“Awakening” aired on Monday; it’s the penultimate episode of the season for Sleepy Hollow, and I am only just now done laughing about John Noble’s face from the scene in which Katrina reveals she’s gone evil and she’s sort of done being married to Ichabod and just wants to raise an army of zombie witches instead, by using the Liberty Bell.
He has about five minutes to live, and oh, he’s going to make use of them ALL.
I ended up using that face a lot for my recap of this episode, because this feels incredibly slapdash even for Sleepy Hollow. A bell no one had ever thought to ring before? What’s the point of zombie witches if their powers are so unpredictable? Why didn’t Abbie and Jenny get affected by a bell that rings witchblood if you have spent so long reminding us Grace Dixon was a powerful witch? Did you really bring back the Gorgon head before you brought back the Headless Horseman, who must just be sitting at home whittling a chess set or something and waiting for someone to come get him at this point? And was this really the decoy Ichabod used when he was assigned to blow up the first Liberty Bell?
Because that’s the worst goddamn decoy I have ever seen in my life, and I watched every season of Young Riders, so I have seen some terrible things.
In the race to backtrack over a season of bad decisions, the episode tried to give us a lot – some Ichabod and Abbie anachronism chatting, some Jenny/Frank bonding, some ill-considered lampshading of previous problems – and then gave us a huge twist (great idea!) that was to send Abbie back in time to 1780 (ACK, YOU’RE NOT READY, SHOW, DON’T DO THIS).
When asked her business, somehow the first words out of her mouth were not “Grace Dixon,” and of all the questions I have in my recap, that is perhaps the biggest one. It’s one of those things where, if you just wanted to get her in parallel imagery with Ichabod in the pilot (and it did) and get her behind bars, then fine – asking for Grace Dixon didn’t have to WORK. But when she’s already wandering around in the middle of what she knows is a hostile environment and not even for Grace Dixon-seeking purposes, I am already fairly sure you are abandoning character just to get a plot parallel.
Am I interested in next week? Genuinely yes. Do I fear a lot of it will be out of character given how this all went? I am. Am I prepared to make this face for an hour?
Yes. Yes, I am.
[My full recap, as always, is up at io9!]