Episode Report Card Kelsea Stahler: A+ | 79 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Give Me Liberty or Give Me Demons
By Kelsea Stahler | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.04.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.After a few weeks without Sleepy Hollow, Monday nights finally feel right again. Now the demons, witches, and spooky stories feel like home, which is why opening this week's episode with a baseball game was a bit jarring. But nonetheless, we learn that everything seems to be hunky dory for Abbie and Ichabod. He's starting to feel at home in Sleepy Hollow and that's just about the time he's drugged and dragged into an underground lair.
But Abbie's got her own set of issues. She's visited by Katrina (she's regained her ability to visit people in their dreams somehow), who says that Ichabod is linked to the Horseman and that since the Horseman is coming back the next night, Abbie will need to find a sin eater to disconnect Ichabod from the headless nuisance. After all, if they're linked, stopping the horseman with whatever means necessary means stopping Ichabod, too.
Determined to save her new best friend, Abbie gets a temporary release for Jenny and they investigate possible leads on the sin eater. Jenny met one once on her travels and they find him: his name is Henry Parish and, more importantly, he's played by Fringe's John Noble. Abbie begs him to help, but he refuses, only giving up a bit of information about Ichabod's whereabouts that he accidentally sees thanks to Abbie's strong connection to her friend. They leave, knowing that the main concern is saving Ichabod from his captors.
But Ichabod's not doing so terribly. He's with his people, the Freemasons, and he's being questioned by a descendant of Edward Rutledge who says he has a journal with the true account of Ichabod Crane. As Ichabod tells his story to prove his identity, we learn that he was actually a redcoat in the American Revolution, but that when he met Katrina the day he was meant to torture and kill a rebel for treasonous pamphleteering, his conscience took over. (It helped that he felt he was already in love with Katrina upon first meeting her, but who's counting that?) He spared the man, learned that he could see demons (which apparently makes him "the one"), and returned to Katrina, who we can assume nursed him back to health so he could start popping up in all those stories of the Revolution that we learned about in school.
This story pleases the masons, who declare that he is the real Ichabod. It's all rosy until they tell him that they've been looking for him for 200 years. Katrina wrote the journal about him and worked with the masons until they sought to kill Ichabod as a method of killing the Horseman (again, with the connected souls thing). She hid his resting place so they couldn't kill him, but now that they've found him, they're going to let him kill himself. Oh, how nice.
Abbie comes in, shares a tearful goodbye with Ichabod, and then he takes the potion. Thankfully, Henry shows up just in time to stop the poison and extract the bad blood from Ichabod's system. He does so (he literally eats the bad blood) and Ichabod is free. However, the Horseman is awake again and Henry can sense he's on the move. This is supposed to be a bad thing, but it's going to make next week one helluva episode, so please pardon my joy.
Next week, we find out why the Horseman was so pleased by sifting through Ichabod's old dirt. Or maybe he was curious, or enraged, or hungry? It's hard to tell when the character doesn't have a face.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We’ve waited weeks for the return of Sleepy Hollow, and right off the bat they give us baseball. Plain ol’ yell-at-the-chump-ump baseball. But it’s the calm before the storm. Ichabod is baffled by Abbie’s proclivity for yelling at the game officials, but when she says she loves sports because the rules never change (unless they start debating about repealing designated hitters or adding instant replay for the umpires), it’s all about teamwork (unless you’re a designated hitter), and it’s rife with tradition, Ichabod starts to come around and calls the ump "basket face." Solid burn, Crane.
Of course, this cute little moment is made eerie when Abbie calls contemporary Sleepy Hollow Ichabod’s home and he smiles about being able to find his way home all by his big boy self. He takes a detour on the way home to Katrina’s grave and apparently, that’s exactly where he shouldn’t have gone because he’s hit with a poison dart and dragged away.
Meanwhile, Abbie is about to become a danger to her fellow drivers. While driving home, listening to Billie Holiday, Abbie has a vision. It starts off all creepy with crying babies that turn out to be voodoo dolls and the Headless Horseman chasing her through a seemingly haunted house, but it gets scarier when she finds Katrina. This isn’t a vision, it’s one of Katrina’s dream doorways, which means Abbie is asleep at the wheel. Hey, unsafe driving is just as terrifying as the four horsemen of the apocalypse when it comes down to it, OK?
But Katrina has a point: the Headless Horseman is returning the next night, so they must defeat him. There is just one catch, because of course there is: when she cast a spell on Ichabod she unwittingly linked him to the Horseman, so that if the Horseman goes down, so does Ichabod. The only way to save Ichabod from suffering the Horseman’s fate is to find a sin eater to unlink them, before the Horseman returns. But first she has to find Ichabod, who’s been taken. And that would be easier for Abbie to do if Katrina didn’t almost kill her by coming to her in a dream when she was behind the freaking wheel. But Abbie narrowly misses death-by-semi and takes her knowledge to Irving.
When Abbie finishes explaining that she knows how to save Ichabod and that the Horseman is coming back because a witch who appeared in her dream says so, Irving rolls his eyes and gives her the keys to the kingdom. And in this case, the kingdom is Jenny Mills’ temporary leave from the sanitarium so that she can help her sister save her off-payroll, time-traveling partner. And Abbie chose the correct seemingly impossible request: Jenny did come across a sin eater on her travels, which gives them an actual lead.