SLEEPY HOLLOW Recap: 1.09 Sanctuary

This week’s episode begins with an attractive, presumably well-monied woman pulls up to an abandoned colonial home owned by her ancestors.  We eventually learn that this woman is named Lena Gilbert.  She and her bodyguard, Sam, go explore the house.  Sam doesn’t like entering a haunted house, but Lena brushes off his concerns.  Her bodyguard’s fears turn out to be correct when Lena opens a closet full of branches, which stab her hand as soon as she touches one, and then yanks her into the closet.  These seem to be the Whomping Willow’s cousin, the Butchering Branches, and they look eerily like the branches that yanked Ichabod down into the tunnels in his Katrina-induced vision in the second episode.

At the station, Ichabod complains about fast food’s desecration of the oh-so-holy “three meals per day” ritual and goes on a tangent about what the Pilgrims ate at the first Thanksgiving (note: They did not have sugar for cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie!  Turkeys were not served!), and then reveal to Abbie that he’s really brooding about how he’s alone during the holidays, though he appreciates her company.  She says she understands because she grew up without typical holiday celebrations and envied other people’s traditions.  Then Irving calls them in to let them know that Lena, who’s a billionaire author/philanthropist/socialite, has gone missing and that she wrote “Katrina C.” on a piece of paper.  Ichabod is stunned, not only by the potential Katrina connection, but also that Lena has ONE BEELLION DOLLARS, which wasn’t possible in his day.

Abbie and Ichabod look into the history of the house and Lena’s family, and find out that she’s the descendant of a man named Lachlan Fredericks, an acquaintance of Ichabod’s and a patriot who used the house as a sanctuary where he employed free black people.  After their trip through Wikipedia, they visit the house, which locks them in as soon as they enter.  They find Bodyguard Sam murdered in a chair; then Abbie spots a ghostly black woman wandering through the room.  Ichabod sees no one, but he muses about the house originally being a sanctuary against “supernatural evil,” with the possibility that Lachlan Fredericks was a warlock.  After a bit more exploring in the monster house and a flashback to Ichabod and Katrina’s visit during its heyday, they find the Butchering Branches’ closet, which Lena is still alive and entangled.  Why did the house keep her  alive but kill her bodyguard?  Does that have to do with her blood connection to the house’s former owners?  Anyway, Ichabod begins to cut her free, and the branches bleed.  Not sap, but blood.

Back at the station, Irving brings Jenny in to return the guns she’s stolen.  They have some witty banter about their adventures together last week and then she invites him to Thanksgiving dinner?  Am I the only one getting Jenny/Irving vibes here?  Apparently not, because Irving’s ex-wife, Cynthia, looks very confused when she enters his office.  She has brought Irving’s wheelchair-bound daughter, Macy, to visit.  Macy is played by Amandla Stenberg, who was Rue in The Hunger Games, which makes me a very happy camper.

Meanwhile, in Fredericks Manor, Ichabod asks Lena about the possibility of Lachlan Fredericks being a warlock and about Katrina’s visit to the house, with Abbie claiming he’s related to Katrina.  Lena looks like all this supernatural talk is clearly over her head when a new danger rears its end.  And it’s…an Ent from Hell.  With some help from the ghostly woman, Abbie discovers a secret passageway that leads behind the walls of the house, where the camera work becomes Blair Witch-esque.  Ichabod kicks his and Lena’s way out of the passageway, but when he reaches for Abbie’s hand, it turns out to be the evil Ent.  Not long after this mini-tussle with the Ent, Lena goes missing, sending Ichabod into a panic.

At the station, Jenny bumps into Rue—er, Macy, who assumes she’s dating Irving and just wants to get the initial meeting over with.  Jenny claims she doesn’t even like Irving that much, and Macy says she really doesn’t either.  Jenny says that Macy should give her dad a chance.  Then Irving talks to Cynthia, telling her that he’s not involved with Jenny.  Cynthia claims she doesn’t care about that, but she does care about how little time he’s spent with Macy.  She can’t understand why a running a small-town police force would take up so much of his time.  If only she knew.  She emphasizes his responsibility as a father, and demands full custody if he bails on Macy again.  Also, Cynthia alludes to something that “happened” that she and Macy are working through.  Maybe the something led to Macy’s wheelchair?  This is all clearly setup for Irving’s own character arc.

Back at Frederick Manor, Abbie lingers in the passageway, but the ghostly woman, who turned out to be the house matron named Grace Dixon, shows her the way out and says “It’s coming.”  Grace leads Abbie to a room where we find a woman giving birth.  That woman is Katrina, who laments having to do this without Ichabod, while Grace talks her through the pushing.  Katrina delivers a healthy baby boy, and for the first time, we see her showing genuine emotion towards characters who are not Ichabod (though he’s mentioned), which makes her seem more like a character who can stand on her own, rather than the distant, worshipped female that drives the hero’s brooding and only exists in Christopher Nolan movies.

Shortly after this vision, Abbie meets up with Ichabod and tells him what she saw.  He can’t believe that Katrina wouldn’t tell him about her pregnancy.  Abbie insists it’s true and relates that the evil in the house awakened the moment his son was born.  We see in flashback that the Ent from Hell rose up in the garden at that moment.  Abbie assumes that that particular evil hid under the ground to get under Fredericks’ anti-hex protections.  The Ent entered the house and killed Lachlan Fredericks, but Grace snuck Katrina and her son through the secret passageway.  Their fates are currently unknown.  At this point, Abbie and Ichabod find Lena caught in the Ent’s clutches.  Abbie shoots the Ent’s roots, which frees Lena and allowed them to escape the house.  As soon as they’re out, Ichabod goes back in, telling Abbie not to follow him.  He mentions his son and it’s clear that he’s in Papa Wolf mode.  He goes back in with an axe (shades of Headless Hal, anyone?) and hacks at the Ent’s roots while spouting melodramatic dialogue.  Then he chops into the creature’s body and heads back out to the van.  Ichabod is covered in blood and he doesn’t seem to care.

Later, Abbie finds Ichabod in the archives, sitting with his problems and ignoring the fact that it’s Thanksgiving.  Abbie mentions that Jenny made turkey and gluten-free pumpkin pie (can this gluten-free recapper have some?  Please?), but Ichabod is not interested.  He starts reflecting on his time in England with his father and how he hoped to have his own son and have a relationship like that, and then Abbie points out that reflection is (supposed to be) a big part of Thanksgiving, and she offers him rum.  They drink in the archives and open a package from Lena Gilbert.  It contains documents about Frederick Manor, including Grace Dixon’s family tree.  Her last descendant in the tree is Lori Roberts, who is Abbie’s mother, which explains why only Abbie could see Grace.  Ichabod muses that his and Abbie’s fates were entwined from the very beginning.  And that’s that.

*

I enjoyed this episode a lot more than last week’s.  I didn’t see the baby bombshell coming, although it makes sense in retrospect.  I assumed Katrina would have sought sanctuary more generally from Moloch after Ichabod’s near-fatal Horseman incident.  I liked this revelation because we finally got to see Katrina do something that was not directly related to Ichabod’s destiny; it was for herself and the sake of her child, so she finally seemed like she had her own existence outside of Ichabod (even though the baby was Ichabod’s child, we assume).

Irving’s subplot felt kind of crammed in, but it’s good to see that he’s getting his own character arc with his family.  This just set the stage for that story, which I’m really looking forward to, since Irving seems like he genuinely wants to be involved in his daughter’s life, but he’s so wrapped up in Sleepy Hollow’s insanity that it’s hard to make time for his personal life.  His subplot reminded me of something a former model/graduate student colleague of mine (no, that’s not an oxymoron) said to me recently about this show: “It’s Supernatural.”  But Sleepy Hollow is not Supernatural: I watched regularly into early Season 6, and SPN never allowed a subplot like Irving’s to be spliced into a Monster of the Week or an arc-based story.  All of that show’s supporting characters had to serve the Winchester Brothers’ angst in some way and characters like Bobby Singer and Castiel weren’t allowed to have their own ongoing subplots, like Irving seems to be getting.  Sleepy Hollow outdoes Supernatural by allowing a supporting character to have a life of his own, outside of serving as a tool for the two leads to use when they need something.

This episode seems designed to get new ideas going, like the baby plotline and Irving’s subplot, and I hope the show follows through on these strong introductions.

The Wisdom of Lt. Abbie Mills

(About Thanksgiving) “I’m guessing that’s what this is: the time for reflection.  You see what you have now, and you embrace what’s in front of you.”

Sleepy Hollow airs on Mondays on FOX.