On last week’s episode of “Sleepy Hollow” we discovered that Katrina has a dark side, but will this improve the ratings? Henry is back with a vengeance and he has a sidekick. Frank has everyone fooled into thinking he’s back to normal. That favor he’s about to ask Jenny might cause some serious repercussions. There is a disaster and a team of surveyors go missing. Who is behind this? You’ll never guess.
Underground
Ever wonder what is under the streets that you drive over or walk across? Some cities have subway systems and underground tunnels that go in all directions. If you talk to anybody who works for the Streets Department, they’ll tell you some scary stories. You can find just about anything down those sewers. Sometimes you find rats, cars, and all kinds of weird stuff. Unfortunately the street department will even find bodies, but you don’t usually expect to find a library.
There’s a three man team checking out the tunnels and they find a strange manhole cover with some strange symbols. It’s a trapdoor to a tunnel that holds a 200 year old secret. The men are attacked and go missing. When Abbie and Ichabod arrive at the scene, someone else is there. Calvin Riggs (Sharif Atkins) wants to know what happened to his brother and he’s not buying Abbie’s or Ichabod’s lame excuse about police business. Calvin is a journalist and he served in Iraq. He’s seen it all and he knows a lie when he hears it. After seeing a strange structure on the radar machine left by one of the workers, our dynamic duo does some research back in their Batcave.
Fenestella
The show works so much better when it focuses on Ichabod and Abbie’s fight against evil. While Ichabod was BFF’s with General George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, his relationship with Thomas Jefferson was rocky. Although he helped Jefferson with some of the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence, Ichabod tells Abbie that Jefferson unfriended him.
Their first attempt at entering the trapdoor brings them into contact with creatures called Reavers. They were colonial sentries assigned to protect the structure, a niche or fenestella that Jefferson had built to hide information. After 200 hundred years of living in a dark tunnel, they are hungry. We have met the ‘Monsters of the Week’ and Ichabod and Abbie’s escape from the Reavers is caught on tape by Calvin.
Frank
Frank needs Jenny to break into the evidence locker. Why would he need her, when he knows the jail inside and out? Jenny sees a strange symbol tattooed on Frank’s arm and gets suspicious. When Jenny catches him stealing stuff for Henry, she questions him. Frank has two personalities and even though he has a magic rune attached to his hand, its power is wearing off.
Holograms
Thank heavens for Grace Dixon’s diary or we would never understand what is going on. Seems Jefferson was not only President of the United States but he watched “Star Trek.” It’s the only explanation for him knowing how to build a hologram of himself in order to talk to Ichabod and Abbie two hundred years later. When Abbie and Ichabod meet hologram Jefferson (Steven Weber) he tells them that everything they ever needed to know is kept in the fenestella and they’ll just have to choose what’s more important; saving the two survivors or saving the books.
Conclusion
The show works better when it’s Abbie and Ichabod fighting the ‘Monster of the Week’ a formula that is working great for “Grimm” on Syfy. Like I said before, I love when they insert historical facts that I can check out, but I couldn’t find anything about Jefferson and secret niches. But, what I do know especially because I worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Jefferson was interested in fossils. He was a man of science. While serving as Vice President of the United States, he served as President of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and was very interested in fossils. We have some of his fossil collection at the Academy. Why am I telling you this cool fact? The word Fenestella is also the name for a marine fossil; bryozoan.
Henry does show his face tonight. He visits Katrina, gives her roses to insure she stays on the dark side. I don’t know where the writers are going with this part of the story, but if they don’t give Ichabod and Abbie worthier enemies to fight, nothing will help the low ratings. Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie are excellent in their parts. You can feel that hidden tension between them. They love each other. They just don’t know it yet. Their characters are a perfect match and I love the give and take between them as Ichabod learns more about the modern world. You have to admit his understanding of unfriending someone is funny as hell. I also like the top notch guest stars that have been on the show, lately, but there is still something missing.
I’m hoping that Katrina gets all bad ass evil with Henry’s help. We need the bad guys to be scarier. Frank’s got his own dark side taking over so maybe he’ll go more Norman Bates. This show has all the right pieces; they just have to get more of a kick ass script. See you next week, my little sleepy heads.
