If you like revisionist history, scary monsters, convoluted explanations, and Bible study (and who doesn’t), you are no doubt enjoying Sleepy Hollow, now in its second season. Episode recaps will resume this week, but in the meantime, let’s take a fond look back at season 1, starting at the very beginning.
Episode 1: Same Place, Different Time
Picture it: Sleepy Hollow, New York, 1781. Ichabod Crane, a British soldier-turned-American spy, decapitates a Hessian soldier riding horseback and is also mortally wounded. He and the now-headless Horseman awaken in the same town in 2013, setting the scene for some fish-out-of-water comedy. As one of his first acts, the Horseman kills local sheriff August Corbin. Ichabod is soon discovered being a weird guy lurking around the crime scene.
Our hero
Predictably, he is charged with the murder and arrested by Officer Andy Brooks (John Cho of Harold and Kumar fame). When Ichabod is questioned by the police, he asserts that he is innocent and actually from the 1700s. Since he passes a lie detector and everyone knows the “It’s not a lie if you believe it” rule, the po po conclude that he is insane. Corbin’s former partner, Lieutenant Abbie Mills, an improbably pretty policewoman of the sort that abound on television, begs to be the one that gets to drive him to the loony bin.
Seriously, the people in my neighborhood never looked like this:
Lieutenant Abigail Mills, Sleepy Hollow
Or this:
Detective Kate Beckett, Castle
Or this:
Detective Rosa Diaz, Brooklyn Nine-Nine
On the way to the mental hospital, Abbie and Ichabod decide to take a little side trip to the cave where Ichabod first awakened. In the cave, they discover a Bible once belonging to George Washington with a passage marked from “The Book of Revelations” (sic), leading them to realize that the Headless Horseman is actually Death itself, the first of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.
It’s heady stuff, but Abbie drops Ichabod off at the nuthatch anyway. As he sleeps, his wife Katrina comes to him in a dream.
Ichabod’s wife was a real witch
In the dream, Katrina tells Ichabod what’s going on. As it turns out, it is imperative that the Horseman not be reunited with his head, which is, conveniently enough, buried in her grave.
Meanwhile, back at the station, Abbie snoops around and finds Sheriff Corbin’s secret stash of files on occultism in Sleepy Hollow. Since much of what’s there corroborates Ichabod’s story and since she and her sister Jennifer saw some strange stuff in Sleepy Hollow when they were kids, Abbie has a change of heart and decides to bust Ichabod out of the bin. She arrives just in time, too, because the doctors are just about to shoot him full of downers so he’ll stop raving like a lunatic.
Our dynamic duo leave the institution and go to seek out the head in question. In taking possession of it, they have to fight Andy, who turns out to be working for the Horseman. Since our heroes win and Andy fails to get the head, a demonic creature comes to confront him. The demon breaks Andy’s neck, snapping it backward and leaving him dead and looking for all the world like a Pez dispenser.
Mmm, cherry-flavored chalk
I wonder what will happen next week.
Episode 2: That Time of the Month
Ichabod is dreaming of Katrina again. In the dream, she tells him, “Before the four horsemen will ride, an army of evil make way for their arrival. The first dark spirit rises with the blood moon.” But then again, doesn’t it always?
At the station, Abbie and police captain Frank Irving are discussing the deaths of Corbin and Andy. Clearly something mysterious is going on and Ichabod is a witness to it. Captain Irving reluctantly allows Abbie to work with Ichabod, even though he thinks they’re both crazy.
Back at the morgue, Andy is reanimated and ordered to bring a witch called Serilda of Abbadon back to life. He gets his head on straight (literally) and resurrects her from the dead. Unfortunately, she looks like this:
To return to her original form, she will have to gather the ashes of the descendants of the magistrate who burned her for witchcraft. In some cases, those ashes can just be nabbed from existing urns, but in others, they will have to be “made” (i.e., any living descendants of the magistrate will have to be killed and burned). Then, on the night of the blood moon, she will be able to stick those ashes to her bones and get her body back, because that’s just how that works. With Andy’s help, she goes about the task.
Abbie gets called to investigate Serilda’s first victim. The victim’s burned, claw-marked body reminds Ichabod of similar bodies found during a blood moon back in his time. General Washington (as in George) had investigated and believed the carnage to be the work of Serilda of Abbadon.
Now that our heroes know who the culprit is, they want to look her up in Corbin’s files. Since Ichabod will be hanging out at the police station a lot, Abbie feels that he needs a cover story. He decides to pretend to be a history professor who speaks in anachronisms, wears clothes from the 18th century, and continually expresses surprise at things like the price and even the existence of donuts, all of which seems plausible enough.
Abbie and Ichabod find Corbin’s office empty, so they figure his stuff has been moved to the archive building. Not wishing to attract attention to themselves, they decide to sneak in. The same building was used as an armory back in Ichabod’s time, and he knows a secret passageway. In the tunnel, they find some boxes of gunpowder and the bones of executed witches. Grisly. Proceeding to the archives, they locate Corbin’s files. Reading his file on Serilda, they figure out what she is up to.
Serilda has now finished the task of gathering the ashes of the magistrate’s descendants. She shows up at the tunnel containing her bones and begins to performing the restoration ritual, but just as she is coming back to life, Ichabod and Abbie find her and blow her up with gunpowder.
Everybody loves explosions, even in the 1700s
Later, while Ichabod and Abbie are debriefing and deciding what to do next, Abbie has a vision in which Sheriff Corbin tells her, “Don’t be afraid of Number 49.” In the next scene, we see what “Number 49” is: a room number in a mental hospital. And that’s where Abbie’s sister Jenny is now, working out obsessively and pretending she doesn’t see monsters anymore.
Episode 3: For the Triumph of Ethnic Stereotypes
Abbie is called out to the scene of a woman standing on the ledge of a tall building, threatening to commit suicide. The woman says she will only speak with Abbie Mills. When Abbie gets up there, it is revealed that the woman is Dr. Maura Vega, the psychiatrist who originally had Abbie’s sister committed, even though she knew Jenny was telling the truth about having seen a demon. Admitting her guilt, she jumps to her death, landing right on top of some poor bastard’s car.
This is going to be hard to clean
Guess who kills himself next? It’s Mr. Gillespie, a rancher who also saw the same demon the Mills sisters saw and who, like Dr. Vega and Abbie, never admitted the truth and let Jenny be labeled a crazy person. Oh, and both Vega and Gillespie had white, glazed-over eyes filled with sand, which pretty much proves that something supernatural is afoot and they weren’t just coincidentally feeling suicidally guilty about the same thing at the same time. Instead, their guilt has been helped along by a spirit called the Sandman, or Ro’kenhronteys according to the Mohawks.
Two down. Guess who’s destined to be the third? Abbie is afraid the Sandman will kill her in her sleep, so she decides to chug Red Bull and stay awake forever. Ichabod drinks it too, just to be a sport. It’s basically the same plot as all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Eventually, they decide they need a better plan and visit the only Mohawk Indian they can think of, the owner of a used car lot called (I kid you not) Geronimotors.
When Abbie and Ichabod first bring up Ro’kenhronteys, the guy is all like, “So, just because I’m a Native American, you think I’m going to, what, take you to a sweat lodge, brew you up some magic tea, place scorpions on your bellies, say some mumbo jumbo, and send you into the dream world to fight the evil spirit?”
Oh, right
In the dream world, Abbie finds the Sandman, a tall creature with vacant black eyes. It’s trying to tell her something.
The spirit’s lack of mouth makes it mondo hard to understand
She of course shoots at it futilely, because people never learn. Abbie eventually gleans that all she really needs to do is admit that she saw the demon and that she did her sister wrong. Once she does so, the spirit turns to glass, which she easily shatters.
Abbie and Ichabod come back to reality (as it were), and Abbie decides she needs to make amends with Jenny. Arriving at Room 49 in the mental hospital, Abbie finds it empty. Jenny has escaped.
Episode 4: I Know I Hate it When I Lose My Keys and Have to Go to Work
Abbie and Ichabod track Jenny down to a cabin that belonged to Sheriff Corbin.
Um, hi
After some awkward family tension, Jenny reveals that she and Corbin were special friends, that he often sent her on secret overseas missions involving arms training (during her rare times out of the loony bin), and that Corbin visited her the night before his death and asked her to retrieve a certain mystical object from the cabin in case of his untimely demise.
Looking around, it seems the place contains a can of Spam, a Big Mouth Billy Bass, and oh yes, a magical sextant that doubles as a projector. When our trio shine a light through the sextant, it shows a map of Sleepy Hollow marking the location of The Lesser Key of Solomon, a book of black magic with instructions for opening a doorway to the seventh circle of Hell. (Ingenious! I know I always forget where I put my keys.)
Members of a secret society of Hessian soldiers who have been living in Sleepy Hollow all along burst into the cabin and fire on our heroes.
Ichabod shoots like a girl
Since our heroes only seem to be able to aim at creatures that bullets can’t hurt, the Hessians get away with the sextant. Our heroes manage to capture and question one of the Hessians, who reveals that the real head honcho in charge of all the recent trouble in Sleepy Hollow is Moloch, the demon Abbie and Jenny saw as children.
Everyone races to the Lesser Key of Solomon, which is housed in an old church. The Hessians have gotten there first and are enacting the ritual to make the doorway. As one of the Hessians reads the words of the spell, the baptismal font bubbles over like a pot of spaghetti on a hot stove, only with demons instead of noodles.
Totally should have turned this down to medium
A fight ensues, and Abbie manages to get her hands on the magic book and throw it into the bubbling cauldron. When she does, the doorway closes and the demons get sucked back into Hell. Another crisis narrowly averted.
Abbie and Jenny sort of make up, and Abbie arranges to have Jenny recommitted to the psychiatric hospital, with the promise that she will be able to get out after six more months of good behavior.
Episode 5: There Once Was a Boy from Roanoke Isle…
A sickly boy wearing colonial clothing and suffering from a strange disease is discovered in the woods of Sleepy Hollow and taken to a local hospital. The boy, whose name is Thomas, speaks Middle English, so no one but Ichabod understands him. Thomas says that he lost his way in the woods, but he lives in Roanoke. Ichabod surmises that he means the lost colony of Roanoke, an early English settlement in America from which all the colonists mysteriously disappeared.
Tracing Thomas’ steps through the woods, Abbie and Ichabod find a colonial village. The people living there all have signs of the disease (namely, ugly black veins), but they don’t seem to be suffering any other ill effects.
Black veins are all the rage in Roanoke!
One of the colonists tells our heroes that the original Roanoke was cursed by another Horseman of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, but that the spirit of the first to die from the disease was able to relocate the colony to protect the residents. However, now that Thomas has left the safety of the village, all bets are off.
Ichabod and Abbie return to the hospital, where the disease is rapidly spreading to patients and workers. Ichabod, too, comes down with it. Not for the first time this series, orderlies come at Ichabod with needles full of sedatives and he ends up confined to a hospital bed.
He looks surprised, but this sort of thing actually happens to him all the time
Abbie doesn’t know what to do, so she goes to the hospital chapel to pray for guidance. Seeing the holy water there reminds her that there is a well in the center of the new Roanoke colony, and she decides that dipping Thomas and Ichabod in that well will cure what ails them. She goes to Captain Irving to explain this logic. Irving is like “oh sure, whatever” and agrees to help her bust Thomas and Ichabod out of quarantine. Just like that, she steals an ambulance and they’re on their way.
With Abbie’s “encouragement” (at one point, she shoots a needle full of adrenaline into Ichabod’s leg), Thomas and Ichabod drag their sick carcasses through the woods and to the village. Once they get in the well, their symptoms go away and all the sick people back home are cured, too. Having fulfilled its narrative purpose, the colonial village disappears and everything is back to normal.
Episode 6: Sin. It’s What’s for Dinner.
While Ichabod is visiting Katrina’s grave, he is shot with a dart and kidnapped. (This is the sort of thing that happens to him a lot.) Shortly thereafter, Abbie has a vision in which Katrina reveals that Ichabod and the Headless Horseman are mystically connected due to the intermingling of their blood at the time of their deaths. This means that you can’t hurt the Horseman without also hurting Ichabod. To sever the connection, Abbie will have to find someone called “The Sin Eater.” When Abbie hears this, she’s all like, “I don’t understand,” and frankly, neither do we.
I don’t get it
Abbie secures a 24-hour furlough from the nut hatch for Jenny and goes to her to ask for help. Jenny is predictably pissed because this is not how she wants to spend her day off. Still, she has heard of the Sin Eater, a legend which she claims “every culture” (well, every culture except ours and any other culture you’ve ever heard about) has a version of. The Sin Eater is a guy who can reach inside a person’s soul and swallow his or her sins. Since the Horseman is “pure sin,” using the Sin Eater to get rid of Ichabod’s sins will break the tie to the Horseman.
It turns out that Ichabod’s kidnapper is James Rutledge, a Freemason, and the Masons also know about Ichabod’s blood tie to the Horseman. They have a different solution in mind, though, and believe that Ichabod should kill himself to break the connection.
Abbie and Jenny track down the Sin Eater, who is a dude named Henry Parrish who lives in an apartment in Connecticut. They tell him their story and he says he’d like to help, but well, he’s retired from sin-eating.
I’m just going to devote myself to spritzing these plants with water for the rest of my life
Still, he is able to give Abbie a vision of where Ichabod is being kept, so she and Jenny return to Sleepy Hollow to find him. By the time Abbie and Jenny arrive, Rutledge has convinced Ichabod, through a series of guilt-trippy flashbacks, that killing himself is the right course of action. Ichabod says a teary goodbye to the Mills sisters and downs a bottle of poison.
Henry has apparently had a change of heart, because he arrives on the scene next. He stabs Ichabod in the hand, tastes his blood, and is able to see the sin in his soul, which basically boils down to not acting faster to save the life of a man accused of treason back when he was still working for the British.
They called us “Redcoats” for a reason
Henry tells Ichabod he should forgive himself, since it’s not really that big a deal and we were all hoping for a juicier “secret sin” anyway. Then, Henry sops up the rest of Ichabod’s pooling blood with a bit of bread and gobbles it up like so much disgusting fondue. With that, Ichabod’s sins are absolved and no one has to die… at least not yet.
Episode 7: Land of the Midnight UV Light
Here in Sleepy Hollow, everyone is headless. Well, really, it’s just the Horseman and these four Freemasons who Ichabod finds decapitated when he shows up for a meeting with them. The Masons were supposed to give him vital information about how to defeat the Horseman, but oh well, it’s just not to be. Ichabod does surmise that the Horseman is on the rampage again, though. He and Abbie decide that the best thing to do is destroy the Horseman’s head before he gets to it.
Our heroes go to the police station to retrieve the head, which apparently Abbie had turned in as evidence, since she is still kind of pretending to be a police officer. The head’s not there, though, because Captain Irving sent it off to a lab for analysis. The captain agrees to go get it and heads off to the lab. Is it just me, or does this lab tech look like Moby?
While Irving and the vegan lab tech are shooting the bull, the Horseman shows up. Moby bites the dust immediately, and then the Horseman comes after Irving with an axe. Irving barely gets away with the head.
Captain Irving runs funny
He delivers it to Ichabod and Abbie, and they set about trying to destroy it (key word: trying). It doesn’t smash when hit with a hammer; it doesn’t dissolve when plunged into a vat of acid; it doesn’t explode when blown up with dynamite. Looking up from these revels, our heroes see a chilling sight. The heads of the four Masons have been turned into hanging lanterns, something the Horseman did for no apparent reason other than that it would be creepy as hell.
What is the meaning of this?!
This strange occurrence does remind Ichabod of Paul Revere’s famous use of lanterns, though, and he thinks back to a time when he was hanging out with Revere and John Adams and how Revere was chased down by a mysterious rider and how Adams once gave him a secret manuscript and yada, yada, yada; it’s somehow obvious in retrospect that the mysterious rider was the now-headless Horseman and that the manuscript tells how to defeat him.
Whatever. Basically, it just means that Abbie and Ichabod had better find that manuscript, which they do, because like everything else, it’s on the internet. Ichabod decodes the manuscript, which says that the Horseman can’t be killed, but that much like Gwenyth Paltrow, his only known weakness is sunlight.
Andy is still out there lurking around. In this episode, he lurks up to Abbie. No, he’s not trying to buy pot, he’s trying to say that he likes her and wants to protect her. He still works for the Horseman, but against his will, and he happens to know how the Horseman can be trapped. Ichabod overhears this and realizes that Andy can be used to deliver a message.
Will you tell Abbie I think she’s cute? And will you also ask her to please put the gun down?
Ichabod tells Andy to tell the Horseman to meet him in the graveyard at dark if he wants his head back. Operating without a brain, the Horseman doesn’t suspect anything strange, so he shows up at the appointed place and time. Ichabod and Abbie use a series of look-alike heads to lure the Horseman into a trap. Once he is in position, they shine an artificial UV light on him.
This oughta cure my seasonal depression!
In combination with a hex spell, the UV light is close enough to sunlight to do the trick. The Horseman is trapped.
Episode 8: (I’m Your Private) Necromancer
Now that they are holding the Headless Horseman captive, Abbie and Ichabod decide to interrogate him, which is tough, since he lacks both ears and a mouth. Then, they remember that Andy can apparently communicate with the Horseman because he is the Horseman’s dealer, er, necromancer, so they enlist his help. Andy reluctantly agrees, warning them that while his heart belongs to Abbie, his soul belongs to Moloch, so if Moloch commands him to do something, he will have to obey. Accordingly, things could go very badly.
Meanwhile, Jenny, newly released from the loony bin, teams up with Captain Irving to investigate an antique store robbery.
“I guess we should hang out this episode.”
Jenny and Irving find that one very important item has gone missing: a Druidic artifact that can be used to break hex spells. As they are trying to track down the artifact, they discover that the Hessians have bombed the town’s power plant, cutting off electricity to the UV lights that are weakening the Horseman. Now, the only thing binding him is the spell.
Speaking through Andy, the Horseman reveals that he was once a man named Abraham, a former friend and romantic rival of Ichabod who was once engaged to Ichabod’s wife Katrina.
If that was the wig he was going to wear, maybe he didn’t deserve to keep his head
When Abraham was killed by the Hessians, the demon Moloch turned him into the Horseman. He was never a Hessian soldier at all; he just dressed like one so he could kill Ichabod! (Death, the embodiment of sin, jilted lover–this guy has more identities than Jim Carrey in Me, Myself, and Irene!)
Jenny, Irving, and Abbie are out looking for the artifact, but they’ve overlooked the obvious. Andy, who is, after all, one of Moloch’s minions, has already snuck it into the Horseman’s chamber in, um, a body cavity. He pulls it out and says an incantation that frees the Horseman and summons an army of demons.
Honestly, it would have been less gross if he had stuck it in a balloon and carried it in his butt
Just as the Horseman is about to kill Ichabod, Andy yells out, “Stop! You can’t kill him! The master forbids it!” With that, the demons take Andy and the Horseman away, leaving Ichabod all alone.
Episode 9: Don’t Go in There, Girl!
A young woman named Lena Gilbert goes to visit an old house that has belonged to her family for generations. Arriving there, she notes that the place “looks haunted,” but she goes in to check it out anyway.
I don’t know about haunted, but it sure does look overgrown
Opening a closet, Lena sees a tangle of roots and tries to clear them out, but they are alive. They grab her and wrap her tight.
This gives new meaning to the term “tree hugger”
Captain Irving assigns Abbie and Ichabod to work on the case of the missing Lena Gilbert. He’s already done some preliminary investigating, and amongst Lena’s papers back home was a list of names including one “Katrina C.” This, of course, intrigues Ichabod. He and Abbie do some research on Lena and find that she is a descendent of Lachlan Frederick, a friend of Ichabod from back in the day.
Abbie and Ichabod head off to the Frederick house and find that it has changed over the years, in that it is totally overgrown and surrounded by crows. Ichabod fondly remembers the place as a sanctuary for former slaves and others in need of protection. When our heroes go in, the doors shut tight behind them and they find themselves trapped. Exploring the house, they find Lena in the closet of roots and free her.
As if she hasn’t been through enough that day, Lena has to put up with Ichabod’s incessant questioning. She tells him that Katrina’s name was in a ledger recording visitors to the house. She was the last to seek refuge there. And what’s more, old Lachlan was a warlock. It seems that his house was a sanctuary from supernatural as well as earthly evils.
Meanwhile, Abbie keeps catching sight of the ghost of an African American woman.
I just hope Lachlan paid this lady a living wage
Following the woman, Abbie is shown a vision of something that happened in the house–Katrina giving birth to a son. Ichabod is a father! Alas, with the birth of the boy, the forces formerly held at bay by Lachlan’s protection spell spring into action. A creature made of roots slays Lachlan and storms into the house. That’s the last of the vision, so we don’t know what happened after that.
Back in the present day, Abbie, Ichabod, and Lena get chased by the root monster but manage to escape. Abbie tells Ichabod what she saw, and boy is he pissed at the root creature!
Pissed
Ichabod goes back inside the house and hacks the monster to death.
Later, Abbie and Ichabod receive a package from Lena Gilbert containing old Frederick family documents. Included in the package is a family tree for Grace Dixon, the woman Abbie saw inside the house. Abbie realizes that Grace is one of her ancestors.
Episode 10: It’s Not a Doll, It’s an Action Figure!
Ichabod wants to learn more about his son, so he calls up Henry the Sin Eater to help him out. Part of Henry’s gift is contacting the dead, so he puts Ichabod in touch with Katrina, who is currently residing in Purgatory.
Nice place
Ichabod is pretty steamed at Katrina, and he’s all like, “Why didn’t you tell me you were knocked up?” Katrina says she only learned that she was pregnant after he was dead and she had cast a spell sending him into the future. Apparently, she was not supposed to do that and it really pissed off her coven, who began persecuting her. Fearing that the other witches would hurt their son if they found out she had a baby, Katrina decided to give him up for adoption. That’s the last she ever saw of their son, whose name was Jeremy.
Katrina is wracked with guilt over giving the boy up, and in Purgatory’s facsimile of church, she lights a candle for him every day. Hearing this, Ichabod forgives her for not telling him about Jeremy sooner. He kisses her and tells her he will find a way to release her from Purgatory, which he might as well, since she is pretty much in every episode anyway. Then, a big monster bursts in on them, and Ichabod flees back to this realm.
Here on Earth, we see the same monster dig his way up from under the ground near Sheriff Corbin’s cabin, where Ichabod is now staying. Abbie, Ichabod, and Henry are unaware of the monster’s presence, so to them, it seems that the next logical thing to do is to go to the library to see if they can find mention of Jeremy Crane in the town’s historical records. There, they run into a shifty librarian who points them in the direction of the archives and immediately gets in her car to leave.
Reading through the records, our group learns that Jeremy ended up in an orphanage and that he had some kind of magical power that made the townspeople scared of him. Our heroes want to question the librarian about this, so they seek her out and end up finding her dead in her car, which has been smashed flat.
Naturally, this discovery indicates that we should go back inside the library.
The gang looks for more clues amongst the library’s effects and they find this exceptionally creepy doll:
By touching the object, Henry is able to see its history. As Katrina’s last act before sending Jeremy to the orphanage, she made this monstrosity for him, effectively inflicting as much psychological damage in one day as it takes most mothers 18 years to perfect. It didn’t help that the priest who ran the orphanage was evil and beat his charges regularly. During one such beating, a drop of Jeremy’s blood fell onto the doll, creating a golem in the form of a giant living version of the doll.
Our heroes are able to glean that the golem served the purpose of protecting Jeremy and that it currently has it in for the remaining members of the coven who did Katrina, and therefore Jeremy, wrong. They know the librarian was a witch because, well, she was acting suspicious. Also she had some ticket stubs from a carnival in her possession.
It’s off to the carnival! Inside one of the carnival tents, Ichabod finds some witches.
I thought carnivals were supposed to be… fun
The witches tell Ichabod they have tangled with this golem before. In their last go-round, they put a hex on Jeremy to stop his heart and banished the golem to Purgatory, where he remained until Ichabod unintentionally brought him back to Earth. Speaking of the golem, only Jeremy’s blood, which initially brought it to life, can kill it.
Enough talk. The golem shows up and kills all the witches. Some of you might be thinking, “Awesome. Problem solved. Let’s all sing kumbaya with our new friend” (to review: the golem protects Ichabod’s wife and son and kills those who would do them harm), but no, our heroes decide to fight it. I guess it’s just too creepy to live and possibly a painful reminder of unpleasant family secrets, sort of like everybody’s weird uncle.
Too creepy to live?
In the ensuing conflict, a funhouse mirror gets smashed and a shard hits Ichabod. Since Jeremy is Ichabod’s son (of his blood), Ichabod is able to stab the golem with the shard and kill it. I guess there’s no need to go on Maury and demand a paternity test.
The next day, all seems to be going well until Moloch appears to Ichabod and delivers the following warning: “The saint’s name is a sign. When you know my name, more will take form, then the end of days begins. Your death is assured, you and the second witness… I touched her soul once, soon it will be mine forever, and you will give it to me.” This cannot be good.
Episode 11: Alternative Uses of Table Salt
At the police station, Captain Irving receives a mysterious call. A deep demon voice tells him to turn over Washington’s Bible to Moloch or else great harm will come to his daughter Macey. Irving asks Ichabod and Abbie about the Bible, and they say they’ve been hanging onto it since Katrina must have buried it with Ichabod for a reason.
“Even though this Bible’s been pretty much useless so far, we’d rather keep it than give it to a demon, if it’s all the same to you.”
Irving decides to bring Macey to a safe house, complete with a police escort, a priest, and her mother/his estranged wife, Cynthia.
Ichabod and Abbie do some further digging through Sheriff Corbin’s files, and they come across a very interesting video.
Search terms: Fully-clothed bondage
The video shows Jenny possessed by a demon (as if that were a surprise to anyone). Abbie and Ichabod call Jenny up, and the three of them watch the tape together. On it, Possessed Jenny threatens to kill Abbie. Jenny tells them that Corbin was able to dispel the demon from her, although she was so out of it at the time, being possessed and all, that she doesn’t remember how.
Upon further viewing of the tape, they notice that Corbin had surrounded Possessed Jenny with a circle of salt to keep the demon at bay. They play the video backward like a Queen album to see if there are any hidden messages, and indeed there are. The tape says, “Ancitif cannot be defeated.” Who’s this Ancitif, you might ask? Our heroes look him up in a reference book, which has several handy pictures, including one in which an old style of French lantern is being used to dispel him.
Back at the safe house, Irving steps outside for some fresh air. He receives another demonic phone call, and this time the voice tells him his time is up. Ancitif, having dispensed with the guards, has now taken possession of Macey. Irving’s priest tries to perform an exorcism.
Put that cross away, fool! This is nothing a little relaxer can’t fix!
The exorcism fails. Possessed Macey kills the priest.
Meanwhile, Jenny recognizes the old lantern from the reference book. It is similar to one that she stole on behalf of some survivalists she was working for (backstory, backstory, whatever). She figures they better go steal it back. En route, Abbey receives a phone call from Irving, who is again inquiring about the Bible. Since he’s not usually that annoying, she figures the worst has already happened and Ancitif is at the safe house. They’d better hustle.
At the survivalist’s compound, Abbie breaks into a building full of relics and retrieves the lantern. On her way back out, she is caught by armed survivalists. Things are tense for a while, but Jenny talks the militiamen into letting them go. Armed with the lantern and a salt shaker, our trio make for the safe house. When they arrive, Irving and Possessed Macey are in the midst of an angry confrontation.
Seeing Jenny, Ancitif turns his attention to her (they are, after all, old friends) and tries to convince her to kill Abbie, which she is probably half-tempted to go for. (Hey, a demon made me do it!) Abbie taunts the demon to come after her directly, but it can’t cross the line of salt she has laid out between them. Then, Ichabod emerges and shines the lantern, commanding Ancitif back to Hell. The demon comes out of Macey. Irving hugs Macey and Cynthia, Abbie hugs Jenny, and Ichabod stands there holding the lantern.
This is awkward
Later, at Ichabod’s cabin, Ichabod and Abbie try to figure out why the Bible is so important. (It cannot possibly have anything to do with the actual scripture.) Ichabod treats the pages of the book with a lemon juice mixture, a technique for revealing invisible ink, and finds the date “December 18, 1799” written in what he recognizes as George Washington’s handwriting. Mysteriously, this date is four days after Washington died. The plot thickens.
Episode 12: So Much Grave Robbery, So Little Time
It’s back to Bible study for Ichabod, and this time, he finds additional clues. At his cabin, Ichabod looks at the book and seems to find something interesting in the story of Lazarus. Meanwhile, Andy shows up unannounced at Abbie’s house and asks her to turn the Bible over to Moloch. When she refuses, he tells her he loves her and warns her of a prophesy foretelling that Ichabod will betray her.
When Abbie joins Ichabod at the cabin, Ichabod reveals that Washington left a more extensive message for him in invisible ink. The message states that Washington was resurrected after his death through the use of prayer beads containing occult powers and that he drew a map showing how to get from Earth to Purgatory. This news excites Ichabod, because if he can get to Purgatory he can free Katrina. When he mentions this, Abbie shoots him a look:
If you mention that wife of yours one more time…
Also in the message is a list of names of those present at Washington’s resurrection. One of the names is that of the Reverend Alfred Knapp. Reverend Knapp was one old dude, because he lived in Sleepy Hollow until recently (we saw the Horseman kill him in the first episode). Turns out that he had been guarding the Horseman’s head for the last couple of centuries. Anyway, Ichabod and Abbie figure the magical beads were probably Knapp’s, so they decide to go dig his body up. They ask Henry to come along because he is good at getting impressions off of objects.
Andy meets up with Moloch to express regrets over being unable to get the Bible. He wants to be stronger and begs Moloch to make him a warrior for the cause. Moloch laughs at him and sends thousands of insects to spin some sort of cocoon or web around him.
Ichabod, Abbie, and Henry arrive at the cemetery. They dig up Reverend Knapp and see that the prayer beads are round his neck. When Henry touches them, they burn his hand. He only gets one brief vision of Knapp in a boat headed to an island before the pain is too great and he has to let go. He soon realizes that the boat in his vision was carrying the dead-again body of Washington.
I’m on a boat!
Through the customary leaps of logic, our heroes come to believe that Washington was buried not at Mount Vernon, but on one of the islands near Sleepy Hollow, and that the map to Purgatory was buried with him.
You know how caterpillars go through a pupa stage and then emerge as beautiful butterflies? Well, that’s not what happened to Andy. He comes out of Moloch’s cocoon all slimy and pointy-headed, a true demon.
Exploring one of the islands near Sleepy Hollow, our group locates Washington’s secret underground tomb. In it, there is a pyramid-like structure, which seems like the obvious resting place for Washington’s body, but Ichabod thinks it’s a trap and looks elsewhere within the tomb. He eventually finds Washington’s casket behind a hidden door, and yes, Washington was buried with the map.
Just then, Demon Andy arrives, grabs Abbie by the throat, and demands the map. When Henry touches Andy, his demonic nature temporarily subsides and he releases her. Abbie appeals to Andy’s humanity and his love for her, and he tells her she must destroy the map so it will not fall into Moloch’s hands. Hating what he has become, Andy begs Abbie to kill him and she complies.
They say you always hurt the ones you love, plus any demons that try to mess with you
As Abbie, Ichabod, and Henry start to leave, Andy starts after them. He’s not dead after all! (Well, he is dead, but then he got resurrected and turned into a demon and… well, you know what I mean.) Abbie shoots her gun at a lever that activates the booby trap on the pyramid and it breaks apart, crushing Andy and killing him for real (you know what I mean) this time. Our trio emerge victorious, map in hand.
But wait! Abbie thinks they should destroy the map. Now it’s Ichabod’s turn to shoot Abbie a look:
“You have got to be kidding me!”
Ichabod burns the map, per Abbie’s request. Only later does he go behind her back and reproduce it from memory.
One more thing: Also in this episode, Captain Irving is questioned about how two police officers and a priest ended up dead at his safe house. Afraid that Macey will be arrested, Irving confesses to the murders and goes to jail.
Episode 13: Signs of the Times
Henry tells Abbie and Ichabod that he had a scary dream foretelling that this is the day the second Horseman, the Horseman of War, will appear. Coincidentally (or not), it is also the 13th anniversary of the day when the Mills sisters first saw Moloch in the woods. Turning to Washington’s Bible, Ichabod finds information about how to prevent the Horseman of War from rising; it involves casting a spell on the earth where he is buried, also in the woods near where Moloch was spotted. They are going to need a witch to cast the spell. Katrina.
Ichabod reveals that he has copied the map to Purgatory, and Abbie agrees that they can use it to free Katrina.
This document renders the central conflict from the previous episode moot
Ichabod and Abbie head to Purgatory and eventually make their way to the church where Katrina hangs out. Katrina explains that she can’t leave Purgatory until she is forgiven.
And that could take, like, forever
To this, Abbie says, “We didn’t come this far to get dinged by some metaphysical technicality.” (Wait a second. Aren’t metaphysical technicalities what this show is all about?) Luckily, there is a loophole. Katrina can leave if someone else will take her place. Abbie volunteers since she is eager to fight Moloch, who is guarding Purgatory.
Ichabod and Katrina come back to Earth in the present time, and Katrina is all like, “Is this real?” But we already went through that with Ichabod, and we don’t have time for it now because she has a spell to cast. She, Ichabod, and Henry go to the alleged burial place, and Katrina gives the spell a shot, although nothing seems to be happening.
Meanwhile, Jenny has been going through Sheriff Corbin’s old files and has found reference to a mysterious church. She goes to check it out and finds the sign with the church’s name lying on the ground. She gets in her car and calls Abbie about it, but Purgatory has bad cell phone reception, so it goes to voicemail. Jenny leaves a message saying that she has figured out Moloch’s cryptic warning. “The saint’s name is a sign. He meant it literally,” but she can’t say much more because the Headless Horseman appears and starts shooting at her car.
Frankly, I’d forgotten all about this guy
Jenny tries to drive away but flips the vehicle.
In the woods, Henry unexpectedly uses his power to push Ichabod and Katrina against two trees, which then wrap their branches around them.
I am Groot.
Then, Henry drops a big bomb on Ichabod and Katrina. The Horseman of War isn’t underground because he’s already emerged. He surfaced 13 years ago; that’s what the Mills sisters stumbled upon way back then, even though they don’t quite remember it. And what’s more, he, Henry, is the Horseman of War. And his name’s not Henry; he just took that off a church sign that said “St. Henry’s Parish.” His real name is Jeremy, because he is Ichabod and Katrina’s son. After Katrina’s coven stopped his heart and buried him, he lay there in his coffin for a really long time until Moloch came and offered to make him the second Horseman, and of course, he jumped at the chance.
Before anyone can properly process all of this, the first Horseman rides up, nabs Katrina, and runs off with her. Henry/Jeremy/Whatshisname sticks Ichabod in the casket he laid in for so many years and buries him in the ground. And that’s where the season ends–with Ichabod in the ground, Abbie in Purgatory, Katrina with the Horseman, Jenny upside down in her car, and Captain Irving in jail.
You don’t have to wait all summer for the next Sleepy Hollow recap. Check out Season 2: Episode 1 right now!
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