Okay, so first things first: I need all of the GIFs in the world of the look Abbie gives the Crane’s whenever they speak of the good in Henry, because I’d like to believe it’s a collective look we’re all sharing. Their notion that Henry can be saved is as dumb as Abbie believes it is. It likely will backfire, and if it doesn’t, the show will look all the more ridiculous due to how they’ve painted Henry as an irredeemable, psychotic tool of the apocalypse for the past season. The convention of a character can’t just be changed because it fits the will of the writers. Also, if we’re ever going to believe that Henry isn’t just an evil demon of hell, they had better begin to tell John Noble to cool it with the conniving glowering.
Otherwise, “Heartless” was a perfectly serviceable, entertaining episode, but very obviously filler. The succubus wasn’t just a distraction for our heroes, it was also a distraction for the audience watching and waiting for a step forward in the storyline, which is delivered is some of the episode’s final moments.
The creature of the week is a succubus. It preys on the victim’s life source and it targets people who have hidden desires. The first victim is a lone man in a night club, the next a woman for hidden affections for a friend, and then, to bring him into the fold, Hawley because of his not so secret feelings for Abbie.
At least they’re not so secret to Ichabod after they rescue Hawley from the monsters clutches.
It’s yet another interesting design for the creature, but the “siren” character, the seductress, is so redundant at this point in the science fiction and fantasy genres that if you’re going to do it, you better do it in a way that’s interesting and new.
They discover that the only way to destroy the creature is to find its heart and destroy it first. Abbie and Katrina set out to find the heart and Hawley and Ichabod go to distract the creature while they work. Ichabod takes this as time to ask Hawley about his intentions toward Abbie, which Hawley tries to play off. Ichabod only wants what is best for his friend, and as they spend more time together he begins to warm to Hawley, despite his prior misgivings.
Ichabod wanders off in search of the succubus and finds her, and she begins to leech from him his life force, saying that with her he doesn’t have to worry about losing those he loves anymore. What he desires is a trusting relationship with his wife, and it would better if it weren’t yet another instance of the writers telling us, not showing us, how powerful the love is between the Crane’s.
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Abbie and Katrina manage to stop the heart in time as Hawley and Crane kill the monster in front of them. Abbie and Katrina working together is a pairing I could get behind; both characters are so different but they complement each other wonderfully, better than Ichabod and Katrina even. Katrina tells Abbie that she knows she doesn’t trust in Katrina’s belief in Henry, and she understands why. However, she’s been through such a whirlwind of changes, and much of what she had previously believed turned out to be false, so now she’s simply holding out hope for what she believes can be. She tells Abbie that she’s going to do everything in her power to stop Moloch, but that means getting in close. She says she’s going to go back to Abraham, tell him she loves him and only him, and that this new world won’t support her now that Ichabod has settled in with someone new. It’s a great lie because it has elements of truth, and Abbie picks up on it. There’s a nice moment at the end where Abbie says she thinks Katrina makes their team better, stronger, that she had a hard time adjusting at first but she’s there now, and I am just so pleased they didn’t extend the two women clashing for much longer.
The episode ends in two pieces. Abbie patches Hawley up and delivers the news to Ichabod about Katrina, and we see Katrina return to Abraham. He brings her to Henry who shows her an infant, Moloch apparently, thriving off of the succubus’s life force that she stole.
Things are about to get crazier, it would seem.
7/10
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