The Gist: We hear the girl, 19-year-old Ava Silva (Alba Baptista), say in voice over that she always dreamed of being dead just so she can see her own body, just being normal. Ava lived and died in a Catholic orphanage in Andalusa, brought there after a car accident left her mother dead and Ava a quadriplegic. `I stare at her perfect normality until I wake up and realize I've still been the freak I've been my whole life. What I've learned since then is life has a fucked up way of making her dreams come true.` The nun who ran the orphanage felt she should be in hell; though her life on earth was already hellish.
Elsewhere, a group of nuns in battle gear take their injured commander, Sister Shannon (Melina Matthews) into a church to tend to her wounds. But she's mortally wounded, and she insists that the halo artifact in her back be taken out, even though that will assuredly kill her. Shotgun Mary (Toya Turner), her closest confidant in the warrior nun troupe, doesn't want to let her go, but others, including Sister Lilith (Lorena Andrea) and Sister Beatrice (Kristina Tonteri-Young) know what needs to be done. The demons that ambushed them are coming for them, and the halo needs to be protected. A nun takes the halo just as the church explodes, and ends up putting it in the back of Ava's corpse.
Warrior Nun is based on Ben Dunn's manga-style comics character Warrior Nun Areala; the character was adapted into this show by Simon Barry. There's a lot to like about it, from Baptista's performance as the bewildered but fascinated Ava to the very idea that there are warrior nuns who battle very real and violent demons in this world. The first episode, though, has a number of issues that muddle the message a bit.