Sleepy Hollow: "For the Triumph of Evil"
So this week’s Sleepy Hollow changed tracks a little, or at least it felt like it did. This time around the focus is on Abbie, giving us more insight into her background and relationship to her sister whilst Ichabod plays a supporting role (and Katrina is nowhere to be seen). Ironically, though it has a much stronger and memorable villain than last week, the story is also a bit clunky - at least the middle bit is.
Nightmare demons are nothing new, I’ve seen them in everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Torchwood, from Charmed to Justice League, but this was a nice spin on the old tale. The Sandman isn’t just going to spook people when they’re asleep, but also works as a sort of demonic judge and jury, forcing people to confront their guilty consciences and driving them to suicide because of it.
The character design of the elongated fingers and hollow eye-sockets and sealed mouth and sand pouring from every orifice was beautifully done, though I can’t help but suspect that somewhere behind the scenes there’s a big fan of Pan’s Labyrinth (the Pale Man, anyone?)
Having the episode start with Abbie experiencing a prophetic dream made for a great hook, particularly when she started connecting the dots and realizing that it all came back to her experience when she was a child. Or more specially, how she handled that experience as a child and what it meant for her relationship with her sister. I liked how the episode framed both sides of her predicament: on the one hand, Ichabod points out that she was very young and afraid, and so it’s difficult not to sympathise with her decision to keep her mouth shut. On the other hand, she knows deep down that she betrayed her sister and that Jenny is the one who told the truth, leading to the very real feelings of guilt that the demon preyed on.
That’s what I like about this sisterly dynamic. In any other story, Jenny would be the protagonist; the “crazy woman” who was dismissed and locked away, the Sarah Connor who works out in prison while awaiting the end of days, the one who makes a dramatic escape in order to head out and save the world. Instead it’s Abbie, the girl who did the wrong thing, who is our main character and who now has to cope with the consequences of her decision. Though it’s easy to understand why she lied, I’m glad that the show is making it tough for her to work through these issues, and it’s clear that she still has a long way to go before reconciliation with Jenny. It’s an interesting twist on the “mercy versus justice” theme, in which Abbie still isn’t going to be let off the hook for what she did in understandable circumstances.
The unfolding mystery was nicely played-out, with immediate hints given out in the dream as to Abbie’s guilty/doubtful conscience (“she didn’t do anything wrong…did she?”) and the accusatory nature of the other people in the room (Vega, Irving, Ichabod and finally the Sandman himself, each one shifting their attention more exclusively on Adult!Abbie).
But I’m going to assume that the flashbacks to the interrogation room were filtered through Abbie’s guilty and warped memories of the place, as I find it hard to believe that Jenny would have been forcibly dragged from the room like that (or that they were even in an interrogation cell to begin with).
By the time Abbie wakes up and reaches the jumper on the ledge, it’s obvious that it’s going to be Vega, to the point where we really didn’t need to get that split-second flashback to her dream. Everything worked much better later on in Ichabod and Abbie’s shared dream, when Ichabod walks into the police station and sees Vega, Gillespie and an empty noose hanging from the ceiling - that summed up the whole situation without any need to spell it out for us.
It was about the time that Ichabod and Abbie went after Mr Gillespie that the plot began to get a bit wonky. First of all, the whole “hostage crisis” sequence went on for far too long and resulted in Abbie and Ichabod realizing things that the audience had already figured out for themselves ten minutes ago (and had Ichabod needlessly run through the police line only to do nothing in the resolution of the situation).
Secondly, what was with that odd little sequence in which Mr Gillespie snags his leg on a nail, blots it with a cloth, and then sets it aside in a close-up shot so that the audience can see that a Native American symbol has seeped into it? Why did his blood do that? That symbol was meant to act as protection from the Sandman, so why does it appear when he’s being haunted by it? And Ichabod and Abbie never find it (Abbie tracks down the identity of the Sandman by researching dream demons) so why even do it in the first place?
Plus the actor playing Mr Gillespie wasn’t all that good. Did he look particularly scared or horrified or guilt-ridden to you?
Then after they’ve identified the Sandman as a Native American spirit of retribution, Ichabod states that they need to find a Mohawk shaman. Now, I’m not even an American let alone a Native American, so I’m not even remotely qualified to speculate on the veracity of what happened in this sequence, but from a purely narrative point-of-view, it’s remarkably silly for Ichabod and Abbie to go to a random Native American car-dealer under the automatic assumption that he would be able to provide the shamanic services they needed. But hey, what do you know - this guy has a sweat lodge outside of town filled with Native American paraphernalia. And he doesn’t mind leaving work in the middle of the day in order to help them out free of charge. And he lets Ichabod guilt-trip him with the old “all it takes is for one good man to do nothing” adage even though if their little foray into the spirit world had failed, he would have been left with two dead bodies full of drugs and scorpion venom to dispose of.
Thankfully it all got back on track with the third act in which Abbie literally faces her demons and rescues Ichabod from the Sandman. The atmosphere of the forest was particularly well down, especially the surrealism of Ichabod coming across the red door of the police precinct in the middle of the trees.
But if anything, it was Ichabod who was slightly ill-served by this script, for at this point the writers are running the risk of making him a bit too good to be true. His transition into modern life is marked out by a few comedy sequences of him trying to cope with new technology and fast food, but there’s no indication of trauma or shock or fear whatsoever. Now granted, this is a fairly light-weight supernatural/horror show, so obviously they’re not going to delve too deeply into the mental state of a person thrown out of their time, but his flippant attitude in regards to his wife and all his long-dead friends means that he’s bordering on Dissonant Serenity. I mean, how does he feel about being trapped in the 21st century? Does he miss his own time? Is he curious about what’s happened between then and now? There are some nice little touches here and there (such as him referring to the secretary as a “charwoman”) but in this episode he comes across as far too confident and calm. Hopefully we’ll get a quiet scene in an upcoming episode in which he’s allowed to be angry or melancholy or heck, even interested about what’s happened to him.
That said, this episode’s theme of truth and trust was well served by his established personality, especially in contrast with Abbie’s. Abbie is all about the lie she told as a child and how it destroyed her relationship with her sister (and almost her own life), yet Ichabod practically beams conviction and honesty and sincerity. It’s almost his superpower, as it allows him to connect with people and read body language and draw out information, as we saw him doing with both Jenny and Abbie. It’s rare to see such intuitiveness in a male character, but whether it’s pre-emptively answering Abbie’s questions or instinctively knowing when she’s holding back, it’s a great character trait that has the added bonus of nudging the plot along.
Miscellaneous
In the opening sequence Irving states that Ichabod is interrogating a witness and I rolled my eyes because - no way. I’m still not entirely sure in what capacity Ichabod is “working” for the police force, but at least this detail was the first clue that Abbie was dreaming.
That said, I thought it was interesting that Ichabod took on a threatening persona in her dream, and it kind of matched up with Ichabod’s insistence throughout the episode that she divulge the truth to him. And that said, the white-eyed Ichabod in her dream was also the one to give her a clue as to how to defeat the Sandman: “the truth will set you free.”
I don’t know what the script is calling for, but when Abbie mentions that she had a dream about him, Tom Mison plays his lines in a flirtatious tone. Don’t deny it.
So will these prophetic dreams be a staple part of Abbie’s life now that she’s the Second Witness as identified in Revelation?
That was a pretty realistic jump that Mrs Vega took out the building.
Abbie gets ticked off when Ichabod lifts the police tape for her. Heh.
I like that the sisters are called Abigail and Jennifer Mills. These names have an old-fashioned quality when said in full, though are easily modernised by calling them Abbie and Jenny. That said, I like that Ichabod refers to Jenny as “Miss Jenny”.
“It’s all over but the crying.” Great spooky line from Jenny!
There were other lines here and there that fitted in neatly with the theme of the episode, namely Ichabod’s “you’re secret is in the way of a truth that we must uncover” and “I’m too tired to lie.”
The receptionist that Abbie spoke to is the same one that gave Jenny her pills last week. I’m betting she’s up to something… there’s just something shifty about her if you ask me.
This show loves those quirky “upside down” shots, where a scene either begins or ends with the camera revolving 360 on its establishing shots. So far there’s been one each episode.
Ditto the recurring image of the cracked mirrors, which I suspect is less of a stylistic feature and more of a deliberate motif that we should be paying close attention to.
All the buildings in this show are beautiful, especially the brick facades.
It was very sweet that Ichabod immediately decides to trail Abbie through the dream-world, though I’m surprised that the demons (or whatever else is in there) didn’t try to distract him with a vision of Katrina. Though seeing the state of the fandom at the moment, perhaps that would have just added fuel to the already-rampant ship wars.
They give us a scene of Ichabod discovering Red Bull but not television?
I’ll admit, right at the end there I was afraid that Abbie would enter her sister’s room only to find her hanging from the ceiling. (After all, there was that foreshadowing of the third noose in her dreams). But nope, Jenny and Abbie’s reconciliation with her will have to wait for another day. Whew.
So in short, this episode was a nice character-study for Abbie, answered some question about what happened to her and her sister, and provided a nice hook for next week. There were a lot of the usual horror tropes at work here: nightmares, strange eyes, suicides, sleep deprivation and so on, all of them so overused that I wasn’t actually scared at any point, but I enjoyed the elegant way it was strung together. Basically: a better villain in a weaker story than last time, but still plenty to look forward to.