sleepy hollow 2x05: and the abyss gazes back
This week on Sleepy Hollow: yoga, buns, and daddy issues. Oh, and some kind of monster thing.
Cold open begins with our heroes upside-down as Abbie tries to teach Ichabod how to do yoga -- to calm his mind, and also to strengthen his arms, abs, and buns. Ichabod gets very flustered at the frank discussion of his “double jugs.” This phrase is even better than “Franklinstein’s monster.” Anyway, Abbie pushes Ichabod into actually admitting that he’s pissed off at Katrina for lying to him all the damn time. You could even say he’s butthurt about it.
Since yoga’s not really doing it for him, they go drinking instead. Ichabod starts namedropping Founding Fathers again, so you can tell his mood’s improving. His revolutionary reminiscences are interrupted by a random bar fight, which Abbie in her awesome tininess easily breaks up. We discover that one of the brawlers is the late lamented Sheriff Corbin’s son, Joe. Hey, he had a son! Who knew? (Not the writers last season, that’s for sure.) Apparently he recently got discharged from the army, and has a hell of a chip on his shoulder about Abbie. He somehow blames her for his dad’s death? I’m not sure how that logic works, because she actually had nothing to do with Corbin’s death (he ran afoul of Headless while responding to an emergency call), but guilt by proximity, I guess.
Also there’s a weird growling creature in the woods. FYI.
Driving back from the bar, Abbie tells Ichabod that Joe wasn’t always such a colossal prick -- she used to babysit him back when he still had Superman pajamas. Ichabod is starting to catch on -- “Peter Parker? No, he’s that arachnid fellow. Clark Kent!” I’m so proud that Abbie is prioritizing geek culture in his ongoing education. Ichabod assures her that Joe’s gonna be okay, because “once a hero, always a hero,” but I’m pretty sure that rule only applies to kings and queens of Narnia. And then he self-administers a breathalyzer test for shits and giggles, so that might have just been the booze talking anyway. Abbie gets an emergency call over her police radio, so they detour up to Pioneer Point, but then SOMETHING runs across the road and they just barely manage not to crash the car. Outside, they find weird footprints and a couple of disembowelled bodies. To which I say, EWWWWW. Also they find Joe half-naked and rambling something about his dad and that “it’s gonna kill us all,” which is eminently reassuring.
The next day, Joe continues to express an unreasonable amount of resentment towards Abbie for being the favored child. He claims to have joined the army so that Corbin would be sad if he got killed. I’m really not sure why Abbie’s still rooting for this dipshit.
Hey, it’s Frank Irving! Lest we forget, he kinda sold his soul to the Horseman of War, so it’s about time he got some damn screentime. He confronts Henry about it, but Henry out-lawyers him -- always read the fine print, man -- and claims that he’ll return Irving’s soul in exchange for someone else’s. In other words, Irving has to kill somebody. Henry volunteers the asshole who caused Irving’s daughter’s accident as tribute. Irving is clearly tempted.
Over in Apocalypse HQ, Ichabod has been studying “modern woods-dwelling monsters” such as Smokey the Bear. This avenue of research has not been terribly fruitful thus far. Abbie’s been digging into Joe Corbin’s military background -- apparently he was the sole survivor of some kind of attack that wiped out the rest of his platoon, and they’d died in much the same manner as the dead guys in the woods. That rings a bell for Ichabod, because of course it does, and then he namedrops Daniel Boone, whose brother had PTSD (or, as they called it, “nostalgia”) after surviving Valley Forge and had gone a bit crazy with it, attacking people. Ichabod’s BFFs in the Shawnee tribe had called it the “curse of the wendigo” -- a type of half-human, half-beast that’s super into cannibalism. So...Joe is a wendigo now, apparently?
They go to investigate Joe’s apartment, and find a typical shitty bachelor pad, complete with mostly-empty refrigerator, dirty laundry strewn everywhere, and the TV paused mid-video game. Ichabod accidentally turns the game back on and is baffled by it. Looks like some kind of multiplayer zombie hunter game to me, which seems appropriate enough. Anyway, they also find Sheriff Corbin’s will sitting in the middle of Joe’s table, along with a clearly incorrect file that Ichabod quickly deduces to be an unsubtle code -- coordinates for Pioneer Point.
Despite the sun shining through the apartment windows in the previous scene, it’s fully night by the time they find Joe digging up an ornate box in the woods. Abbie tries to convince him to trust them, and unsurprisingly, he doesn’t. As they follow him, Ichabod trips and cuts his hand on something, and the scent of blood triggers Joe’s inner wendigo. The resulting creature looks like a werewolf on crack, with bonus antlers. Wacky fun! It chases after Ichabod, but Abbie manages to shoot it (with...tranquilizers? I think?) just in time, and it makes that universal hurt puppy noise and collapses.
After the commercial break, they’ve got the wendigo chained up underground, and that asshole Hawley’s back. Goddamnit. He seems unsure of what to do with the real live monster thing -- he’d told them he had a cure for it, but really he just meant that he knew how to kill it, not how to turn it back into Joe. Jenny turns up while he’s making eyes at Abbie -- ah yes, there’s the love triangle nobody gives a flying fuck about. Anyway, she’s been shopping at the hospital for some nummy treats for the wendigo, by which I mean human organs. Once he’s fed, he transforms back into Joe. Joe explains that this first happened over in Afghanistan, after he received a letter with some weird white powder: “Supernatural anthrax,” Abbie explains with a sigh. This is the result of all that bone-flute-grinding Henry was doing a couple of episodes back. Which, by the way, means that this whole little adventure is Hawley’s fault, since he’s the one who sold the bone to Henry in the first place. No one in the episode points this out, but I feel that they should. Stupid Hawley. Anyway, the letter promised to cure the curse in exchange for Corbin’s mysterious inheritance.
They open up the weird box to discover a flask of an unspellable but extremely potent Chinese poison, which Ichabod of course recognizes on sight. Okay, whatever. Ichabod apologizes to Joe on his son’s behalf: “Needless to say, he’s going through a rebellious phase.” Joe asks if Ichabod still loves Henry anyway; Ichabod admits that he does. This will probably fuck them over later this season. Meanwhile, Abbie’s dug up some additional reading on the wendigo, which has bad news: after four transformations, the change becomes permanent. And Joe’s already burned through three. Hawley mentions that he knows a few Shawnee, who happen to be in town at the moment; Ichabod gets all huffy and insists upon meeting them himself, since he actually knows how to talk to them. Abbie just barely manages not to bash their heads together, and orders them to just go find the damn cure already.
They don’t exactly get off to a great start with the Shawnee. The guy Hawley knows, Big Ash, is really pissed with him for having traded away a sacred mask. Ichabod intervenes, making Hawley promise to get the mask back, and uses his 18th century tribal knowledge to convince Big Ash to help them. As per usual.
Back in the underground dungeon, Abbie is still trying to bond with Joe. She shares a sweet little Corbin flashback with him, and it seems like she might actually be getting through. Which is when Henry ruins everything, as is his wont. He busts in with a handful of Hessians, demanding the bottle of mystical poison. Jenny responds by pulling her own gun on one of the minions, which...okay, you really think the Horseman of War is going to care about the life of one lousy Hessian? He smirks and admits he’s totally cool with this turning into a bloodbath. But Joe caves pretty much immediately, handing over the poison to save the sisters, and is very easily convinced to join Henry in exchange for the cure for his little curse. Henry locks the Millses in as they depart. Outside, he promptly cuts a nice long, bloody gash open on Joe’s arm, triggering the beginning of the fourth transformation. “I thought you said you’d cure me!” Joe protests. “I did,” Henry replies smugly. “The true curse is humanity.”
Seriously, has no one in Sleepy Hollow learned that deals with the devil never end well?
In the psych facility, Irving confronts the asshole (another inmate), insisting he just wants an apology for having crippled his daughter. Spoilers: the asshole isn’t sorry. I do think Irving is justified in his homicidal rage here. I also want to know if we’re ever actually gonna see his wife or daughter again, but that would require an episode to actually focus on his character, so I’m not getting my hopes up. Anyway, Irving has a crisis of conscience before he actually kills the guy, realizing (correctly) that this is exactly what Henry wants him to do.
Ichabod and Hawley burst into the dungeon, relieved to find the Mills sisters unhurt. They’ve got the cure, which is to use an obsidian knife to get some of Joe’s blood into a skull and recite the incantation inscribed on said skull. Fortunately, this should work even if Joe’s transformed again, so long as he hasn’t fed yet. Hawley balks at the idea of hunting the wendigo, claiming he didn’t know that was part of the plan; Ichabod points out that not only did the Shawnee shaman tell them that, but it’s literally written on the skull they’re carrying. Hawley points out that he doesn’t fucking speak Shawnee and hadn’t actually been a part of any of those conversations. His new nickname for Ichabod is “Dances With Wendigos.”
And so they all go wendigo hunting. Abbie decides to lure him in by cutting her hand; Ichabod, affronted, does the same, because he’s not letting her be wendigo bait without him. Then they basically run around town until nightfall waving their bloody hands in the air. Such a cunning plan. Hawley and Jenny arm up, in case the curse can’t be lifted, and have a fraught moment in which Jenny confronts him about why exactly he’s still in town. (I’m wondering the same thing.) But then the wendigo joins the party, thankfully, so we can stop pretending to care about Hawley’s crush on Abbie. Ichabod manages to slash the creature’s arm, the blood makes the skull light up, and he recites the Shawnee chant. And nothing happens. AWKWARD. Abbie refuses to give up on Joe, though, and won’t let Ichabod kill him. This time, she’s right -- I guess the curse-breaking chant just works on a time delay or something, because the wendigo transforms back into Joe, and all is well.
The next day, Abbie introduces Joe to Apocalypse HQ, and I briefly worry that he’s going to join the team. Fortunately, he’s applying to Quantico instead. Thank god, one less dickish white dude for me to deal with every week. But to my delight, we discover that Ichabod is now addicted to online gaming -- and he lets loose a magnificently inventive stream of profanity at being fragged by two other gamers. Aw, Ichabod, don’t take it so personally -- it’s not you, it’s just about ethics in game journalism. Then Abbie gets a call from Irving, reminding us all that a major character is still in deep shit and nobody’s doing anything about it. Despite Irving’s ominous warning -- sounds like he’s getting in more trouble due to his attack on his fellow inmate -- Ichabod tells Abbie that he doesn’t want to give up on Henry, much like she couldn’t give up on Joe. Um, Joe was cursed, that was legitimately not his fault. Henry chose to be an evil bag of dicks. Also, he’s currently doing some kind of super creepy thing with the uber-poison, and the whole mess of it transforms into a scary-looking spider.
A spider which then goes crawling into Katrina’s mouth, and I am so grossed out right now, I can’t even. Well, this bodes well for next week.
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