Speculative Recap ⁓ On the night of 18 December in the city of Wasau in (fictional) Mountain Bay County, Wisconsin, Journalist May Tao (Katharine King So) is putting together a piece about locals in unusual jobs, and watches Randy (Graeme Barrett) feed a body into the cremation oven at Randy’s Crematorium, the Eternal Flame of Wasau, which seems to double as a morgue. A minute or so later, a man bursts from the oven in flames. Then all the other corpses in the place wake up as well.

Deputy Sheriff Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano) is getting ready to leave for her new job in Chicago, and her father, Sheriff Wayne Cypress (David James Elliott), isn’t happy about it. “I’m doing what’s best for me and Cooper,” she tells him. “We need a fresh start. We all do.” Sheriff Wayne responds: “Oh, that’s real nice kid, given everything our family’s been through.” He gets an emergency call that he can’t make sense of and tells Dana to “go see Randy, find out what’s got him all worked up.”

Cooper Cypress (Hudson Wurster) is Dana’s nine-year-old (?) son. Cooper’s father is Derek, whom we have not met, and with whom Dana is no longer involved. All we find out is that Dana and her sister Em (Romy Weltman) were planning to go on a trip to Myrtle Beach when Dana discovered she was pregnant and also found out for the first time that Derek was cheating on her.

On her way to see Randy, Dana’s police radio crackles and fades out after dispatcher Jeannie advises of multiple 10-33s. Then the guy who popped out of the cremation oven runs across the road in front of her car. A nude man runs by, and several disoriented people approach her. A young girl addresses her by name. “Miss Cypress?” the girl asks. “Have you seen my mommy?”

Dead Horse in the Middle of the Road

All of the forty-seven people known to have revived died between 4 December and 18 December within a few kilometers of Wasau, so The CDC quarantines the county. Thirty-five days later, on 23 January, Wasau’s Mayor Dillisch (Conrad Coates) lifts the lockdown, and residents are no longer confined to their homes. The Mayor interviews one reviver, Damon Manning (Pat Thornton), on television. “I tumbled over and had a pain shooting up my arm, then everything went dark,” says Manning. “And then — bam! — I was awake. All happened in a blink.” Mr. Manning, proprietor of Manning Meats, likely was killed by a myocardial infarction. Whatever revived him had to heal the damage to his heart.

Em’s college roommate Kay Mathurin (Maia Jae Bastidas) returns to the dorm to find it a mess and Em in the tub. “Dude,” says Kay, “Did you not go home at all?” Em says “I just had some stuff to deal with.” Kay complains that the week all this went down, she was supposed to be in Chicago visiting her brother, and she is unhappy about going to school with “a dead person”. “Shelly,” she says, “should have stayed dead”. (We haven’t met Shelly yet.)

When Dana gets to the Sheriff’s office, the Mayor is having words with her father, because the Sheriff wants him to authorize the removal of all revivers from the town and the Mayor refuses. Looking on is CDC representative Dr. Ibrahim Ramin (Andy McQueen). Dana met him the previous night at Nella’s bar and almost had sex with him, but a call about a dead horse interrupted things, so Dana and Ibrahim pretend not to know each other. Asked if revivers might be dangerous, Dr. Ramin says there is “no data to substantiate that line of thinking”. After Ramin leaves, Dana gets a call from Chicago saying she’s lost the new job because of being quarantined for a month, then Randy shows up to tell her that the CDC took the horse so he couldn’t do a necropsy.

At the CDC’s temporary HQ, Dana learns that wounds incurred by the revivers heal rapidly, but only wounds incurred after death. They retain whatever maladies they had prior to death (probably excepting whatever killed them, although Dr. Ramin does not mention this). This is illustrated by a sample of reviver tissue which heals itself without being attached to the rest of the organism. He also suggests that wound severity will dictate the pace of healing, something that seems contradicted by subsequent events.

Human teeth were found in the dead horse, and Dana found human teeth scattered in the snow near where the dead horse was found. Both sets of teeth are determined to be from the same person, and likely grew back after revival. Dana and Dr. Ibrahim deduce that at least one reviver is regenerating teeth incorrectly, is strong enough to kill a horse, and is being concealed by persons unknown. Dana goes after Myles Miller (Josh Cruddas), who died of a stroke in prison. When she arrests Miller, who seems unlikely to be connected to the case, he mentions seeing a red truck on the night the dead horse was found.

The Boy Vanishes

Em corners Professor Aaron Weimer (Gianpaolo Vinuta) in his office.

WEIMER: “What the hell are you doing?”
EM: “I’m doing what I have to do. I’ve been texting. Calling. E-mailing. You’re done ignoring me.”
WEIMER: “Fine, we’ll meet. Tonight. Our spot.”
EM: “You better be there.”
WEIMER: “I Will. I promise. But Em, we have to be careful. You were getting a little scary.”
EM: “Wait. What do you mean, ‘scary’?”
WEIMER: “Not now, not here. Tonight. Seven o’clock.”

Em (full name Martha but nobody calls her that anymore) shows up for her rendezvous with Professor Weimer, but he does not. Em is holding a ring which is much too large for her. She tries to call Weimer but gets his voicemail. Someone in a hoodie watches her from the shadows. She calls her father, who is upset that she hasn’t been in touch for weeks. “Look, we had an agreement, remember?” he tells her. “You can’t be out running wild in your condition.” That might mean Em is pregnant, but, if so, her sister clearly doesn’t know. One wonders why she would tell her father and not her sister.

The next morning, Dana drops Cooper at her father’s place and goes out on patrol. She is surprised to find Em sleeping on a bench beside the road. Asked if she wants some company on patrol, Dana says: “I’ve got to get you back to the dorm, before you break a femur, or something.” On the way back to Em’s dorm, Dana spots a red pickup truck.

The Sheriff gets a call about a disturbance at the home of Opal Shaw (Jill Frappier). Leaving Cooper in the car, he knocks on Opal’s door, and it turns out she’s dug up her husband who died on 3 December in hopes of getting him to revive. While the Sheriff is inside, Cooper sees something that makes him smile and roll down the window. We don’t get to see what it is. When the Sheriff goes outside, the car door is open and Cooper has vanished.

That red pickup truck belongs to Bob and Terry Dittman (Derek McGrath and Nora McLellan). They are concealing Arlene Stankiewitz (Nicky Guadagni) who might be Mrs. Dittman’s mother, and whose teeth keep regrowing and falling out. Arlene attacks Dana. When the Dittmans try to intervene, Terry is killed, and Bob is tossed aside. At that point, Em enters the barn, and is run through the abdomen with a scythe. Arlene is about to choke Dana to death when the severely wounded Em gets up and uses the same scythe to slice away the top of Arlene’s head.

---

Miscellaneous Info

Wisconsin does have a city named Wasau, but it is in Marathon County. There is no Mountain Bay County in that state, but there is a Mountain Bay Trail.

One piece of evidence collected by the CDC is a rusty railway spike. The vampire Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was so named because he tortured his victims with railway spikes, and in the first Wynonna Earp episode, the bus bringing Wynonna back to Purgatory got a flat tire from a similar spike likely put there by revenants.

Just before Dana arrests Myles Miller, a full moon is visible. The most recent year when the moon was full from 23 to 25 January is 2016.

Romy Weltman told Sam Stone of CBR about her sisterly rapport with co-star Scrofano: “It was a dream come true, honestly. I got the part [and] the turnaround for me was really quick. Right before I left for New Brunswick, I got a DM that said ‘You and me, Sis,’ from Melanie. I didn’t know anything! I didn’t know that she was playing my sister at the time, so I was like, ‘Oh my god! It’s Wynonna Earp!'”

---

REVIVAL can be streamed on Peacock in the US, on CTV’s Sci-Fi Channel in Canada, and on Binge in Australia.