In police procedurals, there’s a type of episode called a “case of the week,” which if you’ve read my work you’ve seen me use, because I am a fucking hack. “Case of the week” can apply to other types of shows, though, and this week Sleepy Hollow had their first “monster of the week” episode with “Go Where I Send Thee….” It wasn’t a bad episode – or at least it wasn’t a boring one – but it acted as a kind of bottle episode for Ichabod and Abbie; there was no Katrina, no Horseman, no Jenny, no Sheriff Reyes, and minimal sightings of Frank and Henry.
First of all, how great is the chemistry between Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie? There is no version of this show that should work as well as this one does, and a huge portion of the credit goes to Mison and Beharie throwing themselves into the weirdest buddy-cop project since Theodore Rex.
It helps that Mison and Beharie are a-goddamn-dorable together, and sweetly reconfirm their commitment to each other in pretty much every episode.
There’s a missing child in Sleepy Hollow named Sarah Lancaster. Abbie has a personal connection to the girl because Sarah’s mother Beth was Abbie’s case worker. Apparently Beth meant a lot to Abbie, which is why we’ve heard her name so much we are just hearing about her now. Anyway, Crane quickly deduces that the girl was lured away from her home by the Pied Piper, who in Crane’s day was a mercenary (obviously) with anachronistic Assassin’s Creed fighting moves, who placed a curse on the Lancaster family.
For all the jokes I’m making (please tell me I’m funny), I’ll say this about Sleepy Hollow: when it puts a monster on its show, it commits. The Piper gets a well-shot, well-narrated backstory, and it’s the kind of background that tells you why something is scary, not just that it is scary. As inconsequential as I consider this episode to be, I will always applaud a show for respecting its audience’s intelligence.
Abbie and Crane search the woods for the Piper, using an mp3 of Crane playing the enchanted bone flute (haha) to lure Abbie to the Piper’s lair. The duo runs into Hawley, who’s freshly fucked up from a bout with the Piper. Hawley and Crane play off of each other well, but at this point Hawley is basically an exposition machine. If he’s going to stick around, I hope he gets more to do, because I like the energy that Matt Barr brings to the role.
Look, I’m not going to regurgitate every plot detail. If you haven’t seen the show, why would you be reading this? Crane and Abbie kill the Piper (well, Abbie kills him, which is good, because she’s better than a damsel in distress), the curse on the Lancaster family is broken, and Hawley unwittingly sells the broken flute to Henry. Wait, what?
Oh yeah, Henry was in the background doing all sorts of nefarious shit. It’s worth repeating that John Noble is just murdering this role. He got Frank to sign over his soul in blood, which leads to Frank having a vision of himself as a soldier for the Horseman of War; the vision culminates in a Bible spontaneously combusting, which was a pretty striking image. Lord knows what Henry wants with the flute – which he grinds up with a mortar and pestle – but Abbie loudly insisted that the Piper was “part of a bigger picture.”
Come on, Sleepy Hollow, you’re better than that. I’m fine with monster of the week episodes. But I just said you respect your audience’s intelligence, so don’t have a character announce that something will be on the test.
A Few Thoughts
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If Beth Lancaster was so certain that her daughter would be taken by the Piper, why wouldn’t she just get her tubes tied after adopting those three boys?
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Frank knows that Henry is the Horseman of War. There are two things he can do about that: jack and shit. I hope he gets out of Tarrytown soon, because his presence is missed
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