Sleepy Hollow: The Lesser Key of Solomon (S1: E4)

A quick summary of what we’ve seen so far:

Ichabod Crane - a very sexy, very British Union soldier - does battle with a wicked looking Redcoat with a broad axe. The Redcoat loses his head (naturally) and Crane gets stabbed/sliced. They both die.

Two hundred some years later Crane wakes up in a cave, in modern times, and finds his way to a highway and eventually civilization. He is immediately arrested for being an outsider and in proximity to a gruesome murder.

Lt. Abbie Mills has a talk with her Sheriff, Corbin, about her future in a diner. She’s all set to go to Quantico and sign up with the FBI. Corbin eats his pie and asks her if she’s running toward something or away from something else.

They go to investigate a disturbance and Corbin finds the Headless Horseman in a stable. He promptly loses his own head, with Mills arriving just in time to see it roll.

Crane and Mills meet. She is mystified by his inexplicable knowledge of the Headless Horseman, while he tries valiantly to convince the sheriff’s department that he isn’t crazy, he really is a soldier transplanted right out of the Revolutionary War - not to mention a close, personal friend of George Washington. Doubt runs rampant.

Mills offers to take Crane to the asylum, where her boss has ordered he be taken, but they detour to the cave he crawled out of because she believes his story. He finds a Bible and, after reading a passage or two, comes to the conclusion that the apocalypse is coming and he and Mills are the two witnesses mentioned in the good book. The Headless Horseman, of course, is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Crane and Mills discover the Headless Horseman wants his head back (really kind of humorous without intending to be) and they get it from Crane’s late wife’s grave and make off with it. The sun comes up, and the Headless Horseman has to ride away because he doesn’t enjoy sunlight.

In jail, having been outed as a bad guy, Abbie’s coworker Officer Brooks pleads with some unknown force for a second chance. Instead he gets a visit from a creepy AS HELL white demon thing that cracks his mirror and snaps his neck completely backward. EEP.

In Blood Moon, the second episode, Katrina (Crane’s dead wife) visits him in a dream. She warns him that a dark spirit will rise with the moon, and makes unmistakable hints that the dark spirit will be a witch, like herself.

Officer Brooks gets a visit from the mirror demon in the morgue. He tells Brooks to get up and gives him an amulet and orders him to go summon some evil already. Brooks also gets his neck sort of fixed but the skin is all wrong and HOW is no one in Sleepy Hollow, a town of 144,000 souls, noticing that bodies are missing and so are patrol cars and so forth? But whatever, to be honest I like it so much a little skipped reality isn’t a problem.

Brooks summons Cerilda, the witch in question, and starts pulling over warm bodies for her to consume - all descendents of the men who burned her. She needs to get going because she only has one night to rise from dead.

Crane and Mills are busy doing research, and Crane realizes Katrina was a witch, the witch who put the spell on him that has him walking around drinking overpriced coffee and consorting with Ms. Mills.

They end up doing battle with Cerilda (quit it with the bullets, we already know they don’t do anything but annoy supernatural types) and Crane blows her up which prevents her from reaching a fully alive state.

Mills is coping pretty well in my opinion, considering her sole father figure got his head chopped off, but in a moment at the end of the episode she’s standing in Corbin’s empty office and hallucinates/dreams that he’s there, guiding her. He tells her she can trust Number 49…and then we see a room number in the asylum, forty-nine, where Jenny Mills is being held. REALLY, writers? Just skip the unnecessary dramatics and say she can trust JENNY. Sheesh.

Anyway, Jenny doesn’t take her meds before bed, but tells the nurse that she doesn’t see any monsters, no ma'am, and then starts doing pull-ups like a CrossFit champion until she does see a monster, the same creepy white shape that we know means bad news.

In the third episode we meet The Sandman, who is busy punishing people who don’t tell the truth. Jenny Mills and her sister saw a demon, and Jenny tried to tell the truth, and everyone else turned a blind eye and The Sandman gets off on making people crazy enough from guilt that they off themselves.

Crane and Mills are beginning to form a tentative partnership. Mills is reluctant, and it’s obvious, but she believes in Crane and the apocalypse and that she has a role in stopping the chaos. After watching a shrink jump to her death with Jenny’s name on her lips, Mills goes to visit her sister in the psych ward. Jenny refuses to see her, and Crane starts asking questions.

Abbie confesses that they both saw a demon when they were young, and they both knew it. She tried to convince Jenny to lie, so they wouldn’t get in trouble - they were already in foster care. Jenny refused, and told the truth, and tried to get Abbie to back her up. But Lt. Mills lied, and as a result she stayed with her loving foster family and Jenny got shipped from home to home and eventually, the asylum. Jenny feels betrayed and the two of them don’t speak.

Crane goes to see Jenny on his own, and warns her of the impending apocalypse and Corbin’s death. She sneers at him.

Abbie learns that The Sandman is coming for her, and tries to take preemptive action. She and Crane find a Native American medicine man dude and ask for help. He has them drink some tea and straps them down to let scorpions bite them, because that way they can enter The Sandman’s world and battle him on their own terms.

Abbie beats him by admitting that she was a coward, that she lied to save her own ass, and she let everyone believe Jenny was nuts. The more she admits her faults, the more solid The Sandman becomes. She smashing his frozen form with a chair, and she and Crane wake up safe and together.

Lt. Mills goes to tell Jenny that she’s sorry, and she was wrong, but ALAS: Jenny has escaped the asylum. Abbie is impressed, but not thrilled.

That brings us to the latest episode, which begins with the Boston Tea Party. Crane is there, and he and some guys are trying to steal an artifact from the British. The Redcoat lets everyone gather around and then mutters something and BOOM, everyone is bits and pieces except Crane.

We flash back to modern times, and Crane is talking about his love for Katrina, apparently to himself in the car. He finishes by thanking the operator for telling him how to unlock the car (from the inside, HA) and she identifies herself as “Northstar Systems” and thanks him for being so unique in his explanation of love. Nice.

Just as Crane frees himself from the confines of the Jeep, Abbie comes running out of the asylum explaining that Jenny escaped. They immediately go to see her boss, and Mills asks for time to speak to Jenny on her own. He reluctantly grants her twelve hours to sort her sister out.

Crane reads Jenny’s file, noting how often and how far she traveled. He suggests visiting her foster families to see if they can provide a clue to where she might be. They end up at the home of a woman who seems glad to be rid of Jenny, and is starving her current foster child while making her sleep on the floor. Abbie gets bitchy and starts making threats about family services getting involved unless she gets answers. The woman mentions a cabin near Trout Lake and Abbie tells her to expect a phone call from family services.

Meanwhile, Jenny has stopped at a bar and asked the bartender for her items. He hands them over without a word, but regrets it when three Hessians (one of them a music teacher) show up demanding to know if she was there and what she wanted. He claims she wasn’t there and the main guy tells him the thing about a lie is, you have to commit. It’s a beautiful, horrifying moment. The bartender knows he cannot commit. The Hessian grabs his rifle almost before he has it above the bar and then the torture the bartender until he confesses that Jenny DID stop by. Afterward they cut off his head and skewer him and leave him as a wall ornament.

Mills and Crane find the cabin and break in, with Crane commenting about all the mischief they could get into with Abbie’s skills. Once inside it doesn’t take long for Crane to discover that the cabin actually belonged to Corbin. Jenny pops out with her gun, and Abbie pulls her gun, and it’s a stand-off until an exasperated Crane tells them both to quit it.

They find a sexton, which is actually a map of Sleepy Hollow leading to a spell book written by Solomon that will raise 72 demons. AWESOME. Just as they’re realizing they should haul ass and get that book, the three Hessians start shooting. They capture one, but the other two escape with the sexton. Apparently they all thought the other one was keeping watch over the dangerous artifact.

They question the Hessian, which is mostly pointless except that he declares “Moloch shall rise.” Foreboding, isn’t it? It’s determined that Moloch is the white, mostly blurry demon everyone is worried about. Moloch is the one giving orders, the same one Abbie and Jenny were hijacked by as teenagers. Moloch, the mirror-cracking demon is coming. Everyone beats feet to the church, where they decide Solomon’s book is buried, because Crane has a photographic memory and doesn’t really need the map on hand. Crane also makes a great comment about having called the Boston Tea Party “the destruction of the tea” and how we’ve given it a much more festive name.

The bad guys get the demon-raising going at the church the old-fashioned way - the leader cuts his hand open and bleeds onto the pages of Solomon’s text. They back away and soon there’s a gooey, golden mass of demons contorting and making faces in their attempts to solidify.

Abbie and Jenny sneak in from opposite sides, guns drawn, and start the battle. The minions/Hessians put up a good fight and all is almost lost, until Crane has a chance to rescue Abbie and she grabs the book and heaves it into the writhing fire of demons. GOOD THING THAT WAS THE RIGHT MOVE, huh Lt. Mills?

Crisis averted, Abbie and Jenny are back at the sheriff’s office, and Jenny is back in handcuffs. Lt. Mills unlocks her and asks her to sign papers giving her the power to decide Jenny’s fate, perhaps getting her an early release from the asylum. They discuss Abbie’s relationship with Crane, and Abbie explains their theory about being the two witnesses. Jenny says she can’t trust or forgive her; Abbie leaves, but the papers remain on the table.

Crane explains to Abbie that he found of reference to Moloch in Paradise Lost. Moloch is the demon of child sacrifice, who led a revolt against Heaven or some such thing. But he finds it reassuring that they know his name.