“I don’t know if I’ve ever had a show with characters who live so close to me all of the time. Sometimes I dream about them."
Mey Rude*This post contains spoilers from the season four finale of Wynonna Earp.
After four groundbreaking seasons, Wynonna Earp came to an epic, laugh-out-loud, tear-inducing end last night, and it was everything we could’ve wanted from a finale (other than more Wynonna, but we’ll get back to that later).
While the crew and fans are still fighting to get the show picked up by another network, after four wild seasons, Wynonna Earp has aired its series finale on SYFY Friday. The episode had a WayHaught wedding, one last curse to deal with, confessions of love, family, and happy endings for Waverly, Wynonna, Nicole, Doc, Jeremy, and the whole family.
“It feels heartbreaking to say goodbye, but like all things that are beautiful, sometimes they have to come to an end, and that's what makes them special,” show creator Emily Andras tells Out. “I think that little bit of wistfulness, that little bit of a lemon in the cream just makes it that much sweeter, right? Happiness and joy are sometimes fleeting, and being able to say people got to experience that happiness and joy, and also hopefully gave it to a whole group of people, is once in a lifetime. And from a writer perspective, beyond my wildest dreams. So I just feel grateful, honestly. I'm grateful.”
Nicole and Jeremy watch as Waverly walks down the aisle. Photo credit: SYFY/ Michelle Faye
Filming a finale can come with a lot of pressure to get everything right, but Andras said everything just seemed to line up — almost as if the lesbian and bisexual gods were smiling down on them. “It just happened to be the most sunny summer day. There were no clouds. You can hear the birds and smell the wildflowers,” she says of the day they filmed the wedding. “It was very magical, and everybody sort of felt the weight of it on our shoulders, but we also just had a lot of fun.”
When it came to writing vows for Waverly and Nicole, the words flowed out of her. “I will tell you a secret, and I do not say this to be arrogant: it was all so easy,” she says about writing the wedding. “I feel like this as an episode was not that hard to write, because I feel like I've been thinking about this day for these characters for a very long time. It didn't seem too difficult to reach down into my soul, and hopefully their souls, and figure out what they would have said to one another.”
Nicole and Waverly celebrate their wedding with all their family on the homestead. Photo Credit: SYFY/ Michelle Faye
There was one special moment from the show that Andras couldn’t leave out of the vows: the infamous bulletproof vest that Nicole wore when she was shot in season one, bucking a decades-long tradition of showrunners killing off LGBTQ+ characters and letting fans know that this show was going to treat queer women differently.
While the episode with the bulletproof lesbian was written and filmed before Clexa and The 100bury your gays controversy completely bubbled to the surface, a scene where a bisexual woman and lesbian confess their love to each other and neither die resonated with fans who were bitter at the time from seeing so many queer women killed on television.
“God, 2016, it feels like a long time ago, right? And yet it's so fresh for all of us,” she says, remembering a year when 62 lesbian and bisexual women TV characters were killed. “I feel like I was very cognizant of that going into writing Wynonna Earp, because I had been writing for the community for a long time with Lost Girl and what have you. So I kind of understood that we couldn't just blow away another lesbian. I just wasn't going to ever write that type of show.”
Instead, she wrote the type of show where queer women get to be happy, and none of their angst comes from homophobia. That made all of the roles so much more relatable.
“I feel like the show started as one little thing, which was this crazy group of people running around the woods in Alberta, doing this crazy demon-hunting cowgirl show,” she says. “We weren't sure anyone was going to get it. And then I would say that the fandom, The Earpers, have even become their own community now that I feel like we're lucky to be a part of. They kind of created their own brand of kindness, of humor, of inclusivity”
That brand of kindness, humor and inclusivity, of family, became the center of the show and the community that sprung up around it. The final scene of the show was a nod to that family.
“I love that the last word of the series, potentially, is home,” Andras says. “And then I cannot watch the scene with all the mailboxes, ending on the sign that says ‘Everybody Welcome,’ because that's what the love letter to the fandom should be, right? At the end of the day, whoever you are, whatever your gateway drug is to the show, whether it's WayHaught or Wynonna or Jeremy or Doc or tentacle goo, you are welcome in this community. And the fans have always made us feel so welcome, and they really refueled my belief that kindness and love and humor can unite us all.”
Waverly and Nicole getting married. Photo Credit: SYFY/ Michelle Faye
She hopes that viewers take that lesson of building a loving family to heart. And that they learn that they can have a happy ending even if things aren’t exactly how you imagined them. “I think I'd be lying if I said I didn't cry at the very end (of the episode), when WayHaught is discussing how happy they are, just to be home with one another with their wife,” Andras says. “Any happiness and joy you can find is worth fighting for. Perfection is overrated. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to make you feel like living happily for the next day.”
Andras has never gotten as connected to a show as she has to Wynonna Earp. “I don’t know if I’ve ever had a show with characters who live so close to me all of the time. Sometimes I dream about them,” she says. “Even as time goes on, I find myself getting more excited about, like, what are Waverly and Nicole doing right now? Where are Wynonna and Doc? How's Jeremy doing taking control of BBD, is he still dating that cute caterer? I think that the world is really rich, and if there's ever another opportunity to revisit these characters, I think that would be really beautiful.”
She’s still holding out hope that someone picks them up for season five, but also loves the idea of “a movie or something, just revisiting them in five or ten years.” While she’s not ready to spoil any of the WayHaught dreams she’s had, she will tell us one thing. “Wherever they are,” she says, “I know they have one another.”
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