We have somehow already arrived at the fall finale of Sleepy Hollow (nooooooo!). Let’s catch up on the last two episodes.
In “Heartless,” Sleepy Hollow ventured into Lost Girl territory, but unlike our beloved Bo, the soul sucker summoned by Parrish doesn’t have an off switch. She’s also crafty about presenting herself as the person you most want to see/be with before she snuffs you. This means that Hawley has a close encounter with her sort of as a ringer for Abbie, while Crane runs into her in a guise fairly similar to Katrina, with whom he still has some baggage to sort through.
The boys, of course, come out alive at the end, with a handy assist from Abbie, who works with Katrina on a banishment spell involving a not-as-dead-as-it-should be heart. Katrina decides to return to Parrish, again as a spy, and he puts her to work as the caretaker for baby Moloch, who was re-animated by the offerings from the Succbus. I’ll give you a moment to shudder. Of course, that pesky amulet Katrina wears means she only sees the baby as a human baby, and it pulls all sorts of heartstrings.
In “Mama,” we have a tandem motherhood arc, as Katrina continues to nurture demon baby until he suckles her neck, turning her veins black and she realizes something is not at all right. Then she gets to work on a spell and finds out she doesn’t have quite enough when the baby does the SORAS thing.
The larger story in the episode is a string of suicides at Tarrytown Psychiatric that seem to be the work of a spirit who looks an awful lot like Mama Mills. Abbie descends on the hospital with Jenny in tow for an insider’s perspective, and they’re immediately met by an overly helpful nurse (Cynthia Stevenson’s casting is a ding ding ding giveaway). After threats against Irving and Abbie, a round of flashbacks hit home for the girls as they realize exactly what their mom was struggling so mightily against.
They vanquish the nurse, who also forced their mom’s suicide, and have a chance to make peace with their mom’s spirit after they reconcile that some of her actions that seemed threatening when they were girls were done by demon hand. Abbie also gets to ask her mom about knowing way back there that she would grow up to be a Witness. And, they get their family Grimoire back.
Crane is sidelined for most of the hour with a cold (logistically I think that timed out with premiere launch activities that took Mison out of Wilmington, but I’m not sure). Hawley is enlisted to help, but we never get into the dynamics of him perhaps feeling something for Abbie conflicting with his past history with Jenny. And Irving finally decides he’s tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop, so he makes a break for it and leaves Tarrytown with the team.
I like that everybody’s getting involved, and I think probably the series expanded the cast to give Nicole Beharie and Mison some breathing room when they were in almost every scene of Season 1. I’m aware some folks aren’t digging the switch up in the dynamics, but I like it, and I get it from a production standpoint. I feel like Mison and Beharie do such a great job with tiny, small moments, that it’s OK if we don’t spend every minute with them. They’ve got this, and each other. No worries here.
Here are few sneak peeks of tonight’s mid-season finale (again, noooooo!)
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