Wynonna Earp – Look at Them Beans

I think it might be time to have a talk about tonal balance in writing, because boy is Wynonna Earp missing the mark this season. It’s all well and good to have jokes in a drama. It’s nice to blow off steam after a particularly intense string of episodes. Some of the best dramas of the past decade have also had incredible moments of humor (see the last two seasons of The Leftovers). But when the balance is off, you get “Look at Them Beans.” See, the problem with tonal imbalance – when a dramatic series leans too far into the comedy side of things – is that it’s harder to make the deep emotional beats hit. And that’s exactly what is happening with Wynonna Earp.

Now, I’ve never really cared for the jokes as much as I’ve enjoyed the emotionally driven character work on the series, but I certainly can appreciate a solid pun or one-liner. But it feels like the series has begun to lose its structural and tonal framework this season. Wynonna is spending far too much time making, frankly, stupid jokes (yes, Wynonna’s defense mechanism to avoid dealing with emotional stakes is to joke, but its becoming a crutch for the writers and not simply a character quirk at this point), and not addressing the actual situation at hand. I find myself cringing and rolling my eyes more than laughing, and that’s troubling to me. When the writing can’t get the audience invested in the plot due to the over-reliance on juvenile humor, well, that’s a serious writing issue that needs to be solved.

So, after spending the entire episode hoping that the ridiculous gags (everything about Cleo, an idiot sheriff, Nedley obviously being the monster in the woods, Mercedes opening a demon club for some reason), well, I had been hoping there would be some sort of payoff that justified sitting through an hour of nothing of note happening. Yes, I’m sure we’ll discover somewhere down the line that whatever the hell is happening in Purgatory is the result of Eve appearing (hell, perhaps Eve is one – or more – of the new characters we met this episode) and that Black Badge is keeping the “peace” by locking all the monsters in one spot. But there had to be a better way to introduce the “new” Purgatory to us than this waste of time.

It’s entirely possible to have fun with a story and keep it grounded. I had inklings that the series might be trending this way with the first two episodes of the season, but I figured the writers were simply looking to have a bit of fun before diving back into the more serious side of the story. It appears I was wrong and this tonal mess is here to stay. The tone of a season is crucial to getting the audience to invest in the characters and the narrative arc. We have three years of investment in the characters – we want to see what will happen to them. We want to root for them, we want to see them happy and safe, and we know we have to follow them to hell and back to get to the end of their stories.

If you start the season treating seemingly serious situations like jokes – and are constantly allowing characters to make bad jokes and puns at every dangerous situation they fall into – it teaches the audience to treat those situations as jokes. If you open Romeo and Juliet with a slapstick fight between the Capulets and Montagues, the audience is going to treat all subsequent fights between them as a joke because that’s what you have taught them to expect in this production (true story of a version of the play I once saw). You don’t get to unring that bell. Because the episode treated Wynonna’s incarceration as a joke, and treated all the new authority figures in the same way (including the demon bartender who was meant to appear somewhat sinister at the close of the episode), it removed the stakes from the situation. Because the episode treated the Nedley monster as a joke, it removed the stakes from the situation. If there are no stakes, there’s no drama. And if there’s no drama propelling the narrative forward, there’s no point in watching (aside from just seeing characters deliver bad jokes and watching Nicole and Waverly kiss while not dealing with any of the emotional fallout from being separated for 18 months).

Yes, humor can be a defense mechanism for a character like Wynonna. Yes, it’s fun to let loose on a show like Wynonna Earp. But the first episode back in Purgatory, the episode that should be the initial step in setting up a season arc, shouldn’t be spent joking around and treating a seemingly dangerous situation like a walk in the park. We don’t need to have all the answers up front – in fact, we shouldn’t – but if we’re supposed to be worried about what’s to come this season, well, I’m certainly not. And I’m not even sure I’m all that interested in continuing to watch. After all, there’s a lot of other shows that know how to balance tonal shifts while keeping the dramatic stakes intact. It doesn’t look like Wynonna Earp is one of those shows anymore.