sleepy hollow 2x10: magnum opus

[kaydeefalls]

The title of this episode is Latin for “greatest work”. Spoilers: it’s not a particularly apt description of this episode. You know how last season the writers were clearly smoking the good crack? Yeah, not so much anymore.

We open with our heroes rebooting their brains with a quick round of Heads Up!, trying to discern their own true identities. Abbie is Cher, as though we needed further proof that she’s a rock star; Ichabod is, of course, George Washington. The entertainment is interrupted by Katrina Skyping in on the nearest mirror, with dire warnings about what a big boy Moloch is growing up to be. She hastily logs off without giving them any actual, concrete information. Having scared off mommy dearest, Henry smirks and uses the mirror’s redial feature to spy on Abbie and Ichabod for a while. A+ subterfuge there, Katrina.

Abbie and Ichabod continue delving into Grace Dixon’s journal, a veritable font of cryptic intel. They’re still searching for the powerful weapon that Mama Mills mentioned last week. Ichabod immediately deduces that one entry in particular is an anagram -- “chosen words” should be interpreted as “Enoch’s sword”, also known as the Sword of Methuselah. I’m left wondering how on earth the plot would ever progress without his staggeringly improbable leaps of logic.

Meanwhile, Jenny is driving the fugitive Frank Irving to the Canadian border. I’m wary of any plot development that looks like it could continue sidelining these two characters. Abbie shoots Jenny a warning that there’s an alert out for Frank, and Frank chastises Jenny for texting while driving. She promises to get him somewhere safe. He gives her some serious side-eye, asking, “You really think anywhere is safe?” #ferguson

Back in Apocalypse HQ, they find a drawing in the journal that turns out to be a mirror distortion -- yet another unlikely deduction courtesy of Ichabod -- of Benjamin Franklin’s famous Join, or Die political cartoon. The image of the snake matches up perfectly to a map of a nearby river. The treasure hunt is on! Ichabod points out that there’s a prophetic warning attached to the sword -- to bear it, you need to know yourself, or you’re gonna die. Abbie is pretty sure she’s good; Ichabod has less confidence in himself. “Our quest will not be without peril,” he warns her. She counters: “Crane, you and I can’t have lunch without peril.” To prove the point, we cut over to Henry, who’s still watching them through his magic mirror like an old perv. He promptly dispatches the Headless Horseman to go after the sword as well. It’s getting pretty close to sunrise, so Headless is gonna need to hustle. Katrina does her best to delay him; Abraham’s not buying it for a second. I’m not supposed to be rooting for the Horseman of Death right now, am I?

As warned, Jenny and Frank do indeed encounter a police checkpoint on the highway. Frank elects to complete his journey to Canada on foot, and jumps out of the car and into the woods with a promise to meet back up with Jenny at the border.

Team Witness are also currently wandering through the woods, as per usual. The mouth of the “snake” river leads them to the ruins that Abbie dreamed about last week. And that’s when good old Headless shows up, of course. Remember when he used to be scary? I missed that. I also missed his red-eyed demon horse. And he totally misses spotting Abbie or Ichabod in the shrubbery. While Ichabod suggests they simply wait him out -- it’s almost dawn -- Abbie’s too impatient to fulfill her ancestors’ destiny already, so she follows Headless to the ruins. There’s also a lot of lightning happening, but it’s not actually a storm. Maybe Headless just comes with his own lighting effects now. Anyway, he pries some kind of important-looking plaque off some brickwork, and Abbie makes a rookie mistake by accidentally knocking over a couple of crumbling bricks of her own and then gasping about it. I’m not sure how he even heard that over all the lightning and thunder and stuff, but he did. Ichabod jumps out and creates a really obvious diversion that Headless falls for immediately, yanking out his shotgun and giving chase, but just before he can blast Ichabod’s stupid head off, the sun rises and he starts smoking like a Buffyverse vampire. So Headless rides off in a hurry to get out of the sunlight, and Abbie runs after Ichabod to make sure none of those gunshots actually hit him. She asks what arcane mystical method he used to figure out the precise timing of sunrise; he shows her the weather app on his phone. Okay, points to Ichabod for that one.

But he’s taking the Horseman’s intervention super personally right now. Flashback to Ichabod and Abraham back in jolly old England, fencing together in white pajamas and having a chat heavily laden with foreshadowing. Apparently Abe’s the one who convinced Ichabod to hare off to the colonies in the first place. When Abbie tries to call Ichabod on his bullshit melodrama, he shares another flashback, this time to a conversation in a pub where Abe is totally cool -- even encouraging -- about Ichabod having switched over to the colonists’ side of the war. Also Katrina shows up and there’s a lot of awkward love triangle crap. Anyway, moral of the story: Ichabod has never made a damn decision for himself in his entire adult life. “How do I know myself when at every turn my life has been determined by others?” he asks Abbie mournfully. Maybe that’s why he’s constantly namedropping the Founding Fathers: he’s lost without a stronger personality to follow. Thank god for Abbie, I guess.

They go back into the ruins to investigate the blank spot on the wall where the plaque Headless took had been, and Abbie does a quick and dirty sketch of it -- it’s the image of an ouroboros. Snake in the political cartoon, snake eating its tail -- I’m sensing a pattern here. Ichabod waxes metaphorical about the inherent symbolism of the ouroboros: “As above, so below.” Abbie chooses to go with a literal interpretation instead, and they do indeed find a secret passageway covered in loose bricks right below the plaque. A winding stairwell leads them down into a creepy cave, where Abbie gets the bejesus scared out of her by a statue. (I would like to point out that when she pulls her gun on it -- terrified and thinking it’s a live person -- she demands to see its hands rather than shooting first. Too bad that doesn’t seem to be standard police operating procedure in the real world these days.) As they explore further, they find a lot more statues, including one who looks a lot like the women in the Grace Dixon line. Also there’s some chick with snakes for hair lurking in the shadows. Um. They quickly realize that the statues used to be real live people once upon a time, and Ichabod gets all panicky and rushes them both the hell out of there. They slam the doors shut right in the Gorgon’s face. So, yeah, definite snake theme going on. If Medusa looks you in the eye, you turn into stone, hence the wide variety of statuary downstairs. Abbie recalls the specific wording of the sword prophecy: “Know yourself completely, or you will perish when you attempt to see.” There are a lot of strangely literal clues in this show. Abbie indulges in a well-deserved freak-out fit about the Gorgon and her own destiny, and how all the women in her family seem to die really prematurely, but Ichabod has a cunning plan. To fight the Gorgon, you need to find someone who doesn’t have any eyes. Or no head at all.

Jenny waits alone on the bridge at the Canadian border, standing in a patch of very attractive lighting. But Frank leaves her a voicemail saying thanks but no thanks -- he’s gonna go underground and try to help fight the good fight. Please let this mean that we actually get to see him kicking butt in the wilderness, and not that he’s gonna be written out of the remainder of the season.

Chez Headless, Henry shows off his biblical shofar -- this is not a euphemism -- which will sound the call to the rest of the demons once Moloch is fully risen. Katrina, ever the mother, tells Henry how nice it is to see that he’s taken up an instrument. They have a bit of a mother-son spat while Moloch lurks around in the background as a sulky teenager, during which Henry reveals just about every aspect of his plan. No one in this show is capable of keeping a secret for more than five minutes, I swear to god -- we are constantly drowning in a flood of exposition. Anyway, Henry lifts the enchantment on Katrina so that she can see Moloch clearly at last.

At nightfall, Abbie and Ichabod reconvene at the ruins. Ichabod has handcrafted torches that he made himself with, like, dirty socks and gun oil. Abbie just bought a couple of flares at the convenience store. After some more unnecessary exposition for any viewers who haven’t been paying attention -- although in fairness, this plot is so convoluted that we could all probably use the recap -- Headless finally shows up. Abbie and Ichabod look busy, and Ichabod shows off his truly dreadful acting skills. They drop some flares down the secret stairwell and make a break for it. Once underground, Headless is promptly jumped by the Gorgon. If you ever wanted to watch a boss fight between the Headless Horseman and Medusa -- and, really, who hasn’t? -- now’s your chance. It’s almost as ridiculous as Franklinstein’s Monster. (But let’s face it, nothing will ever top Franklinstein’s Monster. What has he been up to lately?) While Headless is thus engaged, Abbie and Ichabod bolt for the inner chamber, where they find about twenty swords arranged around a pool of water -- and they’re screwed if they pick the wrong one. This is some Holy Grail shit right here. Ichabod decides to go keep Abraham busy while Abbie’s sword shopping. Abbie is not very appreciative.

The Gorgon-Horseman fight ends when Headless beheads the Gorgon, as per his usual M.O. The snakes hiss and twitch as the head rolls away. But suddenly, due to the proximity of the sword or the death of Medusa or whatever, Ichabod can see Abraham’s head again! I did not follow this line of logic even a little bit, but whatever. All the better for them to indulge their mutual grudge match. I kind of lost interest somewhere in here, but they duel and yell at each other for a while, and Abraham complains that Ichabod has stolen the life he should have had. “I was supposed to be the hero of this story, not the villain!” he whines. Ichabod promptly calls him on his bullshit, and they move on to bickering about Katrina. Meanwhile, Abbie grabs at a sword at random and discovers that she has chosen poorly when all the swords turn into snakes. So apparently the real Sword of Methuselah isn’t even here? Great. Thankfully, the trumpeting of the shofar interrupts Abraham’s monologue, and he makes a final, firm decision to fully embody his role as the Horseman of Death by...not killing Ichabod or Abbie. Um, okay then. He races off to join Henry and Moloch.

Ichabod, too, realizes that he has to choose his own path, and he chooses life! I hope Abbie has introduced him to Trainspotting. She goes all motivational speaker on him, and he admits that “it is through your eyes that I see myself most clearly.” How platonic. He catches a glimpse of his reflection in the pool of water, and a sniff test reveals that it’s not water, it’s dark oil. His own torch snuffs out when he tries to set fire to the rain pool, but Abbie adds hers in as well -- since they “know themselves” best through each other -- and when their powers combine, they are...a pool of oil on fire, I guess. So anyway, there’s a real sword in the pool. It’s very shiny and reminiscent of Excalibur. It even comes with its own spotlight.

Also Moloch has officially risen on Earth. FYI.