SLEEPY HOLLOW Season 3 Premiere Post-Mortem: Clifton Campbell on Pandora, that Tablet, and More

[Warning: this post contains spoilers for the SLEEPY HOLLOW season 3 premiere. Please watch that before you read this post.]

SLEEPY HOLLOW kicked off its third season nearly a year after Team Witness defeated Henry and Katrina, with both Abbie and Ichabod in very different places. (Abbie is now with the FBI, while Ichabod went to his homeland to reconnect with the world and solidify his place in the present era.)

And though it seems like the duo went through some interesting things while they were apart from each other (and off our screens), new showrunner Clifton Campbell acknowledged the show won’t be using its flashback device to dive into the missing time.

“At this point, it’s what we hear about [that period],” he said. “It’s a lot more fun to see the result of it, than to go back in time and see that. I think when [fans] see the premiere episode, you get a chance to sense the change without having to go over the change. They look a little different…they both are in a slightly different place, a very appropriate amount of self-discovery leaves them fresh and in a good place.”

The good place was a path that took a bit to get to, since last we saw the duo, the ramifications of Ichabod having to kill the newly-evil Katrina (to protect Abbie) were just starting to sink in.

“We looked at [the time jump] as an opportunity to really skip past some of that stuff,” Campbell said. “Honestly, season 2, particularly that stuff with Katrina and the abrupt reveal that she switched sides and went over to Moloch’s side — it’s a lot of disorientating pain on the character’s part, a lot of maudlin emotions to be dealt with. It really felt better, and really felt more like Crane in his utter nobility, to deal with that in a very personal way. And in doing so, [he] hit his own emotional reset button by going to his birth place, and looking in himself, and wondering what his place in the modern world is. That’s our way of having the character move past, without having the maudlin emotional complications.”

“Not that it didn’t happen,” he continued. “And when we move his character forward, personally, it does come up from time to time. I don’t feel like we missed out on anything. And the fan reaction on how much that storyline eclipsed season 2, mostly, fans will be very happy we skip past it.”

But just because the show has skipped over the pain of the past doesn’t mean things will be entirely easy going forward: Abbie crossed paths (and made nice) with this season’s Big Bad, Pandora, in the premiere…but she didn’t realize it.

“We don’t really hide that ball for too long,” Campbell said of Pandora and Abbie’s future interactions. “The character of Pandora is just so interesting, and Shannyn Sossamon is doing such a great, great job creating [the character]. It’s fun to see them together. It’s more of a slow burn figuring out what it is Pandora’s really up to and what her agenda is, but that’s the fun of the show. They interact a lot.”

One more thing that might cause trouble? That tablet Ichabod found, which included figures who resembled Abbie and Ichabod.

“The tablet is probably the apex of the mystery; what the tablet represents,” Campbell teased. “We find [out more about it] throughout the whole [season], certainly as we build to the midseason break, the prophecies therein start to reveal themselves in actual mysteries that Abbie and Crane are dealing with, and start to connect dots. It plays more into the back half, because it suggests something, perhaps, much bigger than perhaps they were expecting.”

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What did you think of the SLEEPY HOLLOW premiere?

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