Sleepy Hollow - 'Pittura Infamante'

Oh, hey; it's Michelle Trachtenberg.

It's date night for the Cranes, and naturally their evening in swish clothes at a museum gala doesn't exactly go swimmingly. We meet another of Ichabod's modern friends, an art restorer, who is almost immediately murdered by a supernatural gribbly. After nice seamstress lady and now this, this could become a habit.

With the aid of Katrina's memories of her friendship with Abigail Adams (wife of the second president, John Adams, and mother of the sixth, John Quincy Adams, for non-American readers, in Sleepy Hollow's mythos a supernatural crime-busting mastermind, and Buffy's Michelle Trachtenberg to boot,) the couple track the killer to a mystery painting that does that whole changing when you're not looking thing that's so goddamn creepy. The killer is James Colby, an artist and serial killer trapped in his unfinished final work by Adams and now seeking to free himself by taking blood to complete the work.

Meanwhile Frank Irving, last seen very definitely dying, hands himself in at the station.

'Pittura Infamante' makes a good fist of getting Ichabod and Katrina working together and giving the latter some proper mileage doing something more than vacillating over whether she's against Horsemen of Death in principle or only in the context of an actual apocalypse. It's also pretty damn creepy, with the bloody painting being completed from within.

The stuff with Abbie and Irving is a little more like time-marking, as if they wanted to get this plot development in somewhere and give Abbie something to do. There is a nice scene where Abbie sends her sister to dig some undead-killing bullets out of a corpse, and Jenny discovers why at least one undead-killing bullet should always be left in place, but otherwise it feels like busyplot.