Whoops! How did Monday get here already? Let’s catch you up on “Midnight Ride.”
The Headless Horseman is back in Sleepy Hollow in full-on serial killer mode and he takes out the Bod’s Mason brothers by beheading, and then to add insult, tuns their heads into lanterns. This casts back to the ride of Paul Revere, and the whole one if by land two if by sea thing, where it turns out the Horseman (while he still has his head), gave chase to Revere because he was couriering a precious Mason manuscript at the behest of Samuel Adams (“Sam” to The Bod).
The Bod and Abbie decide they have to finish off the head to stop the Horseman and Irving says he’ll have to go fetch it from a testing facility. That puts him on the path of the Horseman, who has an uncanny ability to track his noggin. Irving escapes with his life, and the head, after impressively dodging shotgun fire and a thrown axe. So he’s now flipped the switch from skeptic to believer.
Abbie and The Bod try a variety of means to destroy the head–detonation, mallet, acid–and none of them work.
Then they look up the document Revere had been transporting and The Bod finds the password they need (Cicero) on the back of the teeth of the Horseman’s skull and that clues them in that they can capture the Horseman during daylight. Abbie loops the Bod that UV light also works so they set that plan in motion, leading the Horseman deeper and deeper into the catacombs until they light him up to disable and chain him. We close as Abbie, the Bod, and Irving look on and wonder what’s next.
Also in the episode, Morales is paid a visit by Andy, who plants just enough freak out in him that he backpedals from trying to resume a friendship with Abbie. Andy is also instrumental in helping trap the Horseman and The Bod tells him to steer clear after he relays the message.
So this was a setup episode to move us forward on how to beat the Horseman. Or so they’d have us think, because if they do that then what’s next, indeed.
In the episode’s fun with technology, The Bod stumbles upon live sex shows on the Internet and redefines the voice mail when he leaves an eloquent spoken word missive for Abbie. He also gets to shout down a museum guide for perpetuating myths about Revere.
And Tom Mison wins everything for alliteration when he flawlessly says: “It’s similar to a Caesar shift cipher only instead of shifting the alphabet based on a letter, it’s based on a word. A Vigenere cipher is several Caesar ciphers in a sequence with different shift values.”
Tonight, we pick up as the Horseman is interrogated by the trio in “Necromancer.”