Sleepy Hollow - 'Spellcaster' and 'What Lies Beneath'

I'm pretty sure when I was at school in the States, this hat stood for unflagging
moral rectitude and manifest destiny. Now it's basically the shorthand for
lawful evil.

A double murder at a museum in Sleepy Hollow is found to have been perpetrated by boiling the blood in the victims' veins and linked to the theft of a rare grimoire compiled by John Dee (here not an evil sorcerer, but a scholar who gathered up that which perhaps ought not to be anthologised.)

The killer is soon identified by Katrina as Solomon Kane... sorry, Solomon Kent, a Puritan minister and witch turned warlock (a word that I am glad to see Sleepy Hollow reserving for dark side adepts rather than all male witches, given its root meaning of 'oath-breaker',) who tried to cover up a sexually frustrated homicide by instigating the Salem witch hunts, claiming the life of Katrina's granny before the rest of their coven caught up with him and sent him to Purgatory, whence he escaped when Moloch was killed.

Hunting down Kent proves pretty easy, but when his blood magic proves more than a match for Katrina, his jibes appear to start her on an unlikely and (there only being a few episodes left in the season) presumably pretty meteoric descent into Dark Phoenixdom. Life clearly doesn't agree with Katrina, who held out against the blandishments of a major demonic player in Purgatory for centuries, and seems set to go full dark side after less than a year with a pulse. It's not even from the cause you might expect - protecting the Headless Horseman - but from some wild-eyed loon calling her a sissy girl.

The Witnesses take out Kent with the aid of Captain Irving, who then nicks the book and murders the unconscious Kent while Abbie and Ichabod... run off and search for him? The denouement is very strange on this one, with Ichabod getting well personal about Kent hurting Katrina, then just leaving him there with the Book of Evil to search for Irving, whom they have no specific reason to fear is hurt.

Elsewhere, Henry is recuperating and contemplating the simple life, but then he murders some random thugs who pissed him off and decides he's going back to being a wolf among sheep, meeting up with Irving to receive the Grand Grimoire, and again this is a bit confusing, because their conversation suggests they've been working a plan for sometime.

Yes, of course Ichabod knew Jefferson.

Also mad sudden are the swings of fate in 'What Lies Beneath'.

When survey workers are snatched by zombies, the investigation leads to the Fenestella, a great archive of Witness-related information watched over by techno-magical hologram Thomas Jefferson (for realsies) and protected by a cadre of Washington's special commandos (known as Reavers.) Unfortunately, the Reavers have mutated into the animalistic cannibals that snatched the workers, and to rescue them the Witnesses must endanger the power source which maintains the Fenestella.

Naturally, they choose to rescue the workers. What makes less sense is that, having done so, they immediately go back and destroy the whole shebang in order to take out the remaining Reavers. No attempt to muster their forces and clear the tunnels. No effort to preserve something before dropping the hammer. This vast resources is introduced and removed in the space of a single episode.

Meanwhile, Irving gets Jenny to help him break into the police evidence locker, where he steals a thumb drive containing the bank access details for the Hellfire Club, Henry's apocalypse backing group. He explains that he masked his continuing thralldom from Katrina with a rune which also allows his human side to surface, and he wants to see his family provided for before he goes all Dark Irving. Why he hasn't mentioned this to Abbie is a bit of a question, but so it goes.

Honestly, not one of Washington's finer plans.

And Henry approaches Katrina and scratches her with the thorn of some sort of creepy black roses, announcing his intention that they are going to look to their own people, presumably meaning witches, who have been described as if almost a distinct ethnic group a few times in the last couple of episodes.

These episodes are not Sleepy Hollow at its best. I'm starting to get the feeling that we're looking at a Babylon 5 kind of deal, and that faced with possible cancellation they've crammed two season's worth of plot into one and that the death of Moloch was originally slated for the end of the Season. This would explain why Katrina's swing to the darkside is so sudden, why Henry was apparently conspiring with Irving before deciding that he was going to be evil still, and the Fenestella coming and going as it did.

The highlight continues to be Abbie and Ichabod do a thing and he gets exasperated by something modern. In these episodes, marketing, instagram and the 24-hour news cycle.
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