Sleepy Hollow just generally kicks ass at mythology, doesn’t it? Granted, pretty much all of its mysteries are solved by some variation of “Founding Father + occult,” but between this, The Walking Dead, The Flash, and Arrow, I think it’s safe to say that genre TV is just killing it right now.
“Deliverance” picks up where last week left off, with Katrina pregnant with what I really really wanted to be a spider baby. Like, I knew that wasn’t gonna happen – that’s not how magic works – but part of me wanted Sleepy Hollow to get dark as fuck and have Katrina die birthing some eldritch abomination. Still, the reality is pretty shitty for her too.
She manages to escape after Henry and some goons show up and try to take her away from the Horseman, and she ends up at a hospital, from which Ichabod and Abbie help sneak her out, after putting her in a corset that she really didn’t need to be wearing. Don’t get me wrong, Katia Winter looks good in a corset, but she had a blouse on underneath; if anything, donning the corset that used to belong to “some drunk goth chick” only slowed them down. Whatever, they abscond to a church and start the exposition part of every Sleepy Hollow episode.
It’s here that we learn that Henry’s goons are actually members of the Hellfire Club, which sadly does not include a German-speaking Kevin Bacon. Oh, but it gets worse! Katrina is not pregnant with an awesome spider baby, she’s actually pregnant with Moloch himself (who goes by the title “the Horrid King,” which coincidentally is my porn name). After a few weeks of monster of the week episodes, it was nice to see this show jump headfirst back into its larger narrative. The only way to stop Moloch from being birthed is by getting a prism (made by Ben Franklin, naturally) that simulates aurora borealis, so Ichabod and Abbie stage a raid on the Hellfire Club’s warehouse.
It’s nice to see Abbie kicking ass again. The raid is well-shot and well-directed (by Nick Copus, a veteran of Arrow and I Shouldn’t Be Alive), and it looks as though Reyes is warming up not only to Abbie but to Ichabod as well. She’s gotta find out about all this crazy bullshit at some point, and hopefully she doesn’t have the same knee-jerk reaction that got Frank locked up in the loony bin.
Speaking of the loony bin, Ichabod lures Henry there under the misguided notion that he can get through to Henry and get him to help Katrina. Dude, this is John Noble – who has one of the best evil laughs on TV – what did you expect? Henry flat-out chooses Moloch, and the whole scene is just great. Noble and Tom Mison have great chemistry together, and the tight shots on their faces made their conversation – or should I say confrontation? – almost unbearably intimate and tense. Ichabod doesn’t want to give up on his son, but it’s hard to think of another option when he so ominously intones, “I choose Moloch.”
The aurora prism works, obviously, and even though I think killing Katrina would have been a tough, gutsy decision, I understand why Sleepy Hollow wants to keep her around: 1, no one at Fox gives a shit what I think, and 2, Winter plays the role nicely and is stepping up her game with her increased screentime. Still, no spider baby. Zero stars.
A Few Thoughts
- Katrina’s floating hex was pretty cool
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I liked the timely discussion about voting that opened the episode. With the midterm elections tomorrow, it almost feels like product placement
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Ichabod exploding the fist bump was my favorite part of “Deliverance”
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