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Last time I checked, Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane were supposed to be facing off against an onslaught of evil straight from the mouth of hell on Sleepy Hollow. However, we seem to be watching little more than a procedural in narrative drama clothing. This week, they faced the Sandman, and by the time they found this evil demon, his defeat was about as painless as ripping off a bandaid (which isn't all that bad, wimps). What gives?
The episode opens on Abbie dreaming about being called into the station, where she watches herself being questioned by Ichabod until a white demon with black eye sockets and no mouth comes after her. She awakens and is called in to the scene of a crime, where a jumper is asking to speak with her. She doesn't know the perilously perched Dr. Vega, but the doctor treated Abbie's sister Jenni when she entered her first psych ward and despite believing Jenni's story, allowed her to stay locked up. After making contact, Vega then jumps to her death and it's not long before Abbie realizes that despite not knowing Vega until this night, she'd met the doctor in her dreams about the white demon. Are you spooked yet?
It gets spookier when Irving, Ichabod, and Abbie examine Vega's suspiciously white eyes later that morning. The deceased's white eyes are very real, but they burst into piles of sand seconds after exposure. Clearly, something is up, so Irving puts Abbie and Ichabod on the case and they visit Jenni (in room 49, as Corbin's ghost predicted) to learn more about this Dr. Vega, but thanks to Abbie's past betrayal, Jenni will only talk to Ichabod. She's still furious over Abbie's refusal to acknowledge the demons they saw in the forest before the doctor when they were kids. Abbie's silence sent Jenni to the asylum while Abbie frolicked freely. Jenni says she can't help Abbie because Abbie is the one without a clear conscience, which kind of makes sense because she left Jenni in a psych ward.
Abbie starts to figure out the connection between the demon and the cause for Dr. Vega's death. Too late, they realize that the demon may come after Mr. Gillespie, who also saw the vision, but refused to tell the doctor or police (just like Abbie). He's already been visited by the evil Sandman, who's possessed him: Gillespie has milky white eyes and it's not long before he, too, takes his own life before Abbie's eyes. She finally sees the pattern: they and Abbie all wronged Jenni by staying silent and this demon is making it right.
Ichabod's ever-growing base of knowledge comes to the rescue: he once worked with the Mohawk tribe who spoke about a dream demon who tormented people who'd failed to help others. They need a shaman, but apparently, the best thing is the owner of Geronimotors, who's initially offended but eventually agrees to help them. He gives Abbie tea to help her enter the Sandman's dream world, where she can fight him. Upon hearing that Abbie could die for real if she dies in the dream world, Ichabod immediately drinks the tea as well, so that he can help her. (Unfortunately for these guys, the second step to dream land is getting stung by an angry scorpion in a jar. Fabulous.)
In the dream world, Ichabod and Abbie are separated, both forced to find their way to the final confrontation from different angles. Eventually, they both find the room where teenage Abbie and Jenni are being questioned about their demon vision. The doctor turns into the Sandman and begins to threaten Abbie until Ichabod steps in to save her, but this is Abbie's fight and with no real weapon, she decides to kill the Sandman with the truth about her cowardice that led her to abandon her sister. Her truthfulness destroys the demon and he turns to glass, allowing Abbie to shatter him completely and return herself and Ichabod to the real world. After barely five minutes of "fighting" this villain is gone just like last week's easily vanquished witch.
While Abbie's sister (who's missing immediately after Abbie vanquishes her dream tormentor), is clearly up to something, it still seems rather weak that each week we get some flimsy demon whose death is as expected as the headless horseman missing his cranium. You've got the entire supernatural catalog at your fingertips, writers. Must we run the gamut so speedily?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Pay attention, because this episode of Sleepy Hollow packed about an episode and a half of story into a tiny, 45-minute package. The show opens with Abbie being pulled into the precinct to watch a suspect being questioned. Things take a turn for the weird and immediately, we know it’s a dream. Ichabod has milky white eyes and is interrogating the suspect, who turns out to be teenage Abbie.
Finally, adult Abbie enters the room only to find that she’s trapped and Ichabod is actually a white demon with black eye sockets from which streams of sand are pouring. Right on cue, she wakes up in her own bed only to get an actual call from Captain Irving asking her to come down to a crime scene. Even before Ichabod tells Abbie, we know what’s up: our girl is having premonitions.
At the scene, Dr. Mara Vega is threatening to jump from a building while requesting to speak with Abbie, who she’s never met. "It’s not her fault. I believed her and I lied," cries Dr. Vega with the milky white eyes Abbie saw in her dream before telling Abbie that "we" all deserve what’s coming and leaping to her death. When they check out the body after Abbie tells Irving the eyes were glazed white, Vega’s creepy eyes erupt into sand. With the eye color, sand, and emergency phone call (all of which happened in Abbie’s dream ) accounted for, Abbie makes the final connection: while she knows that Dr. Vega treated her sister Jenni at the asylum, she’s never met or seen her and yet the woman appeared in Abbie’s dream. Luckily, we quickly find that the dream is created by the white demon with the sandy eyes. Abbie is not adding "oracle" to her already extreme title of supernatural detective. That would be a little much, no?
Realizing that "I believed her and I lied" refers to Dr. Vega’s interaction with Jenni, Ichabod and Abbie return to their dusty unofficial headquarters to read through Jenni’s records and interviews. In case it wasn’t already obvious (it was), they "figure out" that Vega knew Jenni was telling the truth about seeing the demons in the forest with Abbie, but she lied and kept Jenni institutionalized rather than risk looking foolish. Abbie rationalizes that Vega killed herself out of guilt, but, girl, don’t you realize what’s happening yet? This is supernatural territory, so just accept it. Rational answers are never going to be right.
Luckily, Ichabod reins Abbie into their reality where the more fantastical explanation is actually a far safer bet: this mysterious demon is clearly sending evil mercenaries after Abbie and her sister, so they should probably visit the younger Mills sibling in the asylum. Jenni won’t see Abbie, but she will apparently see Ichabod while Abbie has a panic attack as she realizes that Jenni is the "49" Corbin warned her about last week.
Ichabod tries to find common ground with Jenni, telling her that he also saw the demon in the woods. Seriously, dude? You’re in a mental hospital in 1700s garb, keep the crazy-sounding talk in your pants unless you want to end up back in a straightjacket. Jenni echoes my sentiment, before erupting in some extremely cryptic babble. Ichabod tells her that Dr. Vega killed herself and it simply urges Jenni to ask him to leave, refuse to help him and Abbie, tell him "It’s all over but the crying," and say that Abbie’s conscience isn’t clear. Look, I know that the white demon dude is the real issue, but if this episode hadn’t already spilled those beans, I’d swear Abbie’s demonic sister was responsible for these mysterious happenings.
Naturally, this nonsense talk sends Ichabod right back to Abbie and he demands that she explain what happened between her and her sister. She says she never told anyone what happened (which is probably why she made up some lame story about Abbie being institutionalized for ripping off a Sports Authority). But as it turns out, her sister was institutionalized because right after she and Abbie saw the demon in the forest, Abbie lied about it. While Jenni was raving about seeing a horned vision, Abbie stayed mum, thinking it was more important to remain quiet and keep her foster family situation than rock the boat and risk being thrown in the looney bin with her sister. Apparently, our heroine used to be a selfish little child. Kind of makes it hard to hope things work out for her, eh?
Theorizing that the dream demon might be coming after folks who knew about the visions Abbie and Jenni had in the forest, our dynamic duo decide to visit Mr. Gillespie, who also saw the horned tormentor but refused to tell anyone. Unfortunately for Abbie and especially unfortunately for Mr. Gillespie, the dream demon beats them to him (duh) and Gillespie has gone all white-eyed by the time Ichabod and Abbie arrive with the rest of the police force. Once again, the white-eyed wonder wants to speak to Abbie. She finds him in the kitchen, holding his wife hostage with a gun. Before Gillespie takes his own life (because, hello, there’s a pattern developing) he screams, "You can’t help me, he’s coming for you … the sandman, time you fall asleep, you’re dead."
Once again, Ichabod and Abbie have a round-about conversation that leads them to rather obvious conclusion: the sandman Gillespie spoke of is the sandy demon from Abbie’s dream and clearly, Abbie is his victim because she was the final person who betrayed Jenni. And just like that sleep is the enemy and Red Bull is Abbie’s only friend. Because he’s adorable, Ichabod chokes down a Red Bull too so he can stay awake with Abbie, remarking that it’s "potent" and it's a sentiment I can’t help but echo. Now that they’re perfectly wired, they’re ready to get down to business. Ichabod perfectly describes Abbie’s sandman without a word from her because he’s working with that incomparable photographic memory of his.
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During the Revolution, he partnered with members of the Mohawk tribe, who told him about dream spirits and in particular, one dark dream spirit who came after those who refused to help their friends in need. For example: one terrific guy was killed in his sleep because he wouldn’t help his neighbor. (Keep that in mind time the girl upstairs asks you feed her cat while she’s on vacation).
Ichabod has a completely improbable solution: let’s just find a Mohawk shaman. You know, that thing that totally still exists. Abbie can’t deliver that impossible request, so she takes Ichabod to Geronimotors, where a local descendant of the Mohawk tribe sells crappy cars to the masses. At first, the salesman is offended that Abbie and Ichabod are "assuming" he’s also a shaman because he’s an American Indian, but once Ichabod gives one of his already classic speeches wrought with urgency and eloquence, the non-shaman agrees to help. He takes them to his totally non-shaman cabin filled with totally non-shaman artifacts and elixirs and feeds Abbie and Ichabod tea that is definitely not something a shaman would give two people seeking out the sandman.
The mysterious tea -- which is also blue for some reason (perhaps the writers are fans of Breaking Bad? -- will take Abbie and Ichabod into the sandman’s dream world where they can fight him and defeat him once and for all. There are just two really horrible asterisks that come with this psychedelic solution: they have to be stung by scorpions to complete the journey so they can feel more in-control (oh yes, being poisoned by insects always makes me feel like I’ve got this) and if they die in the dream world, they die in real life.
Even though Ichabod drinks the dream tea with Abbie in order to protect her from potential death at the hands of the sandman, the dream land immediately separates our heroes, leaving Abbie to fight the sandman on her own. Ichabod enters a red door in the middle of the forest that leads him to a hallway where three nooses are waiting: one has Vega hanging in it, another holds Gillespie, and a third waits for Abbie, who’s back in the interrogation room watching her teenage-self condemn her little sister.
After the scene plays out, the doctor Abbie lied to turns into the sandman, whose grand evil gesture is reaching through the two-way glass, where Abbie is standing like a deer in the headlights. Ichabod finds his way to the interrogation room just in time, steering the sandman away from Abbie. (Oh no! Don’t point your ugly, pasty finger at me! Ichabod, save me!).
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This wimpy villain ups his game with Ichabod, severing his dream arm and turning it into sand. Abbie is forced to step in before the sandman turns dear Ichabod into a sand castle, and rather than, I don’t know, attacking him, she stands her ground like a Lost Boy ready to crow and confesses her sins. (You know, those sins she already confessed to earlier in the episode?). Yeah, we get it, you screwed your sister over. Apparently, this works on the sandman, who is being a really terrible villain, by the way. He turns to glass and Abbie simply shatters him with a chair. Wow, that was ridiculously easy and totally unsatisfying. How about we give these guys a villain that’s scary enough to warrant even an ounce of heart palpitation? We can’t let the biggest challenge for the series be "making Abbie understand that supernatural things are real."
With that, they’re safe and sound and back to having little heart-to-hearts in the old munitions warehouse (which Irving has just deemed their covert ops office). With a can of disgusting Red Bull nowhere in sight, Ichabod surmises that Abbie wants to thank him for his help, so she never actually utters the two tiny words herself. Still, these two are pretty cute partners, so I’ll lay off their foibles for now.
But this is a dastardly drama, so the episode can’t end on that sugary-sweet moment. Now that she’s admitted she was wrong to the sandman, Abbie assumes she’s in the clear to go visit Jenni. This time, she’s prepared to resist her sister’s protestations (and use her police badge to force her way in). Only, when the nurse opens the door to Jenni’s cell, the younger Mills sister is gone without a trace. Abbie surmises that she escaped through the ceiling. Now, I know Jenni was wronged by Abbie and all, but between the musical cues, Jenni’s sinister attitude, and her nonsense speak earlier in the episode, I can’t be the only one who thinks this girl is trouble with a capital T. Beware of the sister you screwed over, Ms. Abbie.
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