Sleepy Hollow: Deliverance

I’m usually reasonably certain that everybody’s going to get out of an episode of Sleepy Hollow alive, but they cut it really, really close last week in “Deliverance,” a nail-biter of an episode where we found out that the completely beyond f-cked up Parrish impregnated his mother with Moloch so he could rise again.

The episode of course served two purposes — to confirm just how far gone Parrish is and how much Crane still loves his wife despite her perceived betrayals.

We begin as Katrina realizes she is ill with something other. When Parrish arrives to take her somewhere, she makes a break for it, and like Crane before her, runs straight to the highway for help. Abbie is at the polls (timely) while Crane waxes poetic about the right to vote when they get the call about a woman matching Katrina’s description being hospitalized.

They go get her and Abbie learns the what of Parrish’s plan, and a potential way out, that again tracks back to Benjamin Franklin and the Aurora Borealis. They stash Katrina in the ruins of Parrish’s namesake church and go to get the magical MacGuffin tablet away from the Hessians. To do that, they wind up the Sheriff with a few half-truths and she barges into the Hessian lair with a full tactical team.

Crane and Abbie get out with the tablet and make it to Katrina at the last minute. While Abbie holds Katrina, screaming and writhing as the fetus grows and claws at her belly, Crane cracks open the tablet to reveal the prism they need to abort Moloch. He climbs up over the altar and rips the boards off the windows and lines the prism up between the sun and Katrina, and after quite the light show, she collapses, no longer pregnant. We have a moment where we think she might not have survived, and then she breathes again. She and Crane proclaim their love and Abbie makes her exit.

But Parrish still has a plan B, so we’ll have that coming up (yikes).

This was an extremely solid, emotionally fraught hour, and I really did think we might lose Katrina, and then Crane would just rain down on Henry, blood tie be damned. Now he and Katrina have to deal with the fact that they can’t turn Henry back. Crane is intrigued that his attempt to reason with his son (which fails) does at least give him a glimpse of a lost boy in the woods, which he takes as a sign that his son still exists. I’m not buying that just yet.

I also wonder now that they’ve gotten Katrina away from Abraham, who pleaded ignorance on Parrish’s plan and was defenseless against him in the daylight, whether she will stay with Abbie and Crane.

I’m ready for Irving to be out in the world again — I liked that he got Parrish to the asylum so Crane could have a sit down with him.

And as a side note — I love that every week we sort of have a fakeout cold open, and that the full credits are still intact.

Here’s a sneak peek of Monday’s new episode. We’re almost at the halfway point for the season (nooooo!).