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.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Sins of the Father'

"Did we get hologram tables while I was away?"

More Sleepy Hollow it is, and we're back on the 'who was Sheriff Corbin?' train.

Fugitive artefact dealer Atticus Nevins reappears, apparently pursued by a ghoul. He tells Abbie he can help fight it, describing a ghoul that attacked him and Corbin in Iraq; their first supernatural experience. Team Witness tries to recover the golden scarab which controls the ghoul from one of his rivals, but oh snap! Nevins has the scarab, hidden in a major abdominal wound inflicted by Pandora. Abbie overcomes her post-Limbo nerves enough to shoot the ghoul in the voonerables, but Nevins escapes with Corbin's big index of stealable loot - pausing only to confirm that Corbin was not a bribe-taking son of a bitch - which he trades with Reynolds' FBI superior for an envelope of cash and a bullet in the head.

So the bad guy was the bad guy all along!

Jenny and Abbie each meet with their father, who tells them he left because he was falling into alcoholism and causing more problems than he solved; it wasn't their fault. Abbie wants to know how her mother descended into madness, since she's started seeing giant glowing symbols as well as flashbacks. By the end of the episode, she is apparently worshiping either the symbol or the thing that it represents in thanks for 'saving her'.

The Hidden One decides that he hasn't been enough of a jerk lately and restores a fragment of Pandora's power, basically just to fuck with her and so she can experience the same existential crisis he is going through being only just a little bit all powerful. Pandora has the look of a woman who is seriously rethinking her allegiances.

Sadly, the main impact of this episode is that, by presenting us with flashbacks to an August Corbin who isn't Clancy Brown, it's made me not really care about him anymore. Seriously, he looks less like Clancy Brown than Joe does. Still, with his name cleared and Nevins gone, maybe it won't come up again.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Kindred Spirits'

"Grave robbing. That's new. Interesting."
"I know you meant gross and disturbing."
"Yes, yes of course. Terrible thing. Must put a stop to it."

What's this? An episode of Sleepy Hollow? Yeah, bitches; that's what I'm talking about.

While Abbie is recovering from her extended absence, Agent Reynolds taps her to consult on the double halberd homicide of a couple in a local lover's lane. She and Ichabod realise that the killer is most likely to Kindred, the Death-powered, Frankensteinian super-zombie created by Benjamin Franklin and given its parody of life by the Witnesses in Season 2. There is, naturally, a certain amount of guilt, which might be mitigated if they realised that it had returned following Pandora's beacon.

To stop the creature, they send Jenny and Joe to retrieve Franklin's glass armonica (well, one of them anyway, and a portable one built like a hurdy-gurdy at that, rather than the more common free-standing model) from the local museum, having identified this as one of a number of controls provided by Franklin. Ultimately, they realise that it is targeting couples because it has never known love, just in time for it to nab Zoe, who is in the middle of breaking up with Ichabod for going all silent on her for months.

"I want to know what love is,
I know you can show me."

In desperation, they activate the ultimate control; a female Kindred stored at the museum, complete with her own morning star. Why, Franklin? Why include weapons on your moderating influence? It's like incorporating a bomb into a nuclear reactor's control rods. Anyway, it works: The Kindred and Kindress hit it off and head out of town, until the Hidden One blows them up in a snit and swears off love. Alas, while they are in time to save Zoe it is way too late to save the relationship, which at least puts her ahead on points against his last love interest, who was drowned by La Llorona, lest we forget. Sadly, they do seem to be using this to push the Ichabbie agenda, which does not make me happy.

Did I mention I like platonic partnerships?

So, I confess I think we lost touch with Sleepy Hollow along the way, and part of that is that I don't know if Season 3 is as good. While Moloch was nothing to write home about, Henry/War was an antagonist worthy of the name of nemesis, and neither Pandora nor the Hidden One really makes up for the loss of our two Horsemen (or the fact that we apparently won't get to see the others any time soon.)

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.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Novus Ordo Seclorum'

A Mummy returns

In the big mid-season finale, the race is on to rescue Jenny from Pandora and her sugar mummy 'the Hidden One', whom I presume to be Gozer the Gozarian since our information on him is so far limited to the fact that he is a god and that he was very big in Sumeria. His goal is to extract the power of the Anubis Shard - aka the All-Seeing Eye - from Jenny's body without causing her to explode, a fate that befell the last mortal to absorb the power, the nephew of silversmith, dentist and occult armourer Paul Revere.

At the cost of her future with the FBI, Abbie retrieves the shard casing - created by Revere to contain the Eye - and an arsenal of siege weapons, and she, Joe and Ichabod race to rescue Jenny from Chez Pandora. Being a god and all, the Hidden One shrugs off most things, but Ichabod is able to stalemate Pandora in a box controlling duel until the box itself explodes, and Abbie is able to draw off the power and fling herself and it into the tree, which goes boom.

Most of this episode was working up to the cliffhanger, which once again has Abbie Mills stuck in a weird realm on her own (a la Season 1 purgatory mid-season and season finales) or possibly gone for good (we hope not.) Weirdly, while her departure from the Bureau and Reynolds' suddenly revealed intent to recruit her as an asset for... something are a major subplot, a lot of the punch of this episode belongs to Joe, who finally gets some beef in his role. It's easy for a new love interest to feel tacked on, but by referring back to his original episode with his attempts to recover his Wendigo power in order to sacrifice himself for Jenny, the show tied it all in, and he also got to be a foil for this week's 'I knew the Founding Father's' exposition.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Art of War'

"We're not orcs; if you were wondering."

Super-keen to get the Shard back, Atticus Nevins turns to Pandora's box (which he knows all about, it seems,) to call up a trio of Norse Berserkers, single-minded and nigh invulnerable trackers. Fortunately, Jenny is able to fight them off with the aid of her Shard-power and the team turn up some mistletoe darts; unfortunately, that recorded weakness has been removed by devoting the warriors to Pandora instead of to Odin. Instead, Team Witness cunningly use Jenny's blood, which they are tracking, to make the Berserkers attack one another.

This draws Nevins into a direct attempt to force them to hand over Jenny, not for Pandora but for something much worse. Luckily for our heroes, his right-hand woman reveals herself to be an undercover FBI agent, but I can see this having all sorts of blowback for Abbie's career. All is for naught, however, as Jenny just walks into Pandora's crypt and meets the lady herself and a hooded figure who hoists a sickle over the younger Mills.

Just one episode left to the mid-season finale, and the whole 'Jenny claimed by the Shard' bit looks to be on the out again after only a week. The integration of those two sides has not been excellent, much as the flashbacks have been a bit disconnected, and it's a shame, as the bits with Tom Mison and Nicole Behari are still excellent.

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.)

Sleepy Hollow - 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' (and Bones - 'The Resurrection in the Remains')

Okay; I see what you did there.

And so we come to the Bones/Sleepy Hollow crossover; or as I like to think of it, proof that Brennan is a blinkered idiot. I mean, seriously, she prides herself on detached observation without assumption, which means that she looks like a bit of a pill every time Angela's psychic or a random ghost pops up to establish that the supernatural is totes for real even in the Boniverse, even without a massive supernatural hotspot in upstate New York; a mere four hours drive from the Jeffersonian. Actually, this makes Christopher Pelant make a lot more sense, because clearly he was a motherfucking wizard; I bloody knew it!

Anyway, it is the Ween of Hallows, and a group of revelers setting up a kegger in an abandoned church stumble on a dead med student lying atop the iron coffin of a headless redcoat. Cue a visit from a certain informal investigative duo still pondering the ultimate fate of one Abraham van Brunt, patriot captain turned Hessian demon cavalier and better known as the Horseman (Headless). Of course, we know that he was actually sucked into Pandora's Box, and sure enough they soon learn - thanks to an extra awesome turn from the Angelatron, reconstructing a face from a missing skull - that this was in fact the nefarious redcoat General and probable diabolist General Howe, of shadow assassin-summoning and Ichabod-torturing fame.

"It's not nonsense, it's a spell book."

In the dead student's digs, Booth - who was, it turns out, and old mate of August Corbin's - and Abbie discover a book of spells in runic script, which contains a hidden message - This book shall lead the Witness to the skull that grants the power to resurrect the dead. Cutting ahead to 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' this suggests to me that OMFG, by her lights, Pandora is a Witness. More prosaically, the student wanted to do some Flatliners style shit with near death experiences, and so nicked the skull of a British Army necromancer from his secret grave as a good luck charm, which notably is the kind of shit that seems a little outre in Bones, but is par for the course in Sleepy Hollow.

Anyway, back in Bones Ichabod produces an authentic letter from the Jeffersonian archives; an order from George Washington that Howe's body be returned to Sleepy Hollow (even if it is mysteriously in Ichabod's handwriting.) Of course, by now the skull has turned out to be the murder weapon, and Crane breaks the case by revealing that a missing tooth had in Howe's lifetime been replaced with a French-made porcelain prosthesis (and honestly I would have watched the episode just for his disdain at the concept of fancy porcelain teeth.)

"Franklin invented sex on the beach?"

Mystery solved, the corpse is packed off for Sleepy Hollow and the four investigators retire to the Founding Fathers for a celebratory drink before Abbie and Ichabod return to Sleepy Hollow (and to Sleepy Hollow.)

Unfortunately, Pandora hijacks the transport carrying Howe's remains and uses a runic medallion to transform the decapitated skeleton into a very active zombie, promising him revenge against an old enemy: "Crane," the general hisses, in case we thought that someone might have encountered Ichabod in his patriot days and not fixated on him in an unhealthy fashion. Truly the greatest trick that Washington ever pulled was keeping Crane out of the history books.

Gotta love that 18th Century shooting stance.

Howe's hijacking interrupts the team costume bowling match - at which Ichabod runs into Zoe, who is dressed somewhat disconcertingly as sexy (seamstress) Betsy Ross, but who is the only one to recognise his natty, hand-embroidered waistcoat as a John Adams costume - especially when the General resurrects a force of redcoat zombies who prove impervious to bullets. The books eventually identify them as Draugr, virtually unstoppable undead shock troops, and the only hint of a weakness is a reference to Howe's 'primal tomb'.

With no other means of identifying Howe's original burial site (clearly not Twickenham) our heroes turn to the country's foremost forensic analyst. While Christine's Jane Goodall costume still needs finishing touches, Brennan agrees to look over the bone and determines it was originally interred in Washington's secret, unused tomb in the Capitol building. Insisting on coming along for the archaeology, they find a tomb with a Masonic lock and a booby trap fueled with unquenchable Greek Fire, prompting Ichabod to realise that the Great Manhattan Fire was caused by (not just a seamstress) Betsy Ross putting down Howe's original Draugr regiment with a multi-barreled, rapid-repeating, Greek Fire crossbow; an instrument of pure gratuity that I chose to dub the Betsy Rossbow.

"We're here for a massacre or an Iron Maiden photo shoot,
whichever comes first."

Leaving the indomitably skeptical Brennan ("She would dismiss Moloch as a tall man with a skin condition") to coo over the anthropological ramifications, Ichabod and Abbie set about planning a means to dispose of the Draugr without, you know, burning Sleepy Hollow to the ground. Their plan is to use Ichabod as bait, lure the Draugr into the stone tunnels under the city and incinerate them there, where the Greek Fire can burn itself out without taking too many houses with it.

The plan is enacted just in time, as Pandora - displaying a scary snake face which may or may not be her real visage - and Howe plot to unleash the Draugr on the unsuspecting Halloween crowds, thus reaping the fear that Pandora needs. Even with the Witnesses successful, enough fear is generated to bloom another rose (this one white) and leaving just one, a red flower, to open. The fact that Pandora is talking about fear and love at about the same moment Abbie is pushing Ichabod to ask Zoe out on a date makes me fear for the new love interest even more.

Meanwhile, Jenny and Joe have been pursuing the B-plot and trying to get a meeting with the mysterious buyer who wants the Shard of Anubis. This man, the kingpin of illegal artefact shipment, turns out to be an old military buddy of Corbin Snr, and also the target of Agent Reynolds' big investigation, leading to a clash of Abbie's worlds.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Blood and Fear' and 'The Sisters Mills'

"What did I do last n... oooh."

Pandora's latest attack comes in the form of a knife called up from the Box. Given to a Nice Guy (as distinct from, you know, a guy who is nice) called Nelson, it feeds on his resentment and drives him to expressions of violence and bloodlust. It happened in the time of the Norman Conquest, and has emerged all through history, including at Eton during Ichabod Crane's schooldays, and in Whitechapel about a century after that.

Yes, this killer is the latest in a long line of Rippers rendered virtually indestructible as the blade fuses with their flesh. Thankfully, the Witnesses are able to determine that it has a weakness: It is destroyed by sickness and can not withstand tainted blood. How it managed to last as long as it did cutting up the none-too-hygienic prostitutes of Olde London Town is a bit of a mystery, but Crane and Abbie acquire to vials of tainted blood as their weapons. The Ripper proves resistant, the knife extruding a metal skin to deflect Ichabod's dart, but when Nelson stabs Ichabod, our resourceful Witness infects himself with malaria - fatal to the knife, but something he has already weathered once.

Evil tree. Like, totally.

For the most part, the Witnesses did their job well this week, holding in the fear that Pandora is seeking to elicit. Back at Chez Evil, however, Abbie's fear for Ichabod's life does feed the tree a little more.

In Plot B, Jenny takes Joe under her wing as they pursue the Anubis Shard, finding bounty hunter Randall pantsless and shardless, before finally tracing it in the possession of Sophie Foster, a newer player who uses some of the tricks that Sheriff Corbin taught to Jenny.

Finally, in his quest to save the Archive, Ichabod decides to apply for American Citizenship, and finds an ally in Zoe, the representative of the historical conservation committee who was briefly in last week's episode and is so into Ichabod it hurts.

Nope! Nopenopenope!

In 'The Sisters Mills' a monster that only children can see is preying on Sleepy Hollow's young. Specifically, it hunts out those who have just lost a tooth, because the Abysou is the real tooth fairy. Enter dentist, silversmith and midnight rider Paul Revere to treat Betsy Ross's niece and temporarily cock-block colonial Ichabod.

As an aside, this demonstrates that Betsy Ross knew about the whole supernatural war thing. Apparently everyone except Ichabod and Colonel Dickhead was in on this secret, including British Major General Summons Shadow-Assassins. Gosh darn Ichabod must have been a rube. This time it's Abbie's turn to take a fall, and the Abysou puts the Leftenant in the hospital before Ichabod is able to get hold of Paul Revere's dentist bag and assemble his tools into a silver-nitrate projector used to render the tooth fairy visible so it can be stabbed up by Jenny.

While the monster of the week is a pretty stock effort - gruesome, but stock - there is some interesting action surrounding it. The Witnesses have worked out that Pandora is after fear, and go to some lengths to keep panic from spreading when a child is struck down. Pandora, on the other hand, is working overtime to spread fear, even encouraging the first victim's sister to try to go toe to toe with the Abysou and so ensure more victims. She also engages in a little psyops against Abbie, dropping by her hospital bed for a villain speech and dropping the word 'destroyer' in Sumerian.

Conclusions: Pandora is not the Greek first woman, but a Sumerian occupying a similar archetype, perhaps choosing the name Pandora because of the box (after all, the original Pandora would have a jar, right?)

Despite their efforts, a rose blooms on the evil tree, and the Mills sisters have sussed that there is a little more than citizenship betwixt Ichabod and Zoe. Given a) Pandora's tendency to spy on the Witnesses via magic pool and b) the historical averages for Ichabod's other women, I'm worried about Zoe's long term chances. I think she'd feel safer if she had more personality traits.

Season 3 continues its arcisodic path, with discreet episodes each concluding with a arc-related wrap-up. I am curious to see where it goes once the tree is finished; whether it will up the stakes or drop the ball.

Sleepy Hollow - 'The Awakening', 'Tempus Fugit', 'I, Witness' and 'Whispers in the Dark'

This is a copy of the Liberty Bell, which means I get to say...

Sleepy Hollow ramps up to the season two finale with 'The Awakening', in which Katrina goes full evil and joins Henry in his rather sudden crusade to bring about the Renaissance of the witchbreed, a concept that has barely been mentioned before 'Spellcaster', but which now apparently dominates their thinking. You see, you have to be born a witch to use magic (like, proper magic, rather than the other kind of magic that any bugger can apparently knock out with the right spell book, as in 'The Kindred',) and then you have to awaken to your power. Young Jeremy/Henry did that all on his own, but you can also force an Awakening on those with witch blood by ringing the right bell; the Liberty Bell, naturally, which was cracked because Washington sent Crane to blow it up to prevent an army of dark witches overthrowing humanity.

So anyway, Henry has a replica bell, but can't do the awakening spell, thanks to his mortal father. Katrina, on the other hand, is pure witch (because witches, who have been nothing but goodies previously, are now magic Nazis with a hard on for race purity) and after the tribulations, reversals and confusion of the last, oh, week and a half, is right on board the eugenics train. She even switches out her awkward goth get up for some proper evil swishery, forcing Abbie and Crane to come at the mother and son duo, guns blazing. They get captured, but come up with a plan to shoot at Henry and a chunk of C4 Abbie attached to the bell simultaneously, noting that he can be wounded now that his armour is gone, and bargaining on him only being able to Sith lord one bullet at a time.

...and now for something completely different!

Unexpectedly, however, he stops the bullet bound for the bell and takes a 'greek fire bullet' to the torso. Henry has a rather sweet moment with his dad as he passes, but Katrina goes into meltdown. She blames Crane for all her woes and decides to use the Traveler spell to go back and not save his life after his fight with the Horseman of Death. Abbie tackles her at the threshold of the portal, however, and finds herself in Ye Olde Sleepy Hollow to the strains of an olde timey instrumental of 'Sympathy for the Devil' just to round out the parallels to Episode 1.

"Fuck yeah we got buttons."

Thus we come to 'Tempus Fugit', as Abbie struggles to drag Crane out of the path of Hurricane Katrina (too soon?) Getting him pulled off the field saves his life, but mucks up the future. Fortunately, Benjamin Franklin is able to send Abbie to her ancestress, Grace Dixon, who knows how to reverse the Traveler spell and banish the Darkest Timeline to an ontological cul de sac in the back of Abbie's memory. First, however, she needs to convince Crane, which is made harder after the Horseman decapitates Franklin, the only man who believes her (another parallel, to the fate of Abbie and Jenny's mentor, Sheriff Corbin.)

Katrina is working with Abraham, the Head-Having Horseman, and the rest of the Continental Army thinks that Abbie is a spy and Crane a traitor of some kind, but at last a video on her phone convinces Crane and he runs to save her, only to find her well and truly saving herself. They find Grace Dixon and Abbie reverses the spell even as Crane is about to take an axe to the neck. Thwarted, Katrina aims to fry Abbie, but Ichabod stabs her to death, leaving the Witnesses, Jenny and Irving (now free of War's hold) to carry on the good fight, renewal and contract negotiations allowing.

Betsy Ross - relegating Ichabod Crane to second most ubiquitous badass of
the Revolutionary War.

'I, Witness' picks up the story nine months later, with Crane gone walkabout, Abbie having finished her training at Quantico and working in the near-as-damnit Sleepy Hollow field office of the FBI, and Irving vanished into the night like an old oak table
. Ichabod returns with a mystery tablet and word that something has happened to the Horseman. The tablet looks set to illuminate the 'second tribulation' (since they blew up all the good material last season) and falls in with Abbie's investigation of a series of beast-like murders.

Despite the threatened demolition of the archive and the pressures of FBI fieldwork, the Witnesses slowly get the old mojo working and determine that the killer is a yaoguai, a fear-eating demon of a type that troubled the patriots at Bunker Hill until Washington sent word that it was vulnerable when feeding. At that time, its eyes turn white, hence 'don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.' Oh, Sleepy Hollow; this is the kind of secret history bullshit I love you for. This warning was conveyed by Washington's top agent. Not Ichabod Crane, but his way more badass partner Betsy 'Flag Lady' Ross, joining as a regular despite being firmly in the past.

Theme restaurants are the Devil, but I can't help loving this menu. Croissant
the Delware indeed.

The beast is stopped, but at the cost of Abbie's mentor's life, and she accepts that this is probably part of a new tribulation, especially as the Sumerian tablet that Ichabod found in his English family crypt is headed 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and apparently refers to them as 'the Destroyers'. We also meet our new arc villain, a woman named Pandora, who has a box (into which she sucked the Horseman to give it the power of Death) and is apparently harvesting fear to water a tree with. Probably an evil tree.

Next up, in 'Whispers in the Dark', Pandora summons a shadow beast to reap more fear for the tree. This gribbly preys on guilty secrets, which means that when it gets a swing at Crane and Abbie we learn their dark secrets: That Crane once thought for about five seconds of selling back out to the British, and that Abbie is stalking her absentee father and trying to summon the courage to speak to him. It's nothing all that sensational.

Tentacles!

Meanwhile, Jenny is looking for a new sidekick, the last two having left town suddenly. What she finds is Joe Corbin, or rather he finds her (remember? Sheriff Corbin's boy who was a Wendigo for a bit?) and then promptly gets kidnapped by another relic hunter in order to make her hand over an artefact she picked up last week called the Anubis Shard.

Once more, the answers to the A plot come from Grace Dixon's journal and the adventures of Betsy Ross: This gribbly killed the other members of Betsy's spy ring before Crane could exfiltrate them, but Betsy named the would be killer - a fellow spy who sold out, as Crane did not, and was turned into a shadow-assassin by a British general for his trouble - and by naming him rendered him vulnerable. Thus Crane is able to un-spook Marcus Collins enough for the Witnesses to kill him.

Also, Abbie's new boss is an old boyfriend from Quantico, the Witnesses have identified their nemesis from security footage of a coffee shop that shouldn't have existed, and Ichabod has secured funds to save the Archive; if only he were a US citizen. Pandora's tree is looking pretty healthy; evil, but hale.

As we transition into Season 3, we have ups and downs. Shannyn Sossamon's Pandora is no Henry Parrish, but on the other hand she's no Katrina Crane, and she clearly has an arc plot of a masterplan, facilitated by the monster-of-the-week nature of her box, so everyone is happy. Well, unless they were hoping for some sort of resolution between Crane and the Horseman, because that ship would seem to have sailed in the name of establishing Pandora's badass chops. Similarly to the Horseman, Irving's departure is a bit of a let down, and similarly to Pandora, while Joe Corbin is no Irving, he's definitely no Nick Hawley, and it's good that Jenny has someone to work against, and someone who ties back to the long shadow of Clancy Brown's all-too-brief time on the show instead of being some cool-haired, moody loner with nothing to do with anything.

Don't you just want to punch that smirk?

I've yet to make up my mind about SAC Daniels, but he seems a bit... smug.

And then there's Betsy Ross, who honestly could get very tiresome very quickly. I get that they need someone to stand in for Katrina in flashback land, but so far she's way too awesome. She makes Crane look like he was sauntering through the War of Independence and not doing much. I hesitate to cry Mary Sue on a competent female character's first outings, but there is a touch of it about her. Hopefully they'll calm down a little and establish a stronger relationship between her and Crane, because if she's going to be a regular it needs to measure up to the chemistry Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison have going on.

Also, just three episodes to go until the Sleepy Hollow/Bones crossover. Whee!

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.
.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Kali Yuga'

Jaime Murray; professional bitch monster.

The Witnesses are in trouble when a Hindu vengeance beast called a vetala comes to town, and turns out to be Hawley's long-lost foster mother. This relationship is creepy as hell, which is not entirely surprising given that there is all of eight years between them and Carmilla Pines (played by genre fiction's go-to bitch from Hell, the probably quite lovely in real life Jaime Murray) not only shares a name with literature's first lady of the vampires, but was a murderess even before she got turned into an undead thuggee acid-monster.

'Kali Yuga' is another in the post-Moloch run of fairly slight episodic entries in the Sleepy Hollow canon, as the show wrestles with what smells of editorial mandate: less arc, more sexy. On the plus side, while Ichabod and Abbie are at their most ineffectual, this prompts a confrontation which (hopefully) resolves their growing distance over the past few episodes. It's not just the show that has been losing focus since Moloch was destroyed. Better still, Hawley sets off to track down and destroy his creepy oedipal mentor monster, which means we don't have to have him knocking around Sleepy Hollow being an irritating nth wheel.

Irving is released, some new evidence having completely exonerated him somehow. Katrina gives him a spiritual and determines he is Horseman free, but he also appears to lack a reflection. I'm not sure this is because he is a body and mind without a soul or just because Katrina is pulling some dodgy shenanigans, since the show now seems unsure what to do with her outside of the occasional spotlight episode.

The highlight of the show remains the chemistry between the leads and Ichabod's young old man grumbling, which is why I'm pleased to see the tension resolved; it just wasn't as much fun. This week, Ichabod hates yoga and the Witnesses cement their renewed partnership by belting out a slightly awkward 'Proud Mary' at karaoke night.

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.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Paradise Lost'

"Damn! My hat's on fire! Why didn't you tell me?"
"I thought it was a look!"

Moloch is gone and a quiet has settled over Sleepy Hollow, broken only by the twanging of angst strings as Ichabod and Katrina struggle with their relationship and her insistence on personally supervising the captive Horseman of Death/Abraham. When Abby and Ichabod do track down a genuine supernatural thing, their hunt is interrupted by an angel named Orion. He applauds their extension of the role of the Witnesses to actually kicking arse as well as taking names and gives Abby a feather to contact him. This all leads to trouble when Orion wants to kill the Horseman and Katrina releases him to prevent this. Ichabod has doubts and learns that Orion is a renegade angel with form for genocide. He means to steal the Horseman's power and use it to lay waste to the sinful human world, forcing Ichabod to fight alongside his archenemy and destroy Orion's glowy-spinny-power draining halo chakhram.

'Paradise Lost' is the reinvention of Sleepy Hollow, post-Moloch. With a season and a half wrapped up, they needed something to take its place, and that something is provided by the knowledge that Moloch's death has cocked up the balance of purgatory, letting many things escape, including Orion and Captain Irving. It would seem to be pushing for a slightly more monster of the week format, with a new arc involving Katrina's attempts to separate Abraham from the spirit of the Horseman. It's not a bad pick-up, but I do expect to see Henry again.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Magnum Opus' and 'The Akeda'

"Who would win in a fight..."

Abbie and Ichabod are in pursuit of the weapon which Abbie's mother told them of (in the second of two episodes I straight up failed to review, 'Heartless' and 'Mama'.) They identify it as the Sword of Methuselah, a blade that can slay anything on Earth, but Henry bluejacks Katrina's mirror message to confess she was duped out of finishing Moloch until he was too strong for her and learns what they are after, dispatching the Horseman to claim it first. When Abraham is driven back by the dawn, they uncover a hidden cavern full of statues and flee the gorgon within before adding to their number. In a burst of inspiration, they let the Horseman - who has no eyes with which to gaze on the gorgon - fight the monster while they end run for the sword, but even as they claim it the horn blows for the start of Armageddon.

'Magnum Opus' cranks the crazy up to eleven, as the Witnesses discover the ancient burial place of the sword - which is nicely rough-hewn and run down - and conclude from the array of statues therein that basically the entire colonisation of the Americas might have been inspired by the search for the blade. On a more personal note, Ichabod suffers doubts, recalling that Abraham persuaded him to go to America and fearing that all of his decisions belong to other people.

Orlando Jones auditions for the dictionary definition of badass.

In 'The Akeda', Ichabod and Abbie rescue Katrina from Abraham's binding ritual (a sort of unilateral wedding/brainwashing,) but learn from the captured Abraham that using the sword will result in the death of the wielder as their soul is consumed (despite it being claimed that Methuselah himself slew a thousand demons with it.) Thus they call on Captain Irving to be their executioner, as his soul is already claimed. Armed with weapons from Hawley's arsenal, empowered by Katrina's magic, they battle a zombie hordette and the armour of War. Irving destroys the latter, but receives a mortal wound in return.

Yeah; that well.

Confronting Henry, Ichabod appeals to his humanity instead of going for the kill, and as a result the entire party is captured. As all seems lost, Moloch picks up the idiot ball and explains to Henry just how meaningless he is, Horseman of War or no Horseman of War, while Henry is holding the Sword of Methuselah, which ends about as well for Moloch as you might expect.

So, that was the midseason finale ('Magnum Opus') and a midseason pickup in which one of the main characters died and the primary antagonist was shanked by his own dragon while the heroes were all tied to trees (they don't call them Witnesses for nothing, it seems.) It will be interesting to see where they go next, and I'm hoping that - still being in hock to Henry - we might yet see more of Irving before he finds his final rest. Better than than have Hawley promoted to regular, because he's still a pain.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Deliverance'

"Hello? Did somebody order some mildly rapey body horror?"

Season 2 of Sleepy Hollow seems to be settling into a bit of an artefact of the week pattern, with many of these objects then being bounced off Henry/War (possibly through the agency of Hawley the idiot) to kickstart the next story. In this case, the evil spider created from the jincane swapped for Joe Corbin's non-cure has infected Katrina with... something.

One of the most interesting things to come out of this is a clash between the two Horsemen, as Henry brings a bunch of pseudoscience heavies from the Hellfire Club to drag Katrina away, leading to a drag-out fight against Death as Abraham shows once more that while he may be a crazy stalker, his feelings are as sincere as they are creepy. This gives her the chance to escape and be found by Abby and Ichabod at the hospital (after a visit to the polling booths for the weekly outrage.)

It turns out that Katrina is pregnant with the demon Moloch, bringer of the Apocalypse, who is using her as a means to leapfrog any need for the remaining two horsemen (samurai dude and cloak dude.) Ichabod is briefly livid at the thought that headless Abraham might have knocked up his missus, but then he rushes off to ask Henry nicely to take it back. I know that they said he wants to believe in Jeremy, but this is taking fatherly faith to insane lengths.

Unsurprisingly, Henry mocks Ichabod - although a brief psychic contact hints that a) there may still be a frightened little boy inside War's armour, and b) Jeremy may have inherited his sin-eating ability from Ichabod - and then it's ho for the artefact of the week, a tablet possessed by the Hellfire Club that not only holds the rituals for impregnating, but also has an 'aurora lens' hidden within it that can create an artificial aurora capable of banishing demons, because Benjamin fucking Franklin, okay! (In this universe, the Hellfire Club was evil, because British, and Franklin infiltrated it.) I'll buy the powers of the aurora and even the aurora-making stone, but I'm not clear how Franklin got it inside an already extant stone tablet. I guess with science?

And then Henry was bottling lightning, or something.

Sleepy Hollow continues to be basically bonkers, with a side of eww, but I love it in all its barmy glory.

Sleepy Hollow - 'And the Abyss Gazes Back'

"Alas, poor Wendigo..."

It's been a while since I last visited Sleepy Hollow, and this episode revisits a couple of ongoing threads, specifically Henry's machinations against former-Captain Irving and that bone flute he got from Hawley the Idiot in 'Go Where I Send Thee'. In Tarrytown, Henry is trying to push Irving to kill the man who crippled his daughter (allegedly to reclaim his soul, but we the audience have doubts,) while the bone of the flute was ground up and sent as 'magic anthrax' in a letter to the late Sheriff Corbin's son in an attempt to secure one of Corbin's collection of relics.

As a result of the bone powder, Joe Corbin is cursed to transform into the Wendigo, an organ-eating monster, at the scent of blood. He is back in town having been honourably discharged from military service after the rest of his platoon were eaten (oops) and there is a limit to how often he can change before it becomes permanent. Hawley and Ichabod seek a cure from a group of Shawnee (Hawley's incomprehension when showing respect and understanding of their culture cuts more ice than his cash business is priceless and sums up much of why Hawley is an idiot) but Henry does end up with his price, a mystical poison which he uses to infect Katrina.

The episode touches heavily on father/son relationships. Joe's relationship with his father was strained due to his feeling that Corbin senior's need to help all and sundry meant that he wasn't enough, and he gives Ichabod some advice regarding his own bizarre family situation. Also, the actor playing Joe was wicked convincing as Clancy Brown Jr.

The Irving plot seems a little more strained; the Captain's collapse towards doing War's bidding was a little too swift, but perhaps this is a result of having signed away his soul? Either way, is builds on the nature of War, as does Henry's description of Wendigo Joe as 'a creature of War'. The Horseman of Death is basically just a killing machine, but War is a general and he is building his army one soldier at a time.

'And the Abyss Gazes Back' is a little routine, but overall a decent episode, thanks as usual to the leads. I'm still not enamoured of Hawley the Idiot, and I probably never will be, although he seems to be here to stay.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Go Where I Send Thee...' and 'The Weeping Lady'

You have to take the journey...*

As my darling daughter prevented her parents watching anything new this weekend, here's a couple of episodes of Sleepy Hollow I'd been meaning to review for a while.

In 'Go Where I Send Thee...' we revisit Abbie's past, as a child kidnapping leads her back to a woman who helped her when she was orphaned. Recognising some family memorabilia (and taking umbrage at the canonisation of an ancestor he - naturally - knew personally to be a cad,) Ichabod realises that the Lancaster family's surse (to lose a daughter each generation) is the work of a Pied Piper in the service of Moloch. With a little help from mercenary artefact hunter Nick Hawley (a man with a truly ludicrous collection of magical gizmos to  not believe in magic even a little bit) they rescue the kidnapped girl, but her mother takes her back into the woods, because the curse has a second edge to its blade that forces a truly terrible choice.

** Well, it certainly ends badly for someone.

The Piper is immensely creepy, thanks to a combination of costuming and eerie camera effects to visualise his sonic powers. The added element of child threat makes this episode good, old-fashioned nightmare fuel. As a cherry on the sundae, former captain Frank Irving tries to fire his attorney on the grounds that he is the infernal Horseman of War, only to learn that due a trick pen he's already signed his soul away in blood. He is also given a sneak preview of how that will end for him**.

It's okay; I wasn't planning to sleep anyway.

Following up the creepfest of 'Go Where I Send Thee...' is 'The Weeping Lady', which is probably as close as Sleepy Hollow is going to get to doing The Woman in Black. It begins with the mysterious death of Caroline, a lovely Civil War reenactor with a sweet crush on Ichabod. There's a  La Llorona in town and she has a personal beef with anyone laying a hand or even an overfamiliar eye on Ichabod.

Once more, the villain is a personal acquaintance of Ichabod's (I'm mostly okay with this, because 'destiny') and indeed was his promised bride when they were both children. This woman, Mary Wells, even went so far as to try to 'save' him from the clutches of the colonies (and the trashy ginger witch who seduced him from his kin and country) but supposedly went home again when he wouldn't turn. Once the day is saved and the Weeping Lady put down, it emerges that she was killed in a confrontation with Katrina, who wrote a letter in Mary's handwriting so that Ichabod wouldn't take her body home to England and screw up his destiny with the sense of damned decency that leads him to turn up and personally apologise for giving the doomed historical seamstress the wrong idea**.

I liked the way this episode was put together, with Henry raising Mary through her connection to Katrina's sin (the lie she told Ichabod) in order to put a wedge between them. It plays back nicely to his sin eater gift. It also led on to a new revelation, that Katrina is something important to Moloch - a 'Hellfire Shard' - and that compared to her the Horseman of War is a disposable asset, suffering a major executive arse-kicking for putting her in danger.

'Go Where I Send Thee...' and 'The Weeping Lady' play to all of Sleepy Hollow's core competences: Historical coincidence, high octane nightmare fuel, sinister John Noble, and the lovable awkwardness of Ichabod. I am hoping to see more definite progression of the arc plot soon, and maybe some sign of a third Horseman*** before the season is out.

* No, I don't forsee myself running out of Into the Woods references any time soon.

** An adorable scene; I am so sad they killed her off essentially as ablative armour for Abbie and Katrina.

*** I say man but I won't lie; as much as the new Captain annoys me, it would be awesome if she turned out to be the Conqueror on the White Horse.