Sleepy Hollow - 'The Red Lady from Caribee'

"Did you know that you're COVERED IN BEES?"

Clearly I misheard last week, as while Ichabod dares the horror of a teppanyaki first date, Pandora is angling to harvest the fear of fear itself. She summons 'a red lady from Caribee'; an anthropomorphic swarm of Jack Spaniard wasps whose stings spread madness, fever and death. With the judge in Ichabod's relic smuggling case dead (and, given how cranky he's getting about Jenny and Joe's proximity to Atticus Nevins, how come Reynolds hasn't picked up that Abbie's roomie is up on a related charge?) and a PTA leader dead in fits of paranoia, and Reynolds starting to kick off, it's the usual race against time to bring down the swarm.

Grace Dixon's diary provides a tonic to slow the fever, as well as referencing Betsy Ross, who continues to be a bizarre, anachronistic mess and just way more disconnected than Ichabod's personal flashbacks. The old-school Sleepy Hollow flashbacks worked by linking past to present and revealing Ichabod's unknowing involvement in the secret war to him as much as to the audience. The Betsy Ross adventures feel more like a webisode spin off where everyone knows what they're talking about and are surely, at best, Ichabod's imagining of how things might have gone, with as much reliable accuracy as Brian's version of the takedowns he doesn't get to be present for in Limitless.

But yes, Washington was once afflicted by the same peril. Grace Dixon treated the fever while Betsy Ross took down the Red Lady. Triangulating the likely sting sites for the three victims, they locate the Lady's lair in a ruin whose plan matches a tree design on the tablet which Ichabod 'took for mere decoration'. Seriously, Bod? What have you been learning this past two years? The tree has six flowers, which they link to the six demons loosed by Pandora, which means that oops, time may be even more pressing.

They confront the Red Lady and Pandora in their lair, and while Abbie is able to pour hydrogen cyanide into the nest and kill the wasps, Pandora catches an arrow and disappears into an otherworldly passage which opens in the tree, after thanking the Witnesses for 'doing the hard work' and cleaning up after each of the beasts she released from the box.

On the other side of the storyline, Jenny and Joe visit the local Trinidadan occult supply store for tonic ingredients, where the owner goes all trancey and warns Jenny that she will be claimed by 'a shadow older than time'. Sure enough, when our dynamic deuteroduo confront Nevins and learn that he and Corbin senior had Swiss bank accounts for their ill-gotten gains, Nevins also opens the rock to reveal the true Shard of Anubis, a small, red gemstone. He handles this with a glove, which Joe fails to mention when telling Jenny which pocket it is in, and the stone is absorbed into her flash, giving her a healthy, Windscale glow and nightmares that play a bit like Katrina's experiences in Purgatory.

We're ramping up to the mid-season finale now, so I guess we'll see what Pandora was up to in a couple of episodes time. I'm guessing it will tie in with the Shard; perhaps an Egyptian/Sumerian crossover deity (there were plenty; those guys traded all sorts.)