Sleepy Hollow - S2E9 - Mama

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Previously on Sleepy Hollow, ‘Heartless’

This episode was everything and more that Sleepy Hollow can and should be. Creepy, chilling, tragic, exciting, moody… Truly fantastic. Ichabod was barely in it, but the Mills sisters carried the weight well. Let’s get to it.

Sichabod Crane has a ManCold

Crane is guilty of that modern workplace sin: coming in sick. Get off his case, okay? He totally fought in the Revolutionary War with dysentery. Abbie banishes him to the corner chair with a Crane-proof bottle of drugs and a blankie. Awww. Next we see him steaming his sinuses with eucalyptus under his jacket shouting comments, then seething indignantly at Hawley’s matzo ball soup offering… which is thoroughly roofied. Crane goes down blathering about Katrina’s helpfulness. Nobody wants to hear that.

Baby Moloch

Henry sells Katrina a line about this baby being an orphan, a “foundling” as she puts it. He snarls that her discomfort with the baby is sooo telling, encouraging her to pick it up. He seriously has a jealous fit about her holding Baby Moloch. Hilarious. Meanwhile she cuddles the darling baby… but from over her shoulder we see what it really looks like: EVIL, burrowing into her shoulder, spreading darkness through her veins. So, just like most babies at 3 am. KIDDING. A little.

Katrina and her impossible corseted waist glance in the mirror later and see the true horror of what this encounter has done to her: the child is literally sapping the life from her. Conveniently, Abraham’s estate has no end to helpful flora—she gathers Devil’s Breath flowers, crushing them as she chants a banishment spell. Slowly she walks to the bedroom with the elixir, reminding herself that it’s a demon. Guess what? It’s not a baby either. Preschool Moloch rummages through the cupboards, turning creepily. “I’m hungry, Mother.” FOR YOUR SOUL.

Mama Mills

While snoozing at work, Abbie has a vision of her mother in a Purgatory state, warning her of demons. Having earned her trust and hoping it will help her mother issues, Reyes assigns her a case: 3 nights, 3 suicides at Tarrytown. Abbie enlists Jenny, who is less than thrilled at returning and opening a variety of unhealed wounds. They bump into a nurse wearing pearls at check-in, who seems sweet and helpful, but hey, come on: pearls = totes evil. Frank agrees that the suicides don’t seem motivated and is open to help.

Reviewing videos of the suicides, Jenny admits to having snuck in as a child to visit their mother only to see her being dragged away screaming by the orderlies. Abbie counters with her own fears: turning crazy like her mom. Why her? With night vision overlay, they spot their ghostly mother muttering in the corner of the dying man’s cell. CHILLS.

Abbie recalls her spiral into torment, the uncertainty of which version of their mother they’d come home to. In one flashback, she tells the pair, “Eyes open, head up, trust no one.” The crew determines that Moloch is taking advantage of a lay line running through Sleepy Hollow to call up spirits to test their resolve.

Checking all the Tarrytown monitors, they spot another patient about to kill himself and rush in. Hawley wrestles him to the ground as Abbie spots her mother’s apparition. “Mama?” she asks, disappearing. Yikes! She reappears in a Ghost-Hunters-ready wing of Tarrytown.

Her mother says, “It’s not safe for you here,” then disappears as the pearl-wearing nurse, Gina Lambert asks what she’s doing here. Whoops, totally got lost! Strangely unsuspicious why a nurse would know someone was in the unused wing, right? Hawley and Jenny split up looking for her, giving Mama Mills time to warn Jenny, too. “Stay away from me!” Jenny shouts, much more harried by this haunting, as her mother etches “TPRJLM12” into a window, a video session reference.

Jenny struggles with watching the video, pulling her mother’s suicide note from a file: “I fought.” Abbie convinces her to do it for their mom. They press their foreheads together, then turn to see Lori Mills, straightjacketed, telling the doctor the demons followed her here, she has to protect the girls. “The nurse wants me to do it.” The nurse isn’t REAL! In retrospect, the first scene was very The Sixth Sense—only the suicidal patient and the Mills sisters saw her. BUM BUM BUMMM.

Guess who else sees her? Frank, who thanks her for her help. She touches him and hands him two red pills. Immediately as she leaves, he hears her voice in his head: “It’s time. You have to. It’s time to end the pain. Freedom. Do it.” He climbs into a large sink, zip tying himself in as it fills. DON’T DO IT!!

Fortunately the team swoops in to drag him out. Abbie tells him he had psychotropic drugs in his system, making him susceptible to suggestion and demonic influence. Bet they don’t have that line in Worst Pills, Best Pills. They look at each other knowingly. “Anytime,” Abbie says to the silence.

Gina Lambert, according to their research, was a self-appointed Angel of Death in the 1950s, having performed over 20 “mercy kills” in institutions across America until she was electrocuted in 1959. Mama Mills appears, sending them to her old cell where she spent 7 months in solitary. Jenny and Abbie see a crack in the wall plaster… underneath is the Gallifreyan home planet a mural of the girls and written music to You Are My Sunshine.

Jenny flashes back to her mother’s “worst day”—she’s in the car with her mother, listening to a completely creepy version of the song on the radio. She asks, “What’s that smell?” We see the car is really in the garage as it fills with carbon monoxide. “She was trying to kill me!” Jenny cries.

Mama Mills appears, telling them they’re not safe, that the only way to stop the nurse is with an ancient hex from her journal. All those times she appeared in the suicide videos? She was trying to use the hex but couldn’t remember it all. Nurse Lambert’s voice booms out, snatching Abbie from the cell. Mama’ll find Abbie, Jenny and Hawley run for the journal. It’s not just any journal: it’s Grace Dixon’s journal, their ancestor who attended Katrina’s labor. Suddenly it seems like no coincidence she was at Jeremy’s birth, right? The West African hex expels witch doctors who have risen from the dead. Jenny begins to read, hesitantly at first, then stronger and stronger, finding the chant’s rhythm.

Nurse Lambert tries working her evil magic over Abbie, now strapped to a wheelchair. Don’t you want to be freed from this hellish life? Then she moves Abbie to an exam chair, presenting her with the red pills, forcing her mouth open… When Mama Mills appears, strangling her with a chain! Wind from the hex blows through, turning Lambert’s eyes black. Shrieking, she breaks apart, and both she and Mama are gone.

“She fought for me,” Abbie tearfully tells Hawley and Jenny. She just wants to see her one more time, to thank her. “There might be a way,” Jenny says, setting up a séance, now with the addition of Crane, in the old cell. Candles, a crystal ball, the whole works. Ichabbie look at each other like, “How she know this?!”

The four clasp hands as Jenny summons Lori, now in her right mind. She always knew Abbie was a witness. So many things you don’t get to choose, but you have to fight. We see that she was actually locked in that car, a demon hulking behind them, and drove through the garage door to save Jenny. Lori says Moloch sent that nurse to finish her off and she’s been purgatory bound, watching over Jenny during her stay. There is a weapon hidden in the journal, she says, telling Abbie: “You were meant to go further than any of us. You were meant to free this war.” Now she is free. The sisters embrace, whole for the first time.

As the four drive home a figure rushes out from Dem Woods. The Kindred? Demon Baby #1? Nope! Frank Irving has escaped! “Don’t give me that Aiding and Abetting a Fugitive Look,” he tells Abbie, leaping in the trunk. Irving on the lam!