SLEEPY HOLLOW Recap: ‘Awakening’

Did Katrina’s coven just perform an awakening ritual on this show? I haven’t been so excited about a SLEEPY HOLLOW twist since the season 1 finale, and the show hasn’t felt so full of ridiculous potential since the pilot. That’s fitting. The final minutes of this episode felt like a finale and a pilot all in one, and the fact that it was technically a normal week — that we get to keep going — is what sets this show apart when it’s at its best. (What’s that the producers were saying about making SLEEPY HOLLOW less serialized?) It took us too much time to get here, and we have too little time left, but let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

The War

Now down a library full of answers, Abbie and Ichabod take their fight to the local bookstore, because nothing says apocalyptic Witness like asking a small business owner for Enoch’s Bible. Their search for rare texts is interrupted by a disturbance downtown; three people commit unexplained, violent acts at the same time, and all they remember is the sound of a bell.

There’s always been a bell in the center of the town square, but Abbie doesn’t recognize the one they find there now. Ichabod does: it’s a replica of the Liberty Bell. He blew up the original on George Washington’s orders. The sound of it, or any bell cast in its mold, is like a siren call to anyone with witch blood — and by now, descendants of Katrina’s coven could number in the thousands. This calls for another explosion.

The last of the C-4 went toward blowing up our nation’s third president (he asked for it; it’s fine), so Abbie and Ichabod swing by the hardware store to pick up the ingredients for a homemade bomb. If only Calvin the investigative journalist were here to see this. With Jenny’s help, they drag the bell to the underground tunnel system, where the blast can be contained. The fact that they have to open up a new section of tunnels doesn’t seem to worry them, even though the last people to do that ended up getting eaten by reavers. They just like going rogue together.

Frank interrupts their regularly scheduled mission to shoot at everyone. Jenny can take this, thanks. As she and Frank take off, the Witnesses deal with a new betrayal: Katrina and Henry are out to bring back their kind, awakening every potential witch in town. Henry would do it on his own, but it takes someone with pureblood heritage to ring the bell correctly, which is why he saved Katrina. Mother and son stroll up arm in arm, ready to take this bell by force, though you get the sense they’d rather take it quietly. Henry’s not after “wanton carnage.” He just wants to get this done so he can go home and knit another sweater.

As for Katrina, being evil suits her. She’s never looked more confident than she does on Henry’s arm. She tells Ichabod that they don’t belong together (obviously) and that she’s sorry to have wasted so much time on the idea that she could ever settle down with a mortal man. Ichabod tries to change her mind — Tom Mison laces his pleas with the desperation of a man who knows this is his last chance — but when he sees how it has to be, he doesn’t waste time mourning. He and Abbie have a job to do.

Henry and Katrina seal Abbie and Ichabod into the tunnel and take the bell, but our Witnesses know these tunnels better than anyone, and thanks to Ichabod’s interference with the original bell, they know it needs to be rung from the old town hall. Ichabod calls Henry outside for a confrontation. He is actually ready to kill his son this time, which he proves by shooting at him, but Henry stops the bullet. When Abbie tries hitting him with a car, Katrina blows it up — but if we’ve learned anything today (and Katrina and Henry have not), it’s that Witnesses don’t stop that easily. The car is a ruse; Abbie is already rigging that bell to blow.

Henry ties Abbie and Ichabod to a pillar, but he doesn’t catch the bomb on the bell. Abbie and Ichabod cut the rope from their wrists (using a piece of steel that she bought at his suggestion, because they’re a team like that) and plan to shoot the bomb’s fuse, but since Henry can stop bullets, they decide to split his focus by shooting at him too. Henry bled at the explosion outside, so there’s a chance that he’s mortal after all.

Abbie takes Henry; Ichabod takes the bell. The problem is that Ichabod shoots first; Henry stops that bullet but is unprepared for Abbie’s, which leaves a glowing blue wound. As he dies, he calls his parents “mother” and “father” and asks them to call him by his given name, Jeremy. Is he just looking for sympathy, or did he really care this much for his family all along? He turns to dust. Is Henry off the show? Why didn’t Abbie shoot first?

Ichabod tries to comfort Katrina, but she blames him. Seizing John Dee’s grimoire, she recites a spell that opens some kind of vortex in the room. Abbie runs to stop her — and possibly save her, because Abbie Mills is better than all of us — and they’re both pulled in. As Ichabod calls Abbie’s name, she wakes up in the woods with no cell phone reception. A horse and carriage rush past her on a dirt road. An instrumental version of “Sympathy for the Devil” plays. This is the pilot in reverse. Abbie’s in colonial Sleepy Hollow.

Abbie makes her way to the town square, where the notices posted on a board are dated 1781. She’s figuring it out. Meanwhile, the townspeople have no idea what’s going on or what to make of this strangely dressed black woman who has no papers and won’t be quiet when asked. History is the worst sometimes. Abbie’s taken into custody and locked in a cell, where she tells the officers that she has information to change the course of this war. She’ll only talk to one person: Captain Ichabod Crane.

Oh, and Katrina’s there too.

The Key Players

Back in the tunnels, Frank reminds Jenny that he’s a robot for the Horseman of War: “You can’t run forever. And I can.” That’s comforting. He wants to know where his family is, but Jenny won’t tell. She’s already brought Abbie and Ichabod up to speed on the whole Frank situation, and they’ve got some ideas. Assuming they can bring people back to life who’ve been frozen to stone by the Gorgon (a big “if,” but their research is promising), they can freeze Frank to keep him safe while they figure out if there’s a way to restore his soul. There are a lot of “if”s in Frank’s life right now.

Jenny grabs the Gorgon’s head from their dungeon storage closet and prepares to use it on him from behind a window. This is about where I start panicking, because wouldn’t the Gorgon’s reflection bounce back and freeze her instead? Just in time, Henry’s death releases Frank’s soul, and he falls to the floor with no idea how he got here. He smiles when he says Jenny’s name, which is how you can tell that he’s back, but Jenny doesn’t know for sure until he admits that there’s no way to know for sure. Evil Frank would have tried to convince her.

She runs out of the chamber, and I’m still a little worried that the Gorgon head is going to crawl its way out of there on its little snake hairs and freeze one or both of them. As they embrace, Jenny adds that he’d better not be lying to her. Can you even imagine what she’d do to him if he were? This seems legitimate, though. We have Frank back! I’m tired of the back and forth, but I’m glad to have him back. We’ll need him to help find Abbie.

The Witnesses

We are in for the most tremendous fight. Ichabod won’t stop until he’s rescued Abbie, and Abbie won’t give in until she’s back with Ichabod — and she’ll probably convince past Ichabod in the process. Two Ichabod Cranes. Yes please. Live that dream, Abbie. But will one cancel out the other? It’s no coincidence that Abbie and Ichabod were just talking about pop culture time travel narratives before she was pulled back in time. What are the rules here? Katrina conjured this spell to fix things with Jeremy, which suggests that time can be rewritten. If Ichabod knows Abbie in the past, does that change or undo the person he is in the present? These are all questions for later. What matters now is that Ichabod Crane is about to meet his “leftenant” all over again.

It’s a good time to shake things up a bit, given how comfortable Ichabod is in the present — and with Abbie. With Katrina out of the way, Abbie and Ichabod are in sync on almost every issue. Abbie generously suggests that Katrina might be under Henry’s spell in order to make Ichabod feel better, and he doesn’t even need the reassurance, because that relationship doesn’t matter to him like his relationship with Abbie. She’s his priority. As long as he has her to knock down tunnel walls and answer his questions about lawn ornaments (“Which holiday requires monopedal pink birds and a band of barbate pygmies?”), he’s fine.

Even his own son is less important. Abbie takes Ichabod’s willingness to kill Henry as proof of that he’s with her all the way, although it’s too bad that Henry actually had to die. He bragged about his cool potted plants to his mom today. Isn’t a villain like that worth saving? I’m taking nothing for granted on this show, especially now that we’ve gone back in time.

But who can worry about Henry when Abbie’s trapped in 1781?

What did you think of this week’s episode?