Sleepy Hollow - S3E3 - Blood and Fear

Tweet

Previously on Sleepy Hollow, ‘Whispers in the Dark’

Spell o’ The Week

Pandora casts a spell over her magic puddle, and compared to last week this one is pretty good: she drops some rhymes and gains access to the Witnesses’ innermost fears. Luckily they only have one fear apiece. This show only has an hour.

The same spell also makes handkerchiefs hilariously float through the air and can produce weapons out of thin air. That last part is actually not hilarious-that’s a wicked looking knife she’s got now.

Crane has been enjoying the fruits of standing in line at a government office, ramping him up for a new adorable Icha-rant (™) on some sort of injustice or another. His paperwork to protect the Archives has lapsed, and he can’t have it renewed without an American citizen’s signature. Obviously the time has come for Ichabod to become an American citizen! His new probably love-interest Historian Lady overheard his stirring speech, and later in the episode she tells him she wants to help him pass the test (even though he quoted himself to her). She must really have a thing for Americans.

Hi, My Name Is

Sleepy Hollow has a pretty standard opening formula: Witness repartee, introduce evil, cut to unknown character/location where new evil will undoubtedly take place. That’s how Nelson Myers is introduced, as the typical sad-sack office nerd who can’t talk to his pretty blonde office crush Emily. He follows her unnoticed to the liquid lunch office party at Sleepy Hollow’s All Day Rave Bar, but instead of talking to his crush he gets chatted up by Pandora. She goads him into dancing with her, promising a show for his coworkers, and after a few stumbles he wakes up in his bed with a fancy new knife that’s just begging to be used in a supernatural killing.

Jenny fills Abbie in on losing the Shard and rescuing Joe. They should probably finally tell him the truth about his father’s other life and the crazy goings on of Sleepy Hollow, with it’s Headless Horsemen and Wendigos just walking around. Reynolds interrupts their sidewalk meeting to put Abbie on a new case: local office douche who brags about his sexual conquests found dead in an elevator.

Technically, he was exsanguinated, which really is a mystery since he’d been stabbed multiple times, and with a vengeance. The Witness team is on the case, and as Crane leans over the body he has flashbacks to a childhood terror: Jack the Ripper?

Ichabod Crane, Original Hipster

Ever the investigator, Abbie asks the obvious: how could Jack the Ripper have been around when Ichabod was a kid? And aren’t we using the word kid a bit liberally? Don’t worry-there’s a flashback for that. Eton College in 1763 had been victim to “another” ripper killing of Ichie’s closest friend, found in the same desiccated state. Crane got sent away for his safety before the murderer was found, but never lost his obsession with the strange deaths, which he formed a pattern with the same M.O. going back 900 years. He’d never even heard of Jack the Ripper, he just recognized the death…which means Pandora recognized him by his memories! Making that giant leap based on what feels like zero intel, it becomes clear to them that Pandora and the murder weapon are behind these killings.

Joe and Abbie are ahuntin’ Randall, but when they kick in the door to his motel, they instead scare the bejesus out of some hitchhiker he picked up. With a peal of tires (and probably manic laughter that we couldn’t hear), Jenny discovers that that hitchhiker tied Randall up in the bathroom and made off with the Shard-just like Papa Corbin used to do!

Here Comes the Blade

Forensics has reconstructed the murder weapon. Wanna guess who recognizes it as a Byzantine long-bladed dagger, forged in 950 AD? It’s not the FBI tech. This blade has a wicked history, and those who wield it will be wholly overcome with unquenchable bloodlust. The knife is what turns people into Rippers.

Nelson is having a good amount of murder-regret, at least until Pandora appears to convince him that he deserves the power the knife has given him. He tries to give it back but it’s glued to his hand, forming a metal gauntlet around his wrist. She takes him back to his apartment to give him the gift of the traditional Ripper coat and a new objective: hunt down the Witnesses.

In a sheer coincidence of timing, Abbie and Crane show up at Nelson’s apartment building; they’ve pinpointed him as their Ripper, and not a moment too soon. Nelson slices through the door as they start to knock on it, and I’ll be damned if that knife didn’t grow three sizes since it welded to his arm! But he’s no longer sad office nerd Nelson, he’s angry powerful vengeful Nelson-he gets shot out of a window by Abbie, falls a few stories, lands on a car, and then gets up and smiles! In the words of Abbie Mills: Oh, damn!

Jenny catches up with The Hitchhiker Thief at a diner outside town; she’s already sold the Shard, except Jenny knows she hasn’t because that was another Corbin trick. How the hell does she know all these weirdly specific things? Who is Sophie’s employer that wants the Shard so badly? And why the hell is it so important?

Abbie and Crane have to figure out how to disarm (literally) Nelson, and they do it in standard Sleepy Hollow fashion: with the internet and an unfettered access to all records everywhere. It takes some time and dialogue, but they piece together that the knife gets its power by draining the blood of victims; if it were to drain blood that was unhealthy, it would lose it’s power.

Every Breath You Take

Nelson must have disregarded Pandora’s orders, because Office flirt Emily is obviously Nelson’s next victim for a whole list of reasons (only one of them being that he has secret pictures of her on his computer). She gets picked up for police protection, but when Abbie can’t get in touch with Policeman Rudy, she knows something is wrong and it’s time for them to save the day.

The Action Plan for this episode: shoot Nelson up with Malaria-tainted blood so that the knife will release him. He’s got Emily as a hostage, and when the first round of poisoned blood hits him, he just shrugs it off. Nothing freaking happens. Crane and Nelson fight it out, and as Nelson stabs Ichabod with his blade Ichie reveals that he poisoned himself with the malaria blood, which ends the hold of the Ripper Knife.

Nelson for Crane is not a fair trade, but Abbie isn’t going to let Crane die, even with Pandora breathing down her neck about her impending loneliness.

Joe is sorting through Papa Corbin’s stuff in hopes of finding info on the Shard while Jenny tries to figure out if Corbin was teaching his trade to any lonely orphan that walked by. Things are about to get weird (as they do in Sleepy Hollow), but Joe and Jenny are all in for this mystery.

Abbie has to raincheck her inappropriate working dinner with Randall, so he offers her a drink instead. Drinks on an empty stomach? You’re smarter than that, Mills. Randall just wants to make sure they’re cool because of, you know… “what happened”. They are. Glad they got the chance to get that out of the way.

I’ll Be Watching You

Crane wakes up in Abbie’s house with an IV in his arm and a little ‘splaining to do. Injecting himself with Malaria seemed risky, but he spent two years building up an immunity to iocaine powder. developed an immunity to it during the Seige of Charleston, so aside from that massive stab wound he was going to be just fine. Abbie fills him in on Pandora’s scare tactics: she’s trying to raise fear, but why? Is she doing it for herself, or is she working for someone? And were those questions a secret? ‘Cause Pandora just heard everything you said in her wire-tap pond.

Leave your thoughts on the episode below and we’ll read them on tonight’s Sleepy Hollow podcast.