Sleepy Hollow - S1E4 - The Lesser Key of Solomon

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Previously, on Sleepy Hollow: “For the Triumph of Evil”

New Characters: Nameless German piano teacher – secret Hessian

Flashback: 1773, Boston Harbor. While patriots are destroying crates of tea on the harbor dock, our Hero Crane is sneaking around looking for a crate per Colonel Washington’s orders. They come upon a soldier in a warehouse, and surprise him so much that he begins speaking in tongues. No, wait—that’s just German. The German soldier prays to the Mighty (and assumedly dark) Lord of Death and then blows the place up with all of them standing in it.

In present time, Icky is talking to himself in a car while he flashes on images of lost-in-the-woods Katrina and their brave love. When a tinny voice comes over the speaker, it turns out he’s talking to the OnStar dispatch and coaching her through what is probably another sad breakup. Good thing he knew which button to press to have her unlock the doors!

Picking right up where Episode 3 left off, Jenny Mills has just escaped the mental ward. Abbie begs Captain Irving to let her go after Jenny before he calls in the reinforcements. Since Irving blames Crane and Mills for the escape- they were the last ones to contact her- he gives them a mere 12 hour head start until he goes after her. Kind of weird how fast he went from “You’re my only hope” to “This one non-lethal crazy person who is more important than all that other supernatural shit that’s been going on, and you guys let her out”. What gives, Cap’n?

Jenny has found a refuge in the most non-descript bar in Sleepy Hollow, and walks in with her not at all suspicious disguise of hoodie and sunglasses. From behind the bar, the bartender retrieves her bag that he’s been holding for her, and she warns him as she walks away that the whole town is going to Hell but is ominously short on specifics.

Elsewhere in Sleepy Hollow, a German piano teacher is in the middle of giving a lesson when he receives a phone call…on a flip phone! Is he a soldier from the past as well? A disguised voice tells that Jennifer Mills has escaped and might know the location of a mysterious Item 37. A clean-up crew will help with her capture, but the German must retrieve the item.

The German has arrived at The Bar with his clean-up crew, but the bartender insists with his shotgun that he doesn’t know a Jenny Mills. Unfortunately for him, the German quickly and neatly disarms him and then tortures him with a suitcase full of shiny scary pointy things.

Hero Crane and Abbie are trying to track Jenny with good old-fashioned police work; while she tries to get a lead on the escape vehicle, he goes through her extensive file. It seems that when Jenny wasn’t in jail or the asylum, she was making exotic trips to places like Mexico and Somalia. Abbie gets all sassy on Crane when he digs into her family history, but spills: dad ran out, mom had a nervous breakdown, leaving the sisters in various foster homes as kids. Those foster homes could be the key to finding her, so she agrees to check them out. They aren’t going to find her there, though, because she’s holed up in a truck stop bathroom loading her bag of weapons.

The Cap’n walks into a bar…and finds the bartender pinned to the wall with a pool cue and his head the pool table. Det. Morales tries to pin it on the Headless Horseman, who lately shows up more in conversation than actual episodes, but Cap’n can tell it’s a different m.o.

Our heroes investigate Jenny’s foster home, replete with white trash stereotypes. When Mills awesomely threatens the mom with “legal brimstone” for keeping kids in a shithole, mom reminds Abbie that she took Jenny in when no one—not even her sister—would take her. Jenny did used to go to a cabin off some lake, but that place belonged to an unknown friend.

Crane and Abbie arrive at the cabin and, finding it locked, Abbie puts her old delinquent skills to use—eliciting some very saucy and innuendoed comments from Mr. Crane. They look around the cabin and as soon as they realize that it belonged to Sheriff Corbin, Jenny walks into the room. They found her!

Abbie and Jenny immediately start bickering, albeit this time with guns pointed at each other, but Crane yells at them and puts a stop to it. This new in-charge Ichabod is hot! Jenny explains that she used to help Corbin acquire rare artifacts and the night before he died, he sent her to the cabin to keep one of those artifacts safe. She opens a secret compartment and pulls out a sextant (an instrument used in mapping sea travel). Crane naturally recognizes the leather cloth it is wrapped in and explains where he’s seen those symbols before.

Flashback: Under the orders of G. Dub, and with the help of Sam Adams, Crane orchestrated the Boston Tea Party as a distraction so they could a crate from the British. This crate contained a mysterious weapon that they were going to use to turn the tide of the Revolutionary War. When the Patriots found the crate, the Hessian that was guarding it blew everyone else up, leaving Ichabod as the sole survivor. When he comes to, ferries the stone box across the ocean for safe keeping and never sees it again.

Crane shows the Mills’ that the sextant is actually a projector hidden in the design of sextant; G. Dub had used them to diguise battle maps. This particular map must pinpoint the whereabouts of mystery chest! Gunfire erupts into the cabin as the German music teacher and his clean-up crew invade with kevlar and automatic weapons. Heis caught, but the crew escape. And they took the sextant!

Since the Mills ladies are arguing again, this time over how to interrogate, Crane searches the prisoner and finds his nautical tattoo, the same one that was on the back of the HH’s head, and identifies him as a Hessian.

 

The Hessian tells Crane about a portal and 72 demons, which Jenny recognizes as the Lesser Key of Solomon. The Lesser Key of Solomon is a legendary book written by King Solomon where he lists 72 demons and the spells to summon and contain them. Wanna see a cool list of all 72 demons? Check this out. In true bad guy fashion, the Hessian reveals the nefarious plan to unleash demons (while we see the Cap’n find the Hessian’s basement chock full of torture devices) and open the doorway for Moloch. Just as he finishes explaining, his mouth cracks and he starts convulsing—he’s taken his secret spy cyanide pill. Thank goodness he got the whole plan out first!

While the Mills’ sisters get into yet another argument, Crane gets busy drawing the map with his eidetic memory. Everyone pulls together and figures out the last known location of the box-an old church by the river-and they’re off to find the key!

Making small talk in the car, Icky and Jenny talk about her weapons training; all of those exotic vacations were really tactical training trips. Crane is colored impressed, and Abbie gives him her best unamused side eye. Their chemisty has definitely been turned up this episode; maybe the search for Katrina’s bones will be put on the back burner.

The remaining Hessian brothers must have known all about the sextant map, because they find the stone box with book and start a blood ritual. As blood drips on the book, the text of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lesser Key, appears and the Hessian incants about the portal that will let Moloch into the world. Fire spontaneously erupts in the holy water font! The water spills out as fiery bloody acid water and creates a pentagram on the floor. The pentagram is full of demons trying to push their way up out of the flames!

As the Mills sisters creep up on the ritual, Abbie gives their position away and a fire/knife fight starts. The demons are pulsing under the layer of fiery water as Crane pushes a Hessian off of Abbie; she gets her hands on the book, but not before the other Hessian has Jenny at gunpoint.

Abbie feints to the left, but then throws the book into the fiery pit of demons. This seems like a bad idea, but since demons can’t read, the book just sets on fire. Crane tosses his Hessian into the pit as well, and Jenny extracts herself and turns the gun on the other one, shooting him in the stomach. The now three heroes stare on as the fire pit grows bigger and erupts into swirling streams of flame…and then the whole thing just implodes and disappears. Another tidy ending for our gang.

Back at the station, Abbie releases Jenny from handcuffs and they chit chat about their dead mom and the Book of Revelation. When Abbie tells her about the “two witnesses” theory, Jenny believes her right away but is still caught up in all her abandonment issues. Abbie promises to make it right by getting her out of the asylum; she’ll be out in less than six month, and then they can work together to get real answers about what is happening. Crane intercepts Abbie in the hall to tell her about Moloch, a key player in Paradise Lost. (Moloch is actually a super interesting cat: an Ammonite god, he is traditionally associated with propitiatory child sacrifice by parents but is modernly used as a reference to costly sacrifice. Read up on him here.) According to the full color page in Crane’s book, Moloch is the ram headed demon from the woods and from John Cho’s cell—he’s the one who controls the Headless Horseman, and now we know his name!

Next week on Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod finally wonders if his wardrobe needs updating.