“The impossible becomes our reality.”
When it comes to the show Sleepy Hollow, you have to accept just how ridiculous the premise of the entire thing is. Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) awakens from a 250 year slumber to learn that his wife is in purgatory, the Headless Horseman wishes him dead, and the if he doesn’t partner up with a young Lieutenant, Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), then hell will open up and devour the world.
We’re given a brief recap of what happened at the end of season one: Abbie and Ichabod learned that Henry (John Noble) was actually Ichabod and Katrina’s (Katia Winter) son Jeremy, who was also, inconveniently for them, the second horseman who works closely with Moloch (the big baddie of the show). At the end of season one it seemed that Abbie had been forced into purgatory, Ichabod buried alive, and Katrina captured after escaping her purgatory prison.
However, when the season two premiere begins we’re told that Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood), Abbie’s sister, and Katrina have both been killed by Henry and a year has passed since the events.
More often than not when it comes to this show, I find myself staring at the screen in bewilderment of what’s going on, and it seems that hasn’t changed.
The show gives us no time to truly digest any given scene as we’re thrust back into their world with a touching scene between Abbie and Ichabod. It’s his birthday and she’s trying to celebrate it. She tells him that the two of them have been through so much in the past year that they should be allowed a moment of peace. Obviously the audience is being kept from a bit of truth about the duo’s situation, as once Ichabod and Abbie go to hunt the Headless Horseman they discover he was looking for a key, and due to Ichabod’s ties to the past he realizes it belonged to Ben Franklin, whom we learn in a running joke Ichabod detested.
He tells Abbie that Franklin hadn’t been testing his theory of electricity with the key on the kite but instead had been trying to destroy it, because this is Sleepy Hollow, a show that plays it loose with historical facts and that’s why we love it and all of its campy charm. Ichabod tells Abbie that the key had the ability to open a door between worlds; a key into purgatory. They need to find it before any of Moloch’s crew does. However, this means that they’ll have to confront Henry, whom they have imprisoned.
It’s once they meet with Henry that the world the creators have built for the opening begins to deteriorate and the truth is learned. The sense of peace had been a mirage, and Abbie is still in purgatory and Ichabod is still buried alive with Henry as the person with the most control. Ichabod yells to Abbie that he will find her after finding the key, and the two are separated, both to awaken in different levels of hell.
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Thus begins a race against the clock as Ichabod must obtain the key before any forces of evil reach it. He builds a makeshift explosive in his coffin and blows a hole through the layers of earth and climbs himself out. He ends up on the highway in a mirrored image to the first time we met him on the show. Before racing off to find the key, he must rescue Jenny, who’s been captured by Henry. However, being the badass that she is, Jenny manages to do a pretty good job escaping on her own. Jenny has a greater knowledge of where the key is located and they team up in order to rescue Abbie.
Which, of course, they do by the episode’s end because the show lives and breathes on the adorable chemistry between their leads Mison and Beharie and their ability to bring some humor to the silliest of dialogue or moments.
While it’s not quite up to par with the best of what season one brought us, it’s only the first episode, and it did a serviceable job at expanding the world, re-introducing characters and setting up the future plights that Abbie and Ichabod will find themselves battling.
Ichabod manages to rescue Abbie from purgatory without releasing any unwanted entities. Abbie learns while there that Moloch is building an army of those in the in-between world, those he can control and whose free will have diminished. Fitting with the title of the episode “This is War”, Moloch plans to launch an all-out war with the living, and it’s Abbie and Ichabod’s job to stop it.
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Aside from the main plot we have the B-storyline with Katrina and her captor, who we learn through a magic amulet that shows his face is a man from her past. Katrina is still easily the weak spot on the show. With so few scenes between her and Ichabod it’s hard to read any palpable emotion or chemistry between the two. Her being captured allows for her to still be separated from the main action, and at this point it’s hard to decide whether that’s a good or bad thing.
The heart of the show, though, is Ichabod and Abbie, who work the odd couple setup and have created one of the most interesting pairings on primetime television. The show is more confusing than it ever needs to be and the dialogue is hokey, but it’s all worth it when you get to see these two. Despite people like Jenny and Katrina in their lives they are, ultimately, alone in a sense, despite having one another. They have (quite literally) the weight of the world on their shoulders and have bonded due to it. Some of their scenes shouldn’t work (and ones such as them running and chanting against an obvious green screen is one that nearly doesn’t), but they infuse just the right amount of charisma to hold our attention.
The episode ends with Henry being gifted with an armor to bond his soul with, and we learn that war is about to begin in earnest. And so sets off the beginning of season two.
What were your favorite bits of tonight’s episode? Let us know in the comments.
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The Best of Ichabod Crane:
~He isn’t impressed by the rules for celebrating birthdays in modern society.
~He is impressed that Harvard University is still around.
~He has learned how to record videos on his phone.
~”I’ll consider myself punked.”
~Hated Ben Franklin.
7/10
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