Wynonna Earp: Vengeance demonstrates the pleasures and pitfalls of a continuation movie

The question of whether you can ever really go home again is one Wynonna Earp often explored across its queer, gothic, horror-inflected Western universe. The show, over the course of its four seasons on Syfy, always had its tongue firmly in cheek as it told stories about the titular Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano), the many-generations descended heir of Wyatt Earp, who returns to her hometown cursed to spend her life using Wyatt’s famous pistol to send the resurrected demonic forms of the outlaws he killed back to hell. But it also used its Chosen One setting to explore big-picture questions about what it means to be a hero and what kind of toll it takes on the person called upon to rise to the challenge. 

So it’s perhaps fitting that such an existential question can now be asked of the show itself, which returned September 13 on Tubi for a standalone revival movie. What does it mean for a show to come back three years after its cancellation? And what kind of storytelling is even possible in ninety minutes for a show that has to satisfy fan expectations, introduce a new conflict, and prepare for the possibility that this really is the end?

That Vengeance doesn’t quite rise to the occasion of resolving those issues is not terribly surprising, since it’s basically an impossible ask. But it provides an interesting look at what works, and what simply can’t, for something like this.

It certainly looks and feels like an episode of Wynonna Earp. The show always had a distinctive visual palate, with its ominous wide-open snowy landscapes dotted with broken-down ranches and crumbling industrial warehouses. And with showrunner Emily Andras writing the script and director Paolo Barzman, who helmed quite a few of the show’s episodes, coming back, the characters act and sound like themselves, if occasionally slightly rusty. They are, for instance, not ever going to let an opportunity for a cheesy sex joke pass them by. Various beloved minor characters pop in to say hi, too. Plus, the cast has always seemed nearly as infatuated with the show as its fanbase, and with the core four of Scrofano, Dominique Provost-Chalkley (who plays Waverly), Katherine Barrell (Nicole Haught), and Tim Rozon (Doc Holiday) returning, the whole production ends up feeling about as lived in as you could hope for. (Rozon grew back his iconic mustache, and Provost-Chalkley dusted off that perfect American accent.)  

And the special makes real efforts to grapple with what the intervening years would have meant to these characters. Nicole, the all-too-human police officer who fell for Waverly, had often struggled with what it meant to be the most baseline normal human of the gang. Now she’s conflicted about how to be sheriff in a town with ongoing supernatural problems, and her idyllic relationship with Waverly is showing the strains of their diverging paths. Waverly, long the show’s heart and symbol of innocence, is simply not that young anymore. So much of her journey in the earlier seasons of the show had to do with being a brilliant person in a small town whose notorious older sister left a trail of destruction behind her, but also so young that she’s still finding her way. It makes sense that in the current era, an older Waverly is afflicted with some of the wildness and impulse-control problems that she learned from Wynonna, given that, with all of her intelligence and ambition, she’s never left her hometown.

Wynonna and Doc, meanwhile, have been off having the most fun adventures of their lives, except that said adventures are simply a way of avoiding big conversations about their future and whether it makes sense for them to try and raise their daughter together—or whether they even work as a couple if they sit still long enough to wonder. These are all good, meaty storylines for the special to engage with and solid continuations of plotting the show had set up in earlier seasons. The series may have sent its heroes off into the sunset with happy endings during its finale, but this is pretty fearless about poking holes in those happy endings in ways that make sense by reminding viewers that people, especially these people, are complex and flawed.

What proves a lot less satisfying is that all of those intriguing new character notes have to reach a resolution in one extra-long episode. Waverly and Nicole are not going to actually break up over this, but their conflict is barely established before it’s resolved. Doc storms out on Wynonna after a fight, then comes back with a vision of their potential future that’s so idyllic that it immediately becomes obvious it’s never going to happen. His—spoiler alert—eventual death ends up feeling like an inevitable storytelling beat by the time it occurs, a necessary loss to emphasize the stakes of what is otherwise a fairly standard episode of the show. The effort to introduce some misdirection by having his death occur after Wynonna defeats the main villain might have worked, if not for the fact that the subplot that leads to it—a rogue government agent who claims to be connected to a friend of theirs—gets so little time to unfurl that the sinister agent has barely joined the team before he’s expelled. 

The central conflict of the special may ultimately be that it’s both great to have everyone back and simply not enough. Wynonna Earp has always told its stories serially, and despite its ambitions, Vengeance can’t provide the payoff that unspooling all of these ideas over the length of a season would. There’s a sense that it might have almost worked better with smaller ambitions, but that’s simply not how special-event programs work. It’s hard to quibble with the existence of more Wynonna Earp, particularly given how meaningful the show has always been for the people who loved it. But you also can’t quite go home again.