Sleepy Hollow - 'One Life' and 'Incident at Stone Manor'

Pinboard with strings; a sure sign of a disordered mind.

It has been a month since Abbie disappeared (and waay longer since we last caught an episode of Sleepy Hollow,) and Ichabod is clearly fixated on getting her back. Jenny and Joe try to get him to focus on the work, although a part of that is Jenny working through her own guilt that Abbie was lost in saving her from death.

After Agent Foster interrupts his latest attempt at contact, they are both contacted by a spectral force, which uses mirrored brands to urge them to open a gateway through a mirror, which allows an onryou - a Japanese spirit of vengeance, here manifesting as a murderous J-horror reject drawn to desperation - to enter the world and kill some folks (not that anyone seems to have heavy feels about that.) They track the creature to SAC Reynolds' cabin, where they are able to kill it, and Foster gets a brief Team Witness Orientation.

"Well... shit."

Meanwhile, Jenny and Joe track down Helena Blavatsky's map and engage in skulduggery to extract it from douchey artefact retrieval guy. They hope to use it to locate Pandora and the Hidden One, who are mostly being all abusive codependency in this episode, but instead discover that, as a result of a beacon created by Pandora to turn Sleepy Hollow into an all you can eat god buffet, weird creatures from all over the world are coming to town.

Also, Joe and Jenny kiss. Aww.

The episode title comes from a largely unconnected flashback to the loss of Betsy and Ichabod's eager young partner in espionage, Nathan Hale. I confess, until he actually did the quote the name meant little to me.

"You're doing something different with your hair."

Anyway, 'Incident at Stone Manor' catches us up with Abbie, who is going a bit crazy playing imaginary Crane at homemade chess in a derelict palace in the inescapable land of desert ruins. At Jenny's suggestion, Ichabod attempts to locate her using astral projection, which involves Joe helping Jenny to steal a lighter from her father and Ichabod doing an impressive job of impromptu carpentry.

While he's away, Foster comes looking for advice on a case which has mystical gubbins written all over it - a murder at an exclusive school with a missing gargoyle. This leads to an amazing scene of Jenny and Joe filling in for the missing Abbie and Ichabod. They mention Ichabod and his lessons from the past, but it occurs to me that they haven't yet told Foster - at least onscreen - that Crane is from the eighteenth century.

Cheap, importded Euro-evil.

Anyway, there's some friction twixt the newly encredited Foster and Jenny - who seems to feel that Foster is being brought in as 'replacement Abbie', but Joe smooths things over and together they trap a living gargoyle imported by the British to establish their evil cred during the War of Independence in a block of concrete, with just enough sticking out for the construction crew to get really curious and chip it out.

With the influx of demons slower than expected, Pandora tails Ichabod through the ether and interrupts his reunion with Abbie. Abbie tells Ichabod that six weeks in the world has been ten months for her (which presumably means that the Hidden One was actually trapped, from his perspective, for hundreds of thousands of years; no wonder he's pissed,) and shows him an archive of carvings telling the story of the Hidden One. Then Pandora cuts his tether, threatening to leave Abbie trapped and Ichabod lost unless Abbie agrees to bring the Eye of Providence back to the world. Realising that eventually she will weaken, Abbie smashes the Eye to pieces, because she's a baller.

Pandora storms out, but Ichabod also had time to tell Abbie that a cutlass she found in a tree was Betsy Ross's, so she knows that there is a way out. Weaving her own rope, she abseils into a hollow tree and emerges from a river in time to form a new anchor for Ichabod; huzzah! So, the gang's all here, but Pandora gives up some of the godly strength that her husband gave her, in order to boost the signal, so they'll need all hands on deck.

Sleepy Hollow continues to be a second string watch, with its monster of the week format and slightly weak arc plot (possibly still be editorial mandate.) Pandora and the Hidden One are basically too enigmatic to be very interesting, and I would rather have seen more arc or less. New season of The Musketeers starts next week, so this may go back on reserve for a while.