SLEEPY HOLLOW 1.07 Recap: Midnight Ride

Huzzah!  Yet another episode that begins with a wooded chase scene!  Our friend Headless Hal the Horseman (a.k.a. Death) pursues Paul Revere and friends through the a forest until the camera zooms into Revere’s eye and out of Ichabod’s.

Ichabod stands in Corbin’s cabin, marveling at the amount of “reserves” that Abbie has amassed from some generic fictional spin-off of Sam’s Club.  Ichabod becomes indignant over the existence of bottled water and Abbie explains that tap water has chemicals in it.  I don’t know, I like tap water just fine.  Then again, St. Louis was given the award for Best Tap Water in the U. S. for 2013 by the U. S. Conference of Mayors (though AWWA prefers Oklahoma City), so I guess I’m living in the exception to Abbie’s rule.

Abbie leaves and bumps into Morales on the street.  Things are understandably awkward, since they’re exes.  He just wants to be friends, so Abbie agrees to meet him for coffee.  Later that night, Morales wanders down an alley and finds Brooks waiting for him.  Brooks says he’s trying to protect Abbie and that Morales should stay away from him; Morales will eventually have to choose a side, Brooks mentions mysteriously, putting Morales’s gun under his chin.

After that, Ichabod leaves a majestically epic voicemail on Abbie’s phone as he goes to visit the Freemasons.  He enters a gorgeous old home and finds four decapitated Masons sitting at the dining room table when Abbie shows up and claims she’s his backup.  They hear Evil!Shadowfax neighing and find him standing outside one of the house’s enormous windows with Headless Hal in his saddle, broadax in hand.

The opening sequence has returned!  I guess it had to be cut last week because that episode was so chock-full of stuff.

Eventually, Irving shows up, as do some crime scene investigators, and Abbie and Ichabod explain about the Horseman.  Irving believes the Masons were decapitated, but still can’t buy into the Headless Horseman’s existence.  After their discussion, Ichabod rummages through the Masons’ library for some sort of answers, but finds nothing.  He goes on a tangent about how when the Horseman struck him, he thought “If I die, he’s coming with me,” and how he will make sure that happens this time because he can’t stand the thought of dying with Headless Hal still running around.  So he and Abbie decide to destroy the skull.  Irving is extremely skeptical about this idea, even though Abbie says she’ll take care of it and no one will trace it back to him.  She asks Irving to trust them; he decides to visit the lab where the skull is being examined.

At the lab, Irving talks to a meaningfully named lab tech named Paul, who says the skull exists but shows no signs of ever having life at any point.  When Paul turns away, the skull’s eyes open and Headless Hal moves in with his machine gun.  He opens fire on the lab and kills Paul, but Irving fires back and escapes with the skull.  When he returns to the station, he wants to bring NYPD in to hunt the Horseman down, but all the security cameras in the lab went down, like they did with Brooks in the holding cell.  Abbie claims they’re seen when they want to be seen.  Irving rants a bit, and it looks like he is now a firm believer in Headless Hal, Horseman Extraordinaire.  He announces that “Honestly, I wanted it to be a lie.”

After that little bit of continuity-building, Ichabod and Abbie take the head down to the tunnels to destroy it.  They try to smash it, then blow it up, but the skull remains intact.  Abbie plans to take it to a trash compactor in Terrytown, but then Ichabod notices four lanterns hanging above a parking garage.  He babbles about Paul Revere’s “one if by land, two if by sea” system, and he’s a bit surprised to find out Abbie has heard of it.  The lanterns turn out to be the Masons’ heads—the Horseman is mocking their attempts to destroy his head.  In the middle of this creepy find, Ichabod recounts how he stood guard at Sam Adam’s* and John Hancock’s* safe house when he noticed Revere being handed a manuscript with a devil’s trap** on it before his midnight ride.  Ichabod guesses that the manuscript held some information about death, whom Revere assumed was a mercenary hired by the British.  Abbie agrees that they need to find that manuscript.

*Yes, That Beer Guy and That Autograph Guy, respectively.

**A circle with a pentagram (or heptagram here) or two in it, as Supernatural fans will already know.

The next morning, Abbie and Ichabod visit a museum where they overhear a tour guide telling an elementary school class about Paul Revere, claiming he was a Renaissance man and a dentist who went to Concord and shouted “The British are coming!”  Ichabod slaps this down beautifully.  And he’s right—you learn in middle school that Revere actually shouted “The regulars are coming!” and that Samuel Prescott actually got to Concord.  Abbie interrupts him, calls him “Steve”, and claims he forgot to take his medication.  Ichabod says he’s the only one who doesn’t need any.  Abbie also says that while the manuscript is in London (“That’s three months voyage by ship,” Ichabod tells us), it has been uploaded online. Ichabod has no clue what that means, but he’s glad they can access the manuscript.

Back at the Sleepy Hollow Archives, Ichabod pokes a laptop’s keyboard and prints out the manuscript five times.  Abbie shuts the laptop and Ichabod discovers that Sam Adams wrote the manuscript in a Vigenere Cipher, so he starts decoding it.  Abbie realizes she’s out of her depth, so she goes into the tunnels, where she runs into Brooks, who claims the Horseman won’t let him go even though he’s dead.  He also says Headless Hal can’t be killed, only trapped.  Up in the archives, Ichabod realizes he’s lost without the cipher’s password until he looks into the back of the skull and finds “CICERO” carved into its teeth.  Revere apparently did that once the skull fell into American hands.  Ichabod decodes the cipher and confirms Brooks’ claim; the manuscript states that a witch is needed to turn the moon into the sun.  Abbie laments that they can’t summon Katrina, as does Ichabod (for different reasons), until she realizes they can set a trap using UV light.

They get Irving in on their plan, and that’s when Ichabod starts professing his man-crush on Thomas Jefferson.  Irving questions how Jefferson could write “all men are created equal,” Ichabod goes on the defensive, and then Abbie brings Sally Hemings into the mix.  Ichabod is floored by that revelation.  Abbie and Irving keep talking about it as they set up the trap, and this is an example of how this show introduces race in a rather organic way.

After that amusing sequence, Abbie calls Morales to cancel coffee, he’s freaked out and won’t pick up, and Abbie says they can’t be friends because of her mission with Ichabod—she’d always be canceling on him.  Ichabod says Katrina had a similar view of her relationship with him—it would distract from their roles in the Revolution.  Abbie points out that Katrina’s love brought him to the present and put her in purgatory; Ichabod grimly agrees.

Then Headless Hal shows up for his skull.  Ichabod confronts him on horseback, and a chase ensues until they land in the tunnels.  Ichabod runs, leaving Headless Hal to encounter a number of decoy skulls.  Abbie has the skulls now and runs from the Horseman.  She calls out that she has a broken ankle as Headless Hal approaches her, but it turns out that she’s is bluffing and the Horseman is now caught in the UV light trap.

This episode didn’t go as deep with the characters as the last one, but it was a ton of fun, furthering the continuity by letting Irving in on the apocalyptic secret.  It was also mentioned that he has a daughter—will that raise the stakes for him in future episode?  Maybe, but for now I’m just exciting by the prospect of questioning the Horseman.

One thing this episode was full of: Ichabod quotes!

The Wisdom of Ichabod Crane

“Do you know what we could have done with these supplies during the War?  We’d have taken Lexington in a day!”

“Dear Miss Mills,

I trust this aural missive finds you well, if it finds you at all.  I’m still trying to fathom the notion that my words are somehow recorded on to your ‘smart phone.’  After consideration, I agree that it is wholly unjust that your are prohibited from attending the Masons’ assembly; I will rectify this the moment I arrive.  Please join us as we strategize our plan of attack against the Horseman’s imminent arrival.

I am, most respectfully,

Ichabod Crane”

“Are you charged a fee for that water?  My God, it should be an inalienable right!”

“Flummoxed by a foreign concept that resembles close to nothing of what you know?  Can’t imagine how that feels.”

Sleepy Hollow airs on Mondays on FOX.