SLEEPY HOLLOW Recap: Blood Moon

We begin tonight with Ichabod running in the forest, pursued by the Headless Horseman astride Evil!Shadowfax.  Three other Horsemen join our headless friend, each one wearing an elaborate horned helmet.  They close in on Ichabod, giving every Millennial some Ringwraith flashbacks.  Ichabod evades them by squeezing into a thorny thicket, which quickly fights back.  The Thrashing Thorns drag Ichabod down into a tunnel where he meets Katrina, who gives him more cryptic advice about the oncoming evil and tells him that the first spirit of the Horsemen’s army will rise under a blood moon and that “she’s one of us.”  Of course, Ichabod “must stop her before she kills again.”  Ichabod gets even more confused as Katrina fades away before he sees a woman’s charred face dangle in front of him and then he wakes up shirtless in a motel room.  He tries to leave the room to find Abbie (or as he calls her “Leff-tenant Mills”), but an officer standing guard stops him because he’s “a material witness in an ongoing investigation,” a. k. a. Sheriff Corbin’s murder.

Back at the station, Captain Irving tells Abbie that Corbin’s murder is “opaque,” and that the officers who backed up her story have recanted.  She claims they’re scared and Irving says that the whole town is scared.  She asserts that something got into Brooks’ (that’s John Cho’s) cell and snapped his neck “like a Pez Dispenser,” but Irving shows her the video, in which we and Abbie see Brooks ram his head into the wall, snapping his neck, right before Abbie and Ichabod enter.  Abbie implies that Ichabod will back her up saying that he passed the polygraph test, but Irving reminds her that that’s not necessarily unusual and that according to some psychiatric evaluators, Ichabod suffers from a condition called “aggressive transference.”  This means that all of the people and events in his time-travelling story are so ridiculously detailed that he may have tricked himself into believing that he really was a Revolutionary soldier with a witch wife.  Then Irving admits that Abbie and Ichabod are his only options in the case.  He’s going to Albany to get some “resources” (more experts, maybe?) and leaves Abbie with a warning not to embarrass him.

Meanwhile, Ichabod explores his motel room, poking his electric bedside lamp, discovering the wonders/horrors of modern showers, becoming moderately impressed hairdryers, successfully figuring out a coffee-maker, and watching Caesar ride out of the mist in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which looks terrifying even without the Headless Horseman context.  The whole sequence is fanservice-y and adorable.

Abbie finally visits Ichabod, who rants about his constitutional rights being violated by witness protection laws.  Then he tells Abbie about his Katrina-vision, she doubts him because dream-visions are not concrete evidence in any century, and he asserts that “belief is sanity.”  He also finds out how amazing donut holes are.

Then we visit the morgue, where Brooks’ corpse reanimates in the freakiest sequence this side of Supernatural.  The Blurry-Faced Demon puts Brook’s head back in place and has him cough up a medallion.  This medallion is supposed to release someone.  “Release who?” asks Brooks (and the audience).

Then we get an OPENING SEQUENCE!  Opening sequences are the best.  The music isn’t quite memorable, but it’s very Danny Elfman-ish and the sequence itself is reminiscent of The Tudors, in that the sequence flashes lots of images that relate directly to the story (including Evil!Shadowfax), but we also see the actors’ names paired with their faces, shown into two quick cuts.  Why don’t more shows do this anymore again?  They’re so darn entertaining and helpful.

Abbie and Ichabod talk about Katrina and how she never told Ichabod that she was a witch.  All we learn is that Katrina disliked Ichabod intensely when they first met, and that Ichabod wants to start protesting donut hole taxation.  Then we arrive at Corbin’s funeral, where Abbie remembers her last conversation with him and discovering his body.  Ichabod watches from the hillside and visits Katrina’s empty grave and figures out that “one of us” means another witch.  Um, I could have told you that as soon as she said it.

Suddenly, it’s nighttime and Brooks rests the medallion on a pillar, calling forth the charred woman from Ichabod’s dream-vision.  Brooks tells that spirits that Blurry-Face said, “The ashes of the pious will ordain your resurrection.  Take your flesh, and you will reclaim yours.”

Then Brooks pulls a man over on the side of the road and asks the man his full name, which is Jeremy Stephen Firth.  Jeremy Stephen Firth asks Brooks about his neck, and Brooks says, “It’s hard to explain.”  He sounds possessed, but I don’t think he is.  Maybe it’s a side effect of undeadness?  Anyway, Brooks says that whatever happens, it’s nothing personal, and leaves.  Then Jeremy Firth’s car won’t start while “Witchcraft” by Frank Sinatra plays on the radio and the charred woman pounces onto the window and burns the inside of the car.  Poor Jeremy Stephen Firth.

“Witchcraft” plays into the next scene and I wonder why this show’s soundtrack is stalking my iPod.  If I start hearing tracks from How to Train Your Dragon and/or Gladiator, I will be both alarmed and overjoyed.

Anyway, Ichabod says that “witches draw their power from the lunar cycle,” why Abbie muses about how bizarre this all is.  Ichabod bring up General Washington again, and I lament that Washington had no direct descendants because I desparately want to believe he’s related to the Winchester brothers.  He was definitely a hunter, at the very least.  Then Ichabod asks Abbie about her relationship with Sheriff Corbin.  She admits that after the demon incident with her sister, Jenny, things took a dark turn for her.  Jenny went to a mental hospital and Abbie turned to stuff like drugs.  She broke into a pharmacy with a boyfriend who bolted, and Corbin took her to the diner when he caught her, giving her five minutes to decide if she wanted to change her life.  She says that was more fathering in five minutes than she’d ever gotten before that.

Then an officer tells Abbie about a piece of strange activity, which means that they found Jeremy Firth’s car.  Abbie and Ichabod visit the crime scene and Ichabod realizes that Jeremy Firth’s heart has been ripped out.  He realizes he’s seen this before.  It turns out he and his regiment found a massacred campsite where the victims’ bodies had been charred that way, and that he felt a presence that chilled his blood. In the flashback, we glimpse a witch who might be the charred woman Brooks called forth.  Ichabod claims this happened during a blood moon and that these types murders increased, lead by a dark coven under the command of Cyrilda of Abaddon, who may have aligned herself with the Redcoats, according to General Washington.  Abbie tells Ichabod that Corbin discovered the two opposing covens in Sleepy Hollow, which is exposition from last week and they decide to look at his secret files.

But when they arrive at Corbin’s—now Irving’s—office, they’ve been moved to the Archives, which Abbie does not have clearance to get into them.  Meanwhile, a young officer questions Ichabod Crane about how he was a suspect in Corbin’s murder and where he’s from.  Ichabod tells the officer that he teaches at Oxford: “Treatises of Government, with a focus on the American Revolution.”  The officer claims that should be embarrassing since that’s the one where “we kicked your ass.”  To which Ichabod snarks, “We?  I didn’t realize you were there.”  The officer says he was 101st Airborne in Iraq (101st Airborne?  Easy Company?  Hi, Band of Brothers) and asks Ichabod what war he fought in.  “One that I hope is never doomed to repeat itself, sir.”  Then Abbie shows up and tells this officer, Luke, that Ichabod is consulting to the Sheriff’s Department on Irving’s orders.  It turns out that this is Abbie ex—she broke things off with him when she was about to leave for Quantico, but things are now awkward since she didn’t leave.  She dislikes Ichabod’s prying, but he points out that she did the same thing with Katrina.  If we get anything out of this sequence, it’s that Ichabod needs to interact with more average people (Muggles, Mundanes, Normals, etc.) because he is a fantastic snarker with them.

When Abbie tells Ichabod that she doesn’t have clearance to get into the Archives, he takes her to the station’s basement, where he busts through a thin wall to reveal hidden underground tunnels from Sleepy Hollow’s Revolutionary days.  The tunnels allowed the rebels to secretly transport munitions, according to Ichabod.  So Abbie and Ichabod set off into the underground wonderland of the tunnel maze.  First, Ichabod mentions that witches were buried in the tunnels because they were not allowed proper burials, and reminds Abbie and us that Katrina’s headstone is fake.  He says, “Her remains remain a mystery.”  Then he is surprised to find so many crates intact, including one marked BP in red for “Black Powder.”  Abbie wonders if it has an expiration date and Ichabod doesn’t want to find out.

So they climb up in a historical version of the Room of Requirement, which turns out to be the Archives.  You’d think they’d be in a more modern building by now, but for all I know, there’s a historical preservation committee that insists they leave the old buildings as they are.

Meanwhile, a boy chases his soccer ball into the street and runs into Brooks, who asks the boy his name.  The boy’s name is Kyle Hemmington, and Brooks says it’s a nice name, and “I’m sorry it had to be yours.”  Second episode in and the showrunners are already killing children.  Fantastic.

In the Archives, Abbie and Ichabod look up Cyrilda of Abaddon, who was Romani (in less PC terms: a gypsy), and we find out in a couple quick lines of dialogue that Ichabod knows Greek and several other languages.  He also has an eidetic memory, meaning he can recall sights, sounds, and smells with perfect clarity.  Nice plot device, show!  But it doesn’t apply to that 250 years in the cave.  That’s too bad.  Then we find out more about Cyrilda: a good coven called the Sisterhood of the Radiant Heart captured her and their leader used white magic to weaken her, making her vulnerable to mortal attacks, which allowed her to be burned at the stake.  We ignore the fact that witch burnings were a European thing, not an American one—they tended to be hanged.  Right before Cyrilda was burned, she told the crowd in Romani Greek that “By the turn of the blood moon, the ashes of your ancestry will be mine.  Your flesh will be my flesh.  I will live again.”  Then they torched her.

It turns out that Jeremy Firth was the descendant of the magistrate who sentenced her, a man named Robert Daniel Firth.  So she’s going after the magistrate’s descendants so she can resurrect her self by the last night or “turn” of the blood moon, which is that night.  It looks like the boy Brooks found, Kyle Hemmington, is descended from Firth’s daughter, so he’s next on the list.  Abbie and Ichabod leave the archives to find his house, while Kyle lies in bed stalked by a creepy cat.  It leaves and he follows it.  Cyrilda creeps up behind Kyle when he shuts the front door.  Kyle’s mother lies in the bathtube when she hears him scream.  He’s face to face with Cyrilda.  She searches for him when Abbie and Ichabod burst in.  Abbie says that she’s with the Sheriff’s Department and that they suspect an intruder.  They find Kyle alive and safe; he claims he saw a woman who looked like she was on fire and the mother insists that he was scared and imagining things.  Abbie looks unimpressed, as she probably heard the exact same thing after her own demon-related incident.  Then Ichabod notices that an urn as been taken from a shelf—Kyle’s father.  Kyle was left unharmed because he is adopted, and his father’s ashes are just what Cyrilda needs, since he’s the last Hemmington (and his wife insists that with remarkable certainty).  So Abbie and Ichabod set out to find Cyrilda and burn her body down in the tunnels.  We also get Abbie’s impersonation of Ichabod, which is cute, but as he says, not very accurate.

Down in the tunnels, Brooks digs up Cyrilda’s bones.  Abbie and Ichabod set out to corner Cyrilda, who is already busy resurrecting herself.  And by George, her ritual works when she lies her spirit on top of her bones.  Ichabod discovers her just as she finishes.  She hisses, Ichabod shoots, and she catches the bullet.  He drops the gun, not knowing such a small gun carries more than one shot.  He realizes it’s useless against, anyway, like it was against the horseman.  He and Abbie begin setting up powder when Cyrilda confronts them, sneering that Ichabod “carries her (Katrina’s) stench in her heart” and that Katrina is trapped in “the world between worlds” a. k. a. the Phantom Zone-Narnia Woods, which might be purgatory?  It turns out that Katrina bound Cyrilda’s power and made her vulnerable.  Cyrilda climbs on top of the powder crates, Ichabod throws a torch, which goes out and then reignites, blasting Cyrilda to smithereens.

Back at the station, Ichabod ponders the “world between worlds” and Abbie just wants things to go back to the way they were before.  Ichabod points out that neither one can and admits that he finds comfort in the fact that they’re together on this road.  Then Abbie visits Corbin’s old office and experiences her own dream vision where Corbin gives her advice.  She asks why he didn’t tell her about all of these occult happenings and he says she probably wouldn’t have believed her, though she protests.  He tells her that she’s let fear rule her life so she’s run away from who she really is, which only she can find, and “Don’t be afraid of Number 49.  That’s where you’ll find you’re not alone.”  Then Ichabod finds her and it’s his turn to be left out of the loop on the dream-vision highway.

Finally, we cut to a mental hospital where Abbie’s sister, Jenny Mills, resides in Room 49.  She does push-ups and pretends to take her meds, then switches to pull-ups while Blurry-Face appears behind her.  She turns around and finds nothing.  It looks like this Mills sister will factor into the story very soon and in some important way.

This episode was more filler-ish than last week, giving us only a few bits and pieces that will matter in the long run.  The plot was Monster-of-the-Week, but it was less stand-alone than your average Supernatural or Doctor Who episode, which are the only shows I can compared this to in terms of plot and set-up.  The Abbie-Ichabod dynamic is still extremely fun to watch, but as I said, I hope that they run into more normal people because this show has already handled the fish-out-of-water sequences so deftly that I’d love to see more of Ichabod’s navigation of the 21st century.

I also wonder if we’ll come into contact with more witches in both the present and the past and actually get to hear their story, because right now, they have this “otherness” quality than the show should work to avoid.

Interesting note: this episode featured more male than female fanservice.  I wonder if this trend will continue in future episodes, or if things will even out as they go.

Sleepy Hollow airs Mondays on FOX.