SLEEPY HOLLOW Recap: 1.11 The Vessel

Tonight, we begin in Corbin’s cabin with Ichabod IN MODERN CLOTHING!!!  Yes, the moment fans have waited and whined for comes to pass…only for Ichabod to give up and go back to his old clothing after about thirty seconds of Abbie’s skinny jeans nonsense.  That’s too bad because Tom Mison wears tight pants like a boss.

While Ichabod frets over his clothes, Abbie posits that Moloch may be trapping them in a “boondoggle—an exercise in futility.”  Ichabod thinks this is possible.  Abbie also wants him to consider dry-cleaning his jackets, and Ichabod’s just glad that he recognizes those words.

Over at the station, Irving  watches an officer interrogate the possessed hot dog vendor from the last episode.  Since the vendor is no longer possessed, he has no clue why he’s being questioned.  Irving is adamant that this man threatened Macy, so he tells Morales and Jones (nee Rosenthal in previous recaps) to find the (now-possessed) woman the vendor bumped into in the park.  The possessed woman comes to the station and transfers the demon to an officer, who calls Irving and tells him to offer up Washington’s Bible by sundown or the demons will take Macy.  Irving goes full-paranoid and attacks the officer, who is no longer possessed by this point.  After that, Irving consults his priest and then Abbie and Ichabod in the Archives.  They agree to help, so they start looking up possession in Corbin’s research.

Abbie unearths a video Corbin filmed that shows a possessed woman who couldn’t control her actions in that state.  This woman turns out to be a 19-year-old Jenny, and the demon wanted to use her to kill Abbie.  Abbie confronts Jenny about it.  Jenny admits to it, and then bolts from the Archives, but sits in her car until Ichabod comes out to comfort her (and picks up one of her bras that he finds in her car for a bit of fanservice and culture clash).  Jenny tells Ichabod that people thought her possessed behavior meant she was just incredibly troubled, and that when she found out what the demon’s purpose was, she kept getting arrested so that she would be locked away in order to protect her sister.

Meanwhile, Irving moves Macy and Cynthia into a safe house, taking Morales, Jones, and the priest with him.  Jones transfers the demon to Morales when they arrive.  Then the priest sprinkles salt on the doorways, blocking possessed!Morales’ entry to the house, so he tricks Jones into wiping the salt away.  Then he kills Jones and enters the safe-house with a dangerous smirk on his face.  Excuse me while I lament for Jones/Rosenthal.  We hardly knew ye, dear!

Back at the Archives, Abbie and Ichabod rewatch the video of Jenny’s possession.  Ichabod discovers both the remote’s pause button and the circle of salt beneath Jenny’s chair, which trapped the demon.  Jenny arrives just in time to help decode the demon’s cryptic babbling.  He was speaking in Aramaic, saying, “Ancitif cannot be defeated,” before Corbin blasted him back to hell. (pronunciation: An-SEE-tiff)  It turns out that Ancitif can only be defeated by a late-17th/early-18th century (Louis XIV’s era) French lantern that some nuns used with success in the 1700s.  Luckily, this lantern fell into Benjamin Franklin’s hands during his time in France, and Jenny knows who has it now.

At the safe house, Irving has a heart-to-heart with Cynthia just before nightfall, when Ancitif locks him out of the house and possesses Macy.

Abbie, Jenny, and Ichabod go to get the lantern from some Timothy McVeigh-esque militant dudes that she trained with for a while.  She talks them through their break in, but as soon as Abbie and Ichabod have the lantern, the militants confront them with guns at the ready.  Their leader, a man named Weaver, quotes a sermon that Ichabod knows, so Ichabod tries to convince him that they’ll use the lantern against the fires of hell and then return it.  Weaver doesn’t care, but Jenny gets them out by claiming she’s the better shot and because Weaver claims he could never tell her no.  So Abbie and Ichabod escape with the lantern and head for Irving’s safe along with Jenny.

Irving and the priest try to hold Ancitif off, but the demon kills the priest and forces Irving to take him to the Archives to find Washington’s Bible.  He does so, but the Bible isn’t there anymore.  By now, Macy looks less like Amandla Stenberg and more like a wild cat of some sort.  Ancitif attacks Cynthia and Irving until Jenny enters.  He barrages her with bad dialogue until Abbie enters.  She calls Ancitif a cowards and dares him to possess her, thus tricking him into entering the salt circle.  The Ichabod appears, brandishing the lantern and chanting the incantation Corbin used in the video.  He vanquishes Ancitif and Macy reverts to her adorable self, much to her parents’ relief.

Then Abbie and Jenny share a sisterly hug.  Abbie now knows about Jenny’s sacrifice for her, since Ichabod told her about it during their Wacoland break-in.

It turns out that Ichabod moved Washington’s Bible to Corbin’s cabin, because he anticipated that Irving might try to give in so he could protect his family.  Now Ichabod is mixing a homemade potion that will reveal some invisible ink he found in the Bible, which Abbie recognizes from a forensic class she took.  The potion reveals a date written on one of the pages in George Washington’s own hand: December 18, 1799.  Abbie points out that Washington died on December 14, 1799.  She and Ichabod think this means that Washington didn’t really die on that date.  I think it means that he wrote down December 18, 1799 before his death as some kind of warning.  We’ll find out next week in the SEASON FINALE!!!

*

This episode was more action and less exposition, which I liked.  I also liked that it shifted the focus back to Abbie and Jenny after several Ichabod-centric episodes.  The Abbie-centric episodes are stronger overall because they rely less heavily on flashbacks and delve into more recent/current relationships.  I do wish the demonic possession looked less overtly like Regan from The Exorcist, but that’s a fairly small point.  This was a fun episode, and now I’m super-excited for next week’s finale!

Sleepy Hollow airs on Mondays on FOX.