Sleepy Hollow - The Rest of Season 3

Oh say does that star-spangled banner still wave?

Okay, so it's been a while, but I'm back to put Sleepy Hollow Season 3 to bed. I'm basically going to smush the last seven or eight episodes together.

As the Hidden One gets closer to his goal and starts to be more of a dick to Pandora, alliances blur. Ichabod discovers Abbie's symbol addiction, but soon enough discovers that the symbol in question is used to imprison gods, and can act as a sort of Witness telepathic amplifier if combined with his family tablet, which would no doubt be super useful if it didn't get destroyed in the next episode. We also learn that the Hidden One was one of a number of Sumerian gods, who was set to guarding the Box, the repository of all evil. He got bored of babysitting and used the human slave Pandora's sympathy for him to engineer a coup, only for the humans to turn on him as well and imprison him with said symbol. Pandora was kind of responsible for this, which he learns.

Fuckers.

Pandora thus aligns - temporarily - with Team Witness, and offers to deal with the Hidden One if Abbie and Ichabod repair the box, which must be done in the catacombs. Realising that the reason Betsy 'Badass' Ross made the flag in the first place was that it was not merely a standard, but a magical talisman that lets you turn a boat ride into a path to the Underworld if you sing 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. Because of course it is. They thus cross the Delaware into the Underworld and find the slaughtered remnant of Washington's unit. Deep in the catacombs, they also find Betsy Ross, still alive, who decides that Ichabod must be in love with Abbie and thus departs to return to her own time and be surly at Ichabod, thus leaving him free to hook up with Katrina and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, Joe is turned back into a Wendigo and killed by Jenny using a gun made by her father, who turns out to have been Corbin's friend and armourer.

Unfortunately, the box requires the soul of a Witness to activate, and in order to defeat the Hidden One, Abbie is forced to sacrifice herself. Despite having her soul eaten by a box, it turns out that a Witness's soul is eternal and will reincarnate in someone else (and presumably not a newborn, unless Ichabod is going to be facing the next tribulation Lone Wolf and Cub style.)

So apparently this is where the show is going. Tom Mison in a graveyard.
Alone.

Pandora is still around and decides that she's the new Hidden One, but Ichabod summons the Horseman back from hiatus and gives him his skull so that he will have the strength to battle and destroy Pandora. Technically this kicks off the apocalypse, but it's Moloch's apocalypse and he's dead. I would argue that this might come back to bite Ichabod, but continuity has been a matter of convenience this series.

Mills Snr. pops up and tells Ichabod that, realising what was what with Ichabod showing up in the catacombs, Ross and Washington recorded an order making Ichabod head of a to-be-founded order of evil slayers, who turn up at the end in black sedans to take him away.

"Sorry, Ichabod; you've got another year on your contract."

Season 3 of Sleepy Hollow has been a big disappointment. Season 2 had its problems, but was generally excellent, but 3 squandered its baddies on long-term prep work, as well as alienating me from the get-go by ditching the Horseman. It was good to see him back in the finale, but too little and too late. Joe's death pissed me off, because they bounced the poor character back and forth until we barely had any emotional attachment to him and then made his tragedy Mills Snr.'s reveal. Abbie's death was even more aggravating, because it came because they got suckered. Ultimately, 'Ragnarok' contained no wins whatsoever for our heroes, with Team Witness losing Joe, failing to contain the Hidden One, having to sacrifice Abbie to allow Pandora to defeat the Hidden One and release the full-powered Horseman to defeat Pandora, and ending with Abbie's soul/Witness spark translating to some other random (but not, for example, Jenny or anything,) and Ichabod being abducted by goons who notionally work for him.

I don't know if I'll watch much of Season 4; I suspect it will depend heavily on the chemistry between Mison and the new girl. Just as long as they don't tack on someone else telling him he loves her, as if that was what was missing from the series.