Sleepy Hollow : Sins of the Father

 

I didn’t really like tonight’s episode. It felt a little sad.A little downbeat. Abbie is not herself. She seems dejected. This could be a result of her ordeal  or a result of later plot points in this episode. At any rate, I cant say I liked this episode, although there was a bit of plot advancement and a couple of interesting revelations.

The story opens with Pandora and The Hidden One sitting around, moping about their powers. You can tell that Pandora is not having any more of this shit as, once again, we witness some heavy eyeballing at her boyfriend, when he declines to give her back any of her powers. Se shouldn’t have offered. She should’ve known she wasn’t getting any of that back. Rather than give some of her power back , he would rather gloat that she now knows what he feels. Boyfriend is being an ass.

Ichabod has been spoiling Abbie for the past several days/weeks, cooking dinners for her and otherwise catering to her and trying, I think, to just cheer her up. Everyone can tell she’s not herself. She’s very quiet and doesn’t smile as much as she used to and seems tired, like she’s not sleeping enough. I think this is breaking Ichabod’s heart a little to see her like this.

Jenny goes to see their dad. It sort of ends in emotional detente. He wanted to meet her to explain his side of the issue and that his leaving his family was not their fault but his. The Mills’ backstory is pretty tragic. Their mother, a Witness, starts to go insane and their father, unable to handle it, leaves. The mother dies, sending the girls into foster care, and  one of them is locked in a mental institution. The Sisters Mills have had a lot to overcome and I like that this narrative is slightly different from the stereotypical narrative of the poor, unwed mother, living in the ‘hood, “throw in some gangs”, type of backstory.

Daniel is still trying to get close to Abbie but she explains shes still dealing with what happened to her. She makes it clear to him, that when she’s ready to talk to him about their relationship, she’ll let him know

Atticus Nevins returns and contacts Abbie. He’s set some kind of creature loose in Sleepy Hollow and wants her to stop it. This is all really just a ploy by Nevins to get close to her so he can grab August Corbin’s occult files. He wants to negotiate safe passage to Canada in exchange for finding tonight’s monster. The Scooby Gang take him prisoner and Nevins gives them  background on how the creature got to America in exchange for some of Icabod’s home cooking but even this bit of humor wasnt enough to make me like this episode very much. Nevins says the creature is called a ghallu  and it can only be stopped by a golden scarab, which will allow the holder to control it.

The creature is hunting Nevins crew.  He came to them for help because one of his cronies, seeking  to take over Nevins operations, has procured the scarab and will send the creature after him, or so he claims The crew end up leading  the creature right to Randall and the monster kills him.

Jenny tells Abbie about her meeting with their father. Abbie’s attitude towards this information is somewhat lackluster.Abbie is having visions of her time in the catacombs and a golden symbol.

Nevins is the person controlling the creature, after implanting the scarab in his chest. He found the scarab in a cave in Afghanistan and his first act was to order the creature to kill his team mates.  He summons the creature to free him and kill Abbie and Crane. Crane and Abbie fight the monster and win but Nevins takes Jenny hostage,

Nevins  releases Jenny when Joe confronts him with some hard truths, which I think is weird and kind of arbitrary but the show had sort of written itself into a corner and its not ready to kill off Jenny yet ,so he kind of had to let her go no mattter what Joe said to him. Joe could have  started singing “That’s Not My Baby” or speaking in tongues and Nevins  still would’ve had to let her go, for the purposes of the plot.

Abbie meets with her father. She’s afraid she’ll die the way her mother did but he reassures her that won’t happen.

Wallers, Daniels boss, contacts Daniel and asks questions about Abbie’s emotional state. He orders Daniel to downgrade the search for Nevins, which puzzles him. In exchange Nevins gives  Wallers Corbin’s case  files, which contain special information on nine sacred sites. Wallers kills Nevins afterwards,who should really have seen that coming. The betrayer is oft himself betrayed, as Ichabod would have said.

Later, Abbie sneaks  into the tool shed in the backyard and we can see she has become obsessed with a symbol, drawing it over and over again in her journal, like Jack from The Shining,  and worshiping a version of it, painted on the wall of the shed.

Creepy.