SLEEPY HOLLOW 1.05 Recap: John Doe

Tonight on Sleepy Hollow:  Watch a Historical Reenactment Child run through the woods!  A cute little girl finds him running, and invites him to pursue her.  Suddenly, Cute Little Girl disappears, and one of Headless Hal’s fellow Horsemen, Horned-Helmet Hank, thunders through the woods on his stolen Ringwraith steed.  He chases after Historical Reenactment Child, who continues to run and run through the woods barefoot.  A startlingly similar sequence happened to Ichabod in the episode, but this doesn’t look like a Prophetic Dream of the Week, especially since the forest is sunny.

Cut to that evening, when Abbie helps Ichabod move into Sheriff Corbin’s cabin, where they met up with Jenny and confronted Herbert the Hessian last week.  They banter about how old the cabin is, how plastic works, and how they should spackle over the bullet holes that Herbert’s minions left when Abbie gets a call and Ichabod insists on coming with her.  The police find Historical Reenactment Child collapsed in front of a fountain after following a mail carrier’s tip.  Medics put the boy on a stretcher when Ichabod decides to speak to him.  HRC looks at him and says something cryptic and possibly in a foreign language.  Ichabod claims the boy spoke English, but Abbie says it didn’t sound remotely like the English she’s used to.  Ichabod explains that HRC spoke Middle English, which was spoken during the Middle Ages.  He also points out that the boy has blackened veins in his forearms.

Back at the station, Ichabod explains that he studied Middle English at Oxford and that Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English.  Raise your hand if you’re an English major who knew that and/or has read excerpts of The Canterbury Tales.  *raises hand*  HRC spoke two words that mean “evil girl,” obviously referring to the disappearing Cute Little Girl.  Abbie can’t find the kid in the database and she suggests that he was kidnapped and taught to speak Middle English to prevent him communicating with the outside world.  Irving is a little less skeptical than usual and he says he’s contacted the CDC about the blackened veins.  Abbie and Irving also mention that the boy is currently a John Doe, which they begin to explain to Ichabod, but he knew that because it originated in England “long before my time.”

The CDC comes in and puts HRC in isolation, which Ichabod thinks is terrible, but Abbie explains that it’s necessary and Ichabod grumbles about plastic again.  They put a camera in the isolation room and hand Ichabod a laptop so that he can Skype with the Historical Reenactment Child.  We find out that HRC’s name is Thomas and that he hails from Roanoke.  As in the Lost Colony of Roanoke.  Abbie somehow hasn’t heard of this Lost Colony, which is standard history class fare, so Ichabod exposits about Sir Walter Raleigh brought colonists to Roanoke and how Raleigh’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare, was the first American colonist baby.  So that’s why Thomas speaks Middle English.  Wait a minute…

EVERYBODY FREEZE!  MY ENGLISH MAJOR SENSES ARE TINGLING!!!

Thomas should not be speaking Middle English because Roanoke was founded in the late 1500s (Wikipedia tells me it was 1583).  People in 1583 spoke Early Modern English.  Why do I know this?  Because that’s just a decade before a certain Mr. William Shakespeare would have just begun to write his first plays.  EME would sound different from our Modern English and even the more stylized, archaic sounding English that Ichabod speaks, but mostly because certain words and phrases that we recognize would have different meanings (“to repair” could mean “to return” to a place) or some now-unused words were used in place of more familiar modern ones (“anon” meant “immediately”/”right now”/”right away”).  But overall, it would sound much more like our modern English than Middle English does.  Middle English sounds like an audio-casserole of English and German.  Ichabod should be translating Thomas’s speech, but he should be looking to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, not Chaucer.

After we find out about that glaring historical inaccuracy, another patient in the hospital contracts Thomas’s illness and dies as Horn-Helmeted Hank charges towards him in his mind.  This leads Ichabod and Abbie to track Thomas’s path through the woods.  Ichabod uses his mad tracking skillz that he learned from fox-hunting because it turns out he’s a nobleman’s son.  Geez, are there any British tropes we haven’t applied to Mr. Crane yet?

Meanwhile, at the station, Morales confronts Irving about Crane’s consulting position.  Irving mentions Morales’s history with Abbie and asks if that will be a problem.  Morales says no, but still stews about it to a fellow officer (who shall be known as Rosenthal until he gets an official name).  Rosenthal points out that Irving might know something he and Morales don’t, so Morales should just roll with it.  Go Rosenthal!  As they ponder what the Captain’s pondering, Irving meets with a medical expert (who is totally Agent Henriksen from Supernatural) about how to handle the epidemic that’s flourishing in the hospital and the word “inoculation” gets thrown around.  One expert points out that Thomas might never have been vaccinated against anything, and I know not to add anything to that statement, lest the Internet flip its lid on that subject.

Back in the forest, Abbie and Ichabod come across a lake with a tiny island on it.  After they either walk on water or find the lake to be supremely shallow, they follow Thomas’s route into the Lost Colony of Roanoke.  All of the colonists are living out of time completely infected with blackened veins, all while speaking period-inappropriate Middle English.  They enter a meeting-house and speak with a town elder, who says that Pestilence (or Conquest)–our friend Horn-Helmeted Hank–brought the infection to Roanoke, so many colonists were lost, including the youngest, Virginia Dare.  Baby Virginia’s spirit apparently led the remaining colonists to this lake-isle near Sleepy Hollow.  Her spirit protects them from falling to the infection.  Ichabod works out that Thomas was allowed into the outside world so that Pestilence can join forces with Death (a.k.a. Headless Hal).  He also thinks that returning Thomas to the island will cure him.

Outside the meeting-house a colonist girl offers herb-ish looking flowers to Abbie, who won’t accept them, and it’s adorable, in a creepy undead village kind of way.  Then, as Ichabod and Abbie leave the colony, Thomas’s father goes up to Ichabod and thanks him for helping Thomas.  That’s also creepy-undead adorable.  But while the adorable happens, Abbie notices Horn-Helmeted Hank lying in wait with his horse a few hundred feet from the Colony.

Once they return to Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod realizes that he’s infected.  Abbie assumes he contracted this plague in Roanoke, but Ichabod thinks it happened when he first met Thomas and that it’s taken a while to manifest.  He gets quarantined and sedated (with Abbie shouting her protests) and ends up in the Phantom Zone-Narnia Woods with Katrina.  She is alarmed to see him because she summoned him the first few times they met up, but this time she didn’t, so he must be dead or at death’s door.  But we know things aren’t too dire since the show has been picked up for a second season.  Ichabod notices other people wandering around the Phantom Zone-Narnia Woods and asks Katrina about them.  They’re imprisoned in this purgatory woods with but apart from her.  This realm belongs to Moloch (the Blurry-Faced Demon), who collects the souls and suspended them there, to do whatever he sees fit with them.  Ichabod asks Katrina how she ended up in such a place, but before she can answer, he gets pulled back and she shouts that he’s fighting for both of them now.

While Ichabod’s unconscious, Abbie visits the hospital’s chapel and prays, asking God to give her a sign if she’s supposed to be a witness.  As she exits the chapel, she dips her hand in the holy water and has a lightbulb moment.  She explains to Irving that taking the patients (or at least Thomas and Ichabod) to Roanoke and baptizing them in the Lost Colony’s water might cure the infected patients.  Irving agrees pretty easily, probably because he’s desperate.  He formulates a plan to remove some patients to another facility because of overflow, allowing Abbie to intercept them and retrieve Ichabod and Thomas.

Irving’s plan works and Abbie leads Ichabod and Thomas through the woods.  They’re both pretty weak, so Abbie shoots Ichabod up with adrenaline, he carries Thomas, and they reach Roanoke.  Ichabod plunges himself and Thomas into the colony’s well, curing them both and vanquishing pestilence.  It turns out the patients in Sleepy Hollow are cured at that moment as well.  Then, Thomas runs back into the town and fades to sepia, with the rest of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.  Abbie and Ichabod realize that the entire colony was dead all along and that Pestilence released Thomas into the land of the living to spread the plague.

DEAD ALL ALONG?!  Seriously, writers?  You just took a fantastic concept–an entire colony out of time–and made it into a cop-out.  I was looking forward to how Roanoke would be woven into future storyline and into Ichabod’s development as he accepts his new existence in the modern world, but now it’s just written out.  Disappointing.

Abbie tells Ichabod that she knows he wanted to stay in Roanoke because he sympathized with them, but also that he belongs in the modern world.  Then Ichabod says they’ll need all the faith they can get if “the Horseman of Death” returns.  Cut to Evil!Shadowfax waiting for his master to emerge from the river.  Headless Hal rises from the water, lifting his broadax above his head. Then they ride away, setting the forest ablaze as they go. Death’s back, baby!

Overall, this episode was a disappointment.  I loved the addition of Roanoke and the general concept of that, but the inappropriate Middle English (which was probably used because it sounds creepy-cool in its Germanic way) and the “dead all along” explanation were just wrongheaded in every way and spoil the episode’s plot.  It did have some good character moments, with Abby using her faith to find the answer and Irving not being buddy-buddy with Morales, but this episode just wasn’t as good as the previous ones.  And Katrina was once again useless.  I hope the writers figure out how to use her character in a way that directly affects the plot in a non-expositional manner because right now, I’m wondering why Katia Winter is listed as a regular.  She’s had about the same amount of screentime as and fulfills a similar role to Clancy Brown (Corbin’s actor), who is always listed as a guest star.  I’m just confused on that front.

Also, is it me, or is every show with a paranormal/occult bent required to have an epidemic episode?  Because Supernatural used the Roanoke concept in a similar manner, though the titular town didn’t actually show up there.   Basically, this episode felt like a genre re-tread with good ideas that got a bit mangled in the execution).

Now we go on hiatus for three weeks.  See you then!  For now, I leave you with…

The Wisdom of Ichabod Crane

“You and I have very different definitions of ‘old.’  Seems if a building stays upright for more than a decade, you people declare it a national landmark.”

(To Abbie) “What is this impenetrable barrier around this instrument?”  “It’s call plastic.  I bought scissors.”

“Jefferson had an obsession with puns.  And Adams kept a notebook of dirty limericks.”  (Let’s all sing “He Plays the Violin.”)

Sleepy Hollow airs on Mondays on FOX.