SLEEPY HOLLOW RECAP: Pilot

We start our journey in 1781, as a Revolutionary War battle rages in New York’s Hudson Valley.  A very attractive soldier starts checking the backs of corpses’ hands for something until one of his comrades shouts, “CRANE!”  So this must before our hero, Hunkabod Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison).  Then we spy a hand with white branding on it.  A masked Redcoat on a white horse charges Ichabod, who promptly shoots the mystery man.  Uh-oh, the mystery man gets up and an epic duel ensues.  The masked man slashes Ichabod with his monster broadax, to which promptly responds by unsheathing his rapier and slicing the man’s head off, letting us know exactly who this mystery man is.

Suddenly, Ichabod wakes up in the Cave of Wonders, pushing himself out of some muddy ice chunks.  After he gets out of the Cave, he finds a stream to rehydrate himself and then stumbles upon some strange yellow markings on the road.  And before you can say “Jack ‘O Lantern head”, a semi nearly nails him and he stumbles toward a sedan that veers off the road.  Ichabod wisely flees the scene while Mick Jagger croons “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The camera pans over the Upstate New York town of Sleepy Hollow while we hear more about this man of wealth and taste until we meet two cops: Lt. Abby Mills (Nicole Beharie) and her partner, Sheriff Corbin (Clancy Brown).  They talk about how she wants to leave Sleepy Hollow to join the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  Corbin thinks she’s running away from something, but Abby steals a fry and insists she’s not running and that she’s perfectly qualified.  They’re interrupted by a call to a farmhouse, where they can’t seem to find the owner.  Abby searches the yard while Corbin checks the barn, where he finds a white horse stabled.  Abby discovers the owner’s body, conveniently missing its head, just as the Headless Horseman steps out from behind Evil!Shadowfax.  Abby heads to the barn as the Horseman looms, and arrives just in time to see the broadax crack the wood door and watch the Horseman ride away, leaving Corbin’s body in his wake.

When Abby calls in “Office down,” her colleague, Andy Brooks (played by John Cho), gets the call and is about to responds when Ichabod stumbles into the road.  Ichabod prompts gets arrested and put Otis’s old cell from The Andy Griffith Show.  Brooks brings Abby in to see what they assume is the suspect, but she quickly dismisses this idea.  “It’s not him,” she says, giving a description of the Horseman, until Ichabod replies, asking about the broadax and if the branding on the Horseman’s hand is shaped like a bow.  Abby asks when Ichabod last saw the Horseman.  “When I cut off his head,” he tells her.  Abby asks, “Who are you?”  Cue dramatic strings.

Cut to the interrogation room, where Ichabod gives a wonderful fish-out-of-water exchange with the interrogator where he rails against lie detectors and explains how he was a former history professor-turned-Redcoat-turned Patriot spy whom George Washington charge with the task of killing the horseman and then rails against modern interrogation techniques against, insisting that he has “a thousand questions” for everyone.  We also get a flashback where we briefly meet Ichabod’s wife, Katrina, a civilian nurse.  Abby watches the whole exchange from another room before asking the new head honcho, Captain Irving (Orlando Jones, a.k.a. the Band Director from Drumline).  Irving (Shout-Out AHOY!) refuses, but Abby visits Ichabod anyway and Ichabod asks her about being emancipated and insisting that he does not condone slavery.  Abby is clearly irritated and offended, but handles it beautifully, stating that yes, she’s a black female police officer and gives us the much-touted trailer line, “Do you see this gun?  I am authorized to use it.  On you.”

More fish-out-of-water comedy ensues in the next scene, but it’s handled quite smartly: Ichabod is clearly out of his element, but not a moron, commenting on a building he recognizes, “That used to be a livery stables.”  (It’s now a Starbucks.)  Then he plays with the police cars windows, which makes sense because if you were catapulted two-hundred and fifty years into the future, wouldn’t you play with their technological novelties?  Yes, you would.  And so would I.  Also, these scenes work well because the two stars have an easy-going, bantering chemistry with each other.  Weirdly enough, these are two of the strongest scenes in the pilot, in terms of character.

Abby is supposed to take Ichabod to a mental institution, St. Gregory’s, but instead, she takes him back to the cave.  Ichabod successfully works a flashlight and finds George Washington’s Bible, which Ichabod takes with him after Abby decides “Field trip’s over,” but not before insisting that the Horseman is Death himself, one of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.  This is important because George Washington told Ichabod that the Revolution decided not just the fate of the country but the fate of the whole world.

Meanwhile, the town reverend, who also existed in Ichabod’s time, is cornered by the Horseman, who beheads him in a cool first-person point of view shot (from the reverend’s perspective, not the Horseman’s).  Abby arrives on the scene, locking Ichabod in the car, but he follows an omen-bearing hawk while Captain Irving muses about who would want to decapitate a reverend.  Irving gets mad about Abby violating a direct order by bringing Ichabod to the scene.  The Ichabod finds his wife’s grave and insists that Abby tell Irving what she knows.  She tells him no, since that sounds crazy and she can’t explain any of it and she can’t do any of that again.  Again?  Then she takes him to the instituition and tells him that when she was in high school, she and her sister Jenny glimpsed a strange creature in the woods among four white trees and then black out with everyone thinking their story was crazy.  She moved on and held it together, but Jenny still believes what they saw was real and goes in and out of mental hospitals.  So Abby thinks she gets how Ichabod feels.  Right before they part, she says, “You can call me Abby,” instead of Lt. Mills.

When Abby gets back to the station, she goes through Corbin’s secret files about unsolved occult cases in Sleepy Hollow.  Voiceover from his old tape recorder tells us that the town hosted two covens of witches, one good and one evil, and then some dispersed across the East Coast, except for the 100 who were burned at the stake between 1712 and 1816 (including Katrina).  Corbin looked into Abby and Jenny’s incident, which correlates with what a farmer saw at that spot in 1882, believing the trees represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Irving finds Abby snooping, but she says she found nothing useful.  He tells her to go home and rest.

Then Ichabod has a dream where he wanders through his mirror to the Phantom Zone-Narnia Woods, where Katrina explains everything that Corbin’s voiceover just did in, but in more mystical terms and a few additional points.  She wasn’t buried in the grave; the Horseman’s head rests there, while his body was buried in the river in a chained coffin.  The reverend, one of her coven, watched over the grave to make sure the head rejoined the body.  Ichabod reawakened because his bloodline intermingled with the Horseman’s/Death’s, who was roused by a great evil.  If the Horseman’s head rejoins his body, he becomes whole once again, the other three Horsemen rise, and the end begins.  Oh, and the Headless Horseman doesn’t like sunlight.  Katrina tells Ichabod to wake up, so he does, with hospital attendants restraining them.

Just when a doctor is about to sedate Ichabod, Abby arrives with a court order to release Ichabod to her custody, which is really just a practice sheet for her academy exam.  She fills him in on what she found in Corbin’s office and he tells her about his dream.  They head to the graveyard to dig up the head and Abby calls Brooks to tell him about the head and to ask him to bring back up.  Brooks says he’s just getting off a 36-hour shift, but he’ll be there.  Brooks then walks into his living room, where the Horseman waits, and Brooks says, “I know where it is.”  The Horseman picks up a machine gun.

Just as Abby and Ichabod finish digging up the grave, the Horseman shows up and engages Ichabod in another fight.  Abby shoots the Horseman, to no effect, when Brooks shows up and she tells him she needs a shotgun from his trunk.  He opens the trunk and knocks her down, putting her in his back seat, but she bites Brooks and chains him to the car while he proclaims, “You can’t kill him, Abby!  He is Death!”  Back up arrives just when the Horseman grabs his machine gun.  The officers shout “Put your hands on your…” and wonder if he can hear them when he starting shooting.  They are unhurt, but he shoots the ever-living daylights out of the car.  Then the Horseman rides off into the oncoming sunrise  Afterward, the backup officers spot Ichabod and shoot, but he ducks behind a silver SUV and exclaims, “I’m alright!”  Then he reveals the Horseman’s pickled head and he and Abby smile at each other as more back up arrives.

Back at the station, Captain Irving says that he should throw Abby in jail, but he can’t because the officers corroborated her story and the pickled head is evidence, along with Brooks’ confession.  He says that Brooks agreed to a plea bargain, “but only if he talks to you and Captain America here.”  To which Ichabod gives an understated “Who?”  Irving asks them for answers, so Abby tells him that things will only get worse.  “Outstanding,” Irving sighs and asks Abby if she’s transferring to Quantico the next week.  She says that no, she belongs in Sleepy Hollow.  Then Ichabod tells Abby that Katrina called him “the First Witness” and that the book of Revelation (not Revelations, show) claims that two witnesses will fight a seven-year war against hell’s forces leading up to the apocalypse.  Ichabod thinks that her white-tree experience in the woods means Abby was called to finish what Corbin started.  Then Abby admits that Brooks claimed a war was coming, so they decide to visit Otis’s Brooks’ cell.

Brooks sits in his cell when the demon that Abby witnessed pays him a visit, claiming “YOU FAILED” in a demonic language while Brooks asks for another chance.  The demon decides he won’t, snapping Brooks’ neck just before Abby and Ichabod arrive at the cell.  But they show up just in time for Abby to see the demon walk back into the Phantom Zone-Narnia woods in the mirror, which breaks as Corbin’s voiceover reads the Bible quote, “And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder: one of the four beasts saying, “Come and see.”  Then behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

Cue “Sympathy for the Devil” bookend and end credits.

Pilots are always tough and this one, though exposition-heavy, set a clear tone and established the two main characters very well.  The dialogue was smart and quite snappy in the fish-out-of-water scenes, and I’m really looking forward to seeing more of the Abby/Ichabod relationship.  It looks like at this point, they’re more Elementary than Bones, keeping things at a friendship chemistry level, although that shared smile after they fight the Horseman could have been read many ways.  This looks like it will be a highly entertaining show, especially for anyone who’s missing Fringe or has fallen away from Supernatural.  Now I can’t stop thinking of rock and/or country songs they should use: Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around;” that version of “O Death” from O, Brother, Where Art Thou?; the country classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky;” Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (or any Johnny Cash, really); or even Corb Lund’s “Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier.”  Okay, I’m done imprinting my musical tastes on this show.  See you all next week!

airs on Mondays on FOX.