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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 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 week one helluva episode, so please pardon my joy.
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 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.
When Ichabod awakes, he’s faced with a smug, little man (James Frain, who you may remember from every TV show ever, including True Blood, Grimm,, and The Tudors) and a mysterious basement filled with many candles that some poor henchman probably had to light. The man has a journal with “the true account” of Ichabod’s life. Ichabod immediately recognizes the man as a descendant of Edward Rutledge, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and uses a few physical clues to surmise that he’s a Freemason – the brotherhood Ichabod was also a part of in his old life. Ichabod’s challenge this week? Prove to Baby Rutledge that he’s really Ichabod Crane.
That seems easy enough, until he starts telling a complete yarn. Only it’s not a yarn; it’s the truth. Rutledge asks about the phrase "order before chaos," and Ichabod explains that he heard it from a man named Arthur Bernard, who was tried for treason. Ichabod was the redcoat charged to torture him for information and Katrina was a Quaker nurse who interrupted in an attempt to stop him from hurting Arthur. Because the redcoats surely let women in past their ranks to make commanding pleas and googly eyes at their officers. Ichabod practically turns the color of his coat when she enters the room and after a verbal tête-à-tête over the value of life, she sees his conscience in his eyes. She knows Ichabod won’t kill the poor man. She’s mostly right, but he gets damn close.
Arthur refuses to give up the author of the traitorous pamphlet that landed him here because he says he’s not afraid to die. Instead, he uses this time to attempt to recruit Ichabod to fight the actual demons around them. Ichabod does as all macho dudes initially do: calls Arthur crazy and goes outside to execute three other traitors while Katrina comforts one of their sons. Her disappointment is enough to make Ichabod tell his commander that hanging people might make the colonists revolt (no way). The commander simply questions his loyalty, then walks away as Ichabod sees his face turn into a demon’s. As it turns out, the redcoats weren’t the true antagonists of the Revolution. Demons were. Hold on while I call my old U.S. History professor…
Like a puppy carrying a wilting flower, Ichabod greets Katrina in the woods to tell her he didn’t want to hang those people. She’s delighted that his conscience hasn’t died and he says he feels they’ve known each other all along. Smooth talker, that one. He says he doesn’t believe in spirits and destiny, but Katrina thinks he does, so she tells him that destiny actually means choosing the true path, not simply landing on it. The puppy is charmed and tells her he heard of a secret war between men and demons and that he saw one of the demons. She says he’s "the one" and that it’s basically his responsibility to save them from the demons. Actually, her pickup line is way better.
Back in 2013, Abbie is losing her mind over not being able to save Ichabod, because despite her gruff exterior, she’s really come to care about him. It makes sense -- she’s lost quite a few loved ones recently and over the years. Jenny, ever the tactful one, says Ichabod is basically a dead man and that gives Abbie a stroke of inspiration: the missing sin eater is using dead prison inmates’ identities in order to hide. That was really ridiculously easy, but it will save Ichabod, so whatever. The man’s real name is Henry Parrish and when they find him, Abbie forces her way into his apartment. Of course, it’s John Noble from Fringe; he’s here to make this show amazing with his new recurring role.
But he’s not saving the day just yet. After years of working as a sin eater, he’s given it up. Consuming the darkest parts of other people’s souls has tarnished his own and he wants to be left alone to methodically water his plants. Abbie tries to sell him on responsibility (which never works) and then offers him the chance to take down "pure evil" (the Horseman who’s connected to Ichabod). She almost has him, except for the fact that she can’t find Ichabod. Henry has a loophole: he might be able to help if her connection to her friend is strong enough. He assumes it isn’t, so when Abbie swears she’s connected to Ichabod, he practically throws her out. When he gets close though, the friendship bond is so strong that he has an involuntary vision of Ichabod’s location. Ichabod’s in a Freemason Temple underground somewhere. Too bad there’s not a thing Abbie can do without a sin eater. Still, she and Jenny go straight into the underground tunnels Ichabod showed her, hoping they can help Ichabod somehow. Spoiler: she can’t.
Back in Revolutionary Wartime, Ichabod’s commander forces him to kill Arthur in the woods, but as they’re walking, Arthur teases that Ichabod will never understand what Katrina was talking about if he kills him. So Ichabod doesn’t. Arthur says to say "order from chaos" to Katrina so she will know he’s come in good faith, but Ichabod’s commander kills Arthur just then and comes after Ichabod for insubordination. Ichabod stabs him with a sword and the commander becomes a full-on demon. He tries to kill Ichabod, but Ichabod escapes, finds Katrina, and says the special words just as he collapses in her doorway, which is apparently how he became an American hero, riddled with guilt over Arthur Bernard’s death for the rest of his days.
This tale appeases the modern day Freemasons and they bow allegiance to Ichabod. But there’s a catch: Katrina was working with the Freemasons and when Ichabod "died," she turned on them and buried her husband where the masons couldn’t find him. If they did, they would have killed him, because his death would mean the Horseman’s death. Damn that pesky linkage issue. And now, they’re planning to correct that 200-year wrong by having Ichabod die for the greater good. At least this time, they hand him the poison so he can give himself up for the cause. How considerate, I guess?
Unfortunately, Abbie finds the temple just as this is happening. She demands to be let in on pain of calling in the “damn cavalry” of police (oh yeah, you and what underground cell service?) and runs in just in time to tell Ichabod about Katrina’s visit and the sin eater. But he won’t go because there isn’t time to get to Henry before the Horseman arrives. He’s choosing his destiny like Katrina commanded all those years ago and his destiny is death.
As Abbie fights him, he finally calls her "Abbie" instead of "Lt. Mills" and praises their "miraculous friendship." It’s a truly sweet moment that proves these characters have real chemistry. Ichabod admits that he’s terrified and grabs her hand before saying she might want to leave once he takes the potion, but she’s determined to stay by his side and see him through to the other side. With that, Ichabod drinks the potion and we’re treated to the semi-purgatory he’s already visited once on this show. How many times is this man almost going to die?
Luckily, as the potion starts to take hold, Henry Parrish shows up with a change of heart. Henry stalls the potion somehow and then, rather than just making it quick with the rescue part, they have a little chat about who he is and who Ichabod is.
Finally, Henry drinks Ichabod’s blood (did I just write "finally" about humans drinking blood?), sees the Horseman, and then asks Ichabod to summon Arthur. Apparently, the glue for this Horseman bond is Ichabod’s sin, so Arthur appears in Ichabod’s mind and tells him that letting it wasn’t his sin, it was destiny. Ichabod agrees and recites a command for “death” to leave him as the pool of blood Henry extracted separates, not unlike dancing Flubber in the hands of Robin Williams. Unlike Robin Williams, Henry sponges some of it up and eats it so the room shakes and Ichabod is sanctified. Abbie runs across the room and hugs Ichabod as he promises to listen to her time, which is probably a good idea because this is TV and Abbie is right: there is always another way aside from the death of a main character.
Finally, this show has found a way to make the mystery of the week feel impossible and unsolvable (even if certain pieces did fall into place too easily) before fixing it all up. Things are starting to get incredibly scary around these parts. Plus, in the wake of all this blood-eating madness, Henry says he feels the Horseman’s presence. He’s on his way, and Abbie says they’ll be ready for him. Trust me, they won’t be.
And at that very moment, the Horseman approaches Ichabod’s temporary resting place and sees that he’s been raised. We’re not sure what this little excursion does to the Horseman though, because this moment is a cliffhanger and the Horseman has no face by which to judge his thoughts. So, until week, Sleepy Hollow.