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.
As to the non-answer...consider the context. Waverly is impulsively asking Nicole to marry her. It’s so impulsive, in fact, that she’s using her father’s ugly ass angelic ring to do so. It wasn’t thought through, done as the result of Waverly watching her father die and panicking, and we have hints from earlier in the season that Waverly may want this but Nicole is more level headed about it. After all, Nicole got impulsively married once before and it ended terribly. Not too mention Nicole has a known inferiority complex when it comes to both Waverly and Wynonna, so accepting a proposal from Waverly without issue, let alone doing it herself, is probably not an option.
My prognosis? A conversation (or several) is going to ensue to get assurances from Waverly that this is what she wants (keep in mind: Waverly is about 4 or 5 years younger than Nicole), that it wasn’t something she did in a panic, and that Nicole can actually learn to feel like a contributing member of a family of superhumans as the lowly local sheriff. So, everyone chill.
2. The Garden
More questions than answers here. I’m getting the feeling we’re going for the vibe of “Eden isn’t what you think” which I’m fine with. But the whole thing was a giant WTF?? There’s some things to consider here...
What exactly are the rules of who can see the Garden? Wynonna said only the righteous could but Bulshar could see the steps. Is there any real importance to being able to see that?
What is inside the Garden? My best guess is it was the Tree of Knowledge? Maybe that thing is a huge jackass maybe it’s rescuing Waverly from whatever happened in Purgatory? Who the eff knows
Eden, above everything, represents in religious traditions immortality. Which is interesting that only mortals can enter the Garden. When humanity was ejected, they lost their immortality and were vulnerable to the harms of the world. I wonder if that plays into only those who are vulnerable being allowed to enter the Garden. Likewise, in some traditions humans are allowed to reenter the Garden after the flaming sword is removed (around the time Jesus of Nazareth is crucified). Which kind of happened here--minus the Jesus part.
3. The Hanging Pieces
Some shit that is left open...
Nicole the survivor: We still know very little about Nicole’s interaction with Bulshar’s cult and how she managed to get away, and why fate seems to have brought her back to the GRT. On top of that, Nicole has cheated death several times now (escaping the cult as a child, survives the Widow’s poison, is saved by divine intervention from a stab wound). Is that important?
The price: Julian mentions there’s a price for saving Nicole. Was it him using and losing the rest of his divinity or is there something else?
Waverly’s little vision moment: Are we all gonna sleep on the fact that Waverly touched Nicole’s arm and had a brief vision of herself walking up the stairs? What the hell was that?
The ring: The fucking ring. Nicole has a pull to the stairs leading to Eden, she immediately tried to talk up when she saw them. She survived a massacre at the steps of Eden. That ring boomeranged back to her and Waverly and Waverly makes the point to say “it’s haunting us.” Now Nicole is wearing the ring. Since it was gifted to her by an angel as an engagement ring will it recognize her as “kin” and allow her some abilities? Is there some sort of ramification of Julian saving her, did she receive any of Julian’s divinity as a result?
Jeremy: We were told he was partially non-human. What does that mean? There’s almost zero way to speculate on this because we know so little besides that he has empathetic abilities for people he loves after spending three days trapped in a car with his mother’s dead body
Mama Earp: Where this bitch go? I feel like she might have had something to do with the missing townsfolk. The whole Julian thing is going to be fun to explain to her.
Finale Theory: Nicole, Bulshar, Eden, and a Season 2 Misdirect
(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).
Boom. Could be totally off but this is the most sense I could make of all these moving parts and misdirects this season.
