oh dear.
Oh, Sleepy Hollow, we were getting to be friends...until you made a plot point out of having the people from the lost colony of Roanoke - people from the late sixteenth century - speaking Middle English. What the heck, guys, really.
...It wouldn't have been *so* bad if it had just been an offhand mention; I mean, if you're doing a show with a lot of historical facts, you ought to make heavy use of a(n) historical advisor, or at least, you know, Google and basic history books, but a lot of people seem to be under the impression that Shakespeare wrote in Old English, I guess because it is English and it is old, so whatever. But when you go through all the trouble of making Ichabod the only person who can communicate with these people because he can speak Middle English (don't even ask; that is my motto for this show), and therefore including dialogue supposedly in Middle English, then shouldn't you, I don't know, check to make sure you actually know what Middle English is and when it was spoken, before going ahead on that path? I'm trying to imagine the situation where they asked some expert how to say these particular lines of dialogue in Middle English, and didn't ask for any other info from the expert, and I *can* imagine that (although it is a *terrible* idea), but I can't imagine just not looking it up in the first place. I mean, at a certain point during the writing of this episode, when you look up Roanoke on Google, and the *first* sentence in the Wikipedia article that I didn't even have to click on because I could read it from the Google page says that it was a late 16th-century colony founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, someone should be able to go, "...you know, I don't think they were speaking like this in Queen Elizabeth's time? On account of how I can totally understand the words in stuff like Shakespeare and the King James Bible?" And the extras were wearing relatively appropriate period clothing (I...may have started yelling "Why is that child speaking Middle English and wearing slops, this is ridiculous" at my screen at one point), so, just, you know, WHAT. Why get that research right and then just bail on the linguistic stuff, when it totally wasn't necessary in the first place? How did you write a line where Abbie says "This kid looks like he just stepped off the Mayflower," and not go "...you know, I also do not think that the Pilgrims spoke like this? On account of all the US History classes ever?" What even, Sleepy Hollow. What even.
...It wouldn't have been *so* bad if it had just been an offhand mention; I mean, if you're doing a show with a lot of historical facts, you ought to make heavy use of a(n) historical advisor, or at least, you know, Google and basic history books, but a lot of people seem to be under the impression that Shakespeare wrote in Old English, I guess because it is English and it is old, so whatever. But when you go through all the trouble of making Ichabod the only person who can communicate with these people because he can speak Middle English (don't even ask; that is my motto for this show), and therefore including dialogue supposedly in Middle English, then shouldn't you, I don't know, check to make sure you actually know what Middle English is and when it was spoken, before going ahead on that path? I'm trying to imagine the situation where they asked some expert how to say these particular lines of dialogue in Middle English, and didn't ask for any other info from the expert, and I *can* imagine that (although it is a *terrible* idea), but I can't imagine just not looking it up in the first place. I mean, at a certain point during the writing of this episode, when you look up Roanoke on Google, and the *first* sentence in the Wikipedia article that I didn't even have to click on because I could read it from the Google page says that it was a late 16th-century colony founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, someone should be able to go, "...you know, I don't think they were speaking like this in Queen Elizabeth's time? On account of how I can totally understand the words in stuff like Shakespeare and the King James Bible?" And the extras were wearing relatively appropriate period clothing (I...may have started yelling "Why is that child speaking Middle English and wearing slops, this is ridiculous" at my screen at one point), so, just, you know, WHAT. Why get that research right and then just bail on the linguistic stuff, when it totally wasn't necessary in the first place? How did you write a line where Abbie says "This kid looks like he just stepped off the Mayflower," and not go "...you know, I also do not think that the Pilgrims spoke like this? On account of all the US History classes ever?" What even, Sleepy Hollow. What even.