asks Doc what happened to his shoulder, and Doc spits out a retort about it not being in his report. Dolls takes a step back, visibly shaken, registering Doc’s anger and finally understanding his opponent’s vigor for the fight. He does a quick survey of the room before delivering a roundhouse kick to Doc’s chest, laying him out. The crowd picks him up and tosses him back in the ring. Agent Dolls screams out “how?!” as he pulls the man up and holds him in a very firm grip, pounding his side with each question out of his mouth. Dolls halts his attack, still holding Doc up, as Doc begins responding. He calls Dolls a “dirty, two-faced, sonuvabitch liar” and strikes a low blow, doubling Dolls over. Both men fall to the ground and struggle to get up. Dolls is on his feet first and, though the two bring up Wynonna in an attempt to hurt the other, Dolls brings Wyatt into the equation. With one final uppercut, Doc knocks Dolls out cold. Whiskey Jim jumps in, proclaiming Doc the winner, who takes a very ungentlemanly curtsey. Jim gleefully screams out that Doc killed Dolls.
Whiskey Jim’s bodyguards throw Agent Dolls and his clothes into a dumpster as Whiskey Jim walks Doc out of the building. He tries to weasel out of giving up the tunnel information by claiming he promised the information to the dead agent – which also means more agents will be arriving to look for him and that he will need to lay low for awhile, none of which pleases him. In response, Doc draws his gun and growls, to which Jim laughs and writes a note on a stack of bills he hands to Doc. He also includes additional information: although Bobo is trapped inside the Ghost River Triangle, he has “friends in high places” on the outside of their landmarked prison. He then hands Doc the keys to the Black Badge SUV since Dolls won’t be needing them any longer.
A talon-nailed hand unrolls a leather case of knives on top of the recently departed fake doctor’s bloody tool tray. Jack whistles as his nails glow red-hot and he slices into Dr. Reggies neck, severing his head. He holds the head aloft and turns to Wynonna, strapped to an operating table next to the beheaded man.
Sitting in the driver’s seat of the SUV, Doc opens the note from Whiskey Jim. He then begins to poke around the vehicle, unsure of how to get it started. He jumps when he hits the car’s horn. While he watches the windshield wiper blades dance like a metronome, Agent Dolls bangs on the window, opens the car door, and climbs in, shoving a startled Doc Holliday to the passenger’s seat. Dolls checks his weapon and starts the car. Doc is still in shock that Dolls is alive and his mouth hangs open as the SUV drives off.
Wynonna fights the restraints on the table until the whistling man returns. As she lies back, her nose begins to bleed. As he pull back Wynonna’s gown, Jack tells her they are the same: they work with a team because they have to, even though they prefer to do their hunting alone. He also mentions that Wyatt’s nose bled when they first met, which explains why her nose bleeds when Jack is around. He draws on Wynonna with a marker, a fascinating practice he learned from his dearly departed friend. His psychopathic side reveals itself when he loved cutting open his victims. “Every man has a favorite body part,” he begins a short speech. It ends with a whispered “I love to look at your organs.”
From the passenger seat of the SUV, Doc accuses Agent Dolls of keeping a major secret. He was dead, after all, confirmed by the revenant Whiskey Jim. As they exit the vehicle, Agent Dolls credits his elite paramilitary training for allowing him to control breathing and heart rate. Circling back to Agent Dolls’ employer, Doc questions how a government agency willing to poke and prod a man for science be any different than the demons they hunt, with the revenant Jack and his disemboweling live victims as the implied demon of thought. Agent Dolls recites the company line that the research would be used to create better soldiers. Doc laments that Wynonna is in danger; he would love to shoot Agent Dolls for the news he now know. Agent Dolls retorts that Doc would not be able to shoot him because he would be in the back of a van on his way to a secret testing facility. The two come to an uneasy truce to pick up their argument once Wynonna is safe.
Jack’s nails begin to glow again as he tells Wynonna that they both know she won’t survive what’s coming. She begs him to wait and at least answer some questions first. He reminds her that the posse didn’t kill Ward Earp, she did. He then divulges that her daddy Ward was close friends with Bobo Del Rey. Wynonna refuses to believe him, balking as the revenant compliments the man and admits to liking him. After apologizing for breaking Wynonna’s heart, Jack promises to cut it out. As he reaches toward Wynonna’s chest, a shot rings out.
Jack recoils with a gunshot wound to the head as Doc makes his entrance. The revenant becomes a blur as he runs to Doc and slices apart the gunslinger’s gun with his red claws. Doc draws the Stone Witch’s athamé, which catches Jack’s attention. He knocks it out of Doc’s hand and calls his cane sword to his hand, deciding to make an exception to his rule of only carving up women. While Doc distracts Jack, Agent Dolls frees Wynonna. She sends him after Peacemaker and picks up one of Jack’s own knives and stabs him in the back. With black blood oozing from his mouth, he falls to the ground, giving Doc a reprieve. Agent Dolls returns with Peacemaker and Wynonna walks off to find Jack. The moment she is gone, the two men draw their weapons (Doc always has a back up!) and find themselves in a standoff.
Agent Dolls holsters his gun, inviting Doc to go ahead and shoot him, but also warns him that Black Badge has a far reach and Doc cannot hide. When pressed, he reveals that he only gave up Doc to his superiors because it was either Doc or Wynonna. Doc understands this reasoning, holstering his own gun, offering the agent a bit of advice from Wyatt: “if you stand for nothing, you are sure to fall,” therefore, you fight.
Wynonna, still in the hospital gown, stalks through the abandoned building with the Colt in her hand. She finds Jack pulling himself along with his hands, dagger still buried deep in his back. She removes the blade and kicks him onto his back. He tries to reason with her, tries to remain free because, as he puts it, once he is gone, she’ll have to “deal with the puppet master,” Bobo Del Rey. Wynonna hears none of it. She cocks the gun, ready to shoot, but Jack continues. He congratulates her on completing a hunt that Scotland Yard never could – pretty much admitting he is Jack the Ripper on top of being the Jack of Knives of the old west. The fire consumes Jack as Wynonna pulls the trigger.
Agent Dolls and Doc walk in to find Wynonna sitting on the ground, back against a crate, either disturbed by Jack’s final speech or having succumbed to the realization that the hunt for the Seven is over.
Standing with Waverly, Wynonna lights the photo of the seven revenants with a lighter. She takes a swig of a bottle of whiskey and walks away, leaving Waverly standing to watch the photo burn in an ash bucket.
Standing in Big City, Agent Lucado (Kate Drummond), confronts Agent Dolls about his most recent report: the death of the revenant Jack of Knives / Jack the Ripper. He formally withdraws his report on Doc, claiming the man is nothing more than a good con artist, wanting the record to reflect that the real Doc Holliday is dead. However, he opens the back of his SUV to reveal Whiskey Jim, surprising and delighting Agent Lucado; Jim is considered “a local asset” and called a lieutenant of Bobo Del Rey’s. He promises to test the revenant to the extreme since he can’t be killed without Wynonna shooting him with Peacemaker
After the meeting, Agent Dolls manhandles Jim into a storage shed where he mentions something he had not said to Agent Lucado: there is a mole within Black Badge and with Jim’s help, Agent Dolls will find him.
Total Revenant Kill Count: 14/77
Wynonna Earp returns to Syfy on Friday, June 9, 2017, at 10/9c.
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