Episode Report Card Kelsea Stahler: A | 91 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Evil Now Has a Face… Sort Of
By Kelsea Stahler | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.07.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.This week, we pick right back up where we left off: Abbie's sister Jenny has escaped from the mental facility and the main concern is chasing down Abbie's misbehaving little sibling.
Ichabod and Abbie dig into Jenny's files, and while Abbie is too busy chewing on the gristle of her relationship with her little sister, Ichabod figures out that the seven foster homes she cycled through might be a good place to start. Abbie's practically handing the reins to Ichabod now. Pull yourself together, woman.
He's right of course, and the duo find one of Jenny's foster parents, who directs them to a secluded cabin. It turns out the cabin belonged to Corbin and that he and Jenny were working together. Jenny is already there and ready to throw down with Abbie – this quickly becomes an ongoing theme through the episode. So. Much. Bickering. Luckily, Ichabod keeps the ladies on track: Jenny has returned to Corbin's home because he asked her to retrieve a sextant that actually holds a map of Sleepy Hollow. Before we can figure out what's so special about some old timey tool, a gang of Germans shoot up the cabin and steal the sextant while Jenny detains their leader and Abbie shoots fruitlessly at the escape vehicle. Thanks for your immense help there, Ab.
They tie the German guy up and proceed to pump him for intel. While the sisters bicker some more, Ichabod manhandles the German until he finds a tattoo on his chest that aligns him with the Reinhessen or Shadow Warriors. This man is a Hessian, like the Headless Horseman, and apparently he's only willing to cooperate with people who recognize his tattoos and speak "excellent German," like Ichabod. He spills just about every possible detail like the worst classic villain: the box indicated on the sextant map is the fabled Lesser Key of Solomon and if opened, is set to release 72 very nasty demons.
But this confession is actually a two-fer. The Hessian also confesses that there are more Hessians in hiding in Sleepy Hollow than even he knows and that they just keep multiplying and getting stronger. It sounds like a totally empty playground threat, but he also says that their leader is the demon Abbie and Ichabod have seen in the forest (horns, pale skin, legs like a steroid-riddled gazelle – remember?). The Hessian takes a cyanide pill and we take a break from that huge revelation to remember Ichabod's handy dandy photographic memory.
Ichabod's able to draw the map he saw for all of 15 seconds from memory and use it to take Jenny and Abbie into Sleepy Hollow to retrieve the Lesser Key of Solomon. When they get to the site, another set of Hessians as already dripped blood all over they key (which is apparently unlocks it) and a fiery demon portal has opened up in the floor. Abbie manages to steal the book and dump it into the fire, curbing the flow of angry demons. Again, they solved another problems way too easy, but at least the big, overarching mystery is deepening.
With the danger temporarily quelled, Abbie and Jenny finally have a moment to reconcile their sisterly differences. Abbie has learned that Jenny was a freedom fighter and not just some thug, and Jenny sees that Abbie doesn't actually hate her with the fire of a thousand suns. They don't quite hug and make up, but Abbie offers to help get Jenny out of the mental facility for good and Jenny seems open to potentially, maybe, kind of someday forgiving Abbie. Hey, it's a start.
Finally, Ichabod and his infinite base of scholarly wisdom cracks the last piece of the Hessian's code. Before he died, he said that Moloch was coming. Ichabod remembered that Moloch was a god from Paradise Lost with a penchant for child sacrifice and a mission to lead an army of demons against Heaven (perhaps 72 demons). Sounds a lot like this horned demon the Hessian spoke of. And in case that wasn't proof enough, the drawing in this particular copy of Paradise Lost looks exactly like the horned demon that's been tormenting our fine heroes, so it's pretty much settled.
Finally, we're getting somewhere.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Finally, we're getting somewhere. But before delving right back into the hellfire, brimstone, and blood-curdling hands-on torture rampant in this episode, Sleepy Hollow gives us a brief moment of levity. We find Ichabod sitting in Abbie's car, calling talking to his weeping Northstar operator Yolanda, about the melodic and heartbreaking story of his love for his missing wife Katrina. Can you blame an unsuspecting woman for falling prey to his lyrical storytelling? Nope. Not a bit.
But that moment quickly disappears when Abbie comes out of the asylum to inform Ichabod that Jenny escaped. We're hitting the ground running and with this show, that means some of us are about to be out of breath. Irving immediately blames Jenny's escape on Ichabod – oh yeah, blame the handsome time traveler for everything, he only told her about the Sleepy Hollow murders and suggested she might be connected enough to help solve them. Oh, right. Understandable enough. Still, Abbie has a hunch that Jenny's escape is related to the murders; Irving doesn't buy it, but he gives her 12 hours because even he knows he doesn't really understand what's going on.
It's not long before we learn what Jenny's escape is really about: she heads to a Sleepy Hollow dive bar where she retrieves a duffle bag full of weapons and newspaper clippings about Abbie that he's been storing for her. Unfortunately for Jenny's friend the bartender, the local German piano teacher is getting creepy calls from electronically-altered voices telling him to go after Jenny's known associates to find her before she gets her hands on something he refers to as "Item 37." Though the name suggests it's merely one in a string of items, it's apparently important enough to send Mr. Piano to the Sleepy Hollow dive bar where he tortures and beheads the bartender with a James Bond-level torture kit in order to figure out where Jenny is heading.
Abbie and Ichabod take a less violent approach to finding Jenny, tracking down one of her seven foster parents and pumping her for info. It's made a little easier by the fact that this particular foster parent fulfills the stereotypical deadbeat role. The woman's most recent ward is sleeping on the floor and suffering from malnutrition, and Abbie uses that knowledge to force the woman to divulge information. Luckily, Abbie's a good cop, so even after the woman tells Abbie and Ichabod to go to a cabin in the woods, Abbie says she's going to call child services on her. And thank God for that. If she's going to be the woman who abandoned her sister, she can't also be the woman who abandoned another helpless child in the care of some dastardly care-provider.