The Breakdown
The second episode of Sleepy Hollow starts off with Ichabod running for his life in the dark of night through the forest. He is running from four figures on horses; with one figure being headless of course. He ends seeing his wife, Katrina, which confirms he is in some sort of vision or dream. Katrina has another warning for him. She warns, cryptically, about a dark spirit who “arises with the blood moon” and is waiting to enter the world; “she is one of us”. Katrina says to stop her before she kills again. She also talks about the headless horseman wanting to wake the others.
Meanwhile in the real world, Abbie finds out from the captain that the cops who saw the headless horseman with their own eyes recanted their statements. They make up a story about the person being bent down and why it originally looked like he was headless but really wasn’t. They do this out of fear of sounding crazy with their original stories. This enables the captain to further his denial and skepticism of Ichabod’s story. In addition, a doctor who viewed a recording of Ichabod’s statement has labeled him as having a disorder to explain his so-called delusions. Abbie brings up what happened to Andy and how after only two minutes in the cell, somehow his head ended up snapped back. He shows her a video of Andy ramming himself head-first into the mirror, but we know what really happened and we get to see a flashback of the evil faceless figure being the real murderer. After being disproven yet again, Abbie is back to displaying doubts as she listens to Ichabod’s story about his vision of Katrina and the warning she gave.
We then see a body bag in the morgue suddenly start moving. As someone makes their way out of the body bag, we only see the neck down. He turns around and we see that it is Andy. As he tries to put his head back right-side up, the faceless figure appears and tells him to release someone. Andy starts to choke something up and pulls out a chain with a pendant on it.
In the next scene, we get a chuckle out of Ichabod freaking out at how much the meal cost as he rides to the Sheriff’s funeral with Abbie. It was over four dollars and the tax was a whole forty-one cents. During the funeral we see some of Abbie’s memories of Sheriff Corbin as tears roll down her cheeks. While at the cemetery, Ichabod visits Katrina’s headstone and her warning runs through his mind again. He realizes that her words “she is one of us” means that the dark spirit Katrina warns about is a witch.
After nightfall, Andy is in a cemetery with the pendant. He delivers a message to a smoky being that looks to be female and covered in ash. Andy tells her she must find the descendants of the ones that burned her in order to get her skin back. We soon see Andy, who is in his police uniform, stop a guy in a car. He asks the guy his name and tells him that the road he is about to take isn’t personal. Confused (as we all are), the man tries starting up his car to continue on. While he is still trying to get it to turn, the woman covered in ash appears, puts her hand on his windshield, and the inside of the car bursts in flames.
When we return to Ichabod and Abbie, he confronts her about the Sheriff, indicating he can tell that he meant a lot to her. Abbie opens up to him and talks about the after effect of seeing that faceless figure when she and her sister were younger. Her sister ended up in an institution while Abbie’s way of coping was to turn to drugs. That is actually how she met the sheriff. Instead of busting her right away, he took her to the diner that we first saw the two of them in the pilot episode. He tried to talk some sense into her and told her to make a choice: change or go to jail right now. She decided to change and recognized that moment as the most fathering she had gotten up to that point.
Abbie soon gets called to a crime scene with a charred guy in a burned up car. They notice that the body has a hole in the chest as if someone was collecting something. Ichabod realizes he has seen this before. We flash back to one of his memories in the war where he found bodies charred the same way. He catches a glance of a woman with red eyes and he can tell there is something dark about her but was still a heavy skeptic at the time and wasn’t sure if he believed what he saw.
Back at the station, Ichabod is waiting on Abbie and gets approached by a cop who still sees him as a suspect (and treats him that way) and doesn’t know he is working with Abbie. When she returns, she tells the cop, who happens to be her ex-boyfriend, about her working with Ichabod. Once they leave, Ichabod, detecting some jealousy, teases her and asks about her previous relationship. She tells him they split up when she was about to go into the FBI and doesn’t want to say much more about the subject. When they reach their destination on a lower floor in the precinct, Abbie panics as Ichabod starts knocking the wall down.
It turns out there is a tunnel that was built during the war to transfer ammunition and supplies. They walk down the dark, spooky tunnel and Ichabod tells Abbie that the witches’ bones are down there because it was felt they did not deserve a proper burial. Eventually, two end up in the storage room or “the place where hard copies go to die” as Abbie says. They find Corbin’s old files and do some research. They find a book that tells of Serilda who was bound and weakened so the hunters could catch and burn her. Right before she burns she promises that the ashes of ancestry will be hers, that “your flesh will be my flesh” and “I will live again.” Ichabod and Abbie research further and discover that the charred victim in the car was a descendant of the magistrate. They find out who the other descendant in town is and go to the house. Meanwhile, Serilda is already in the house to get the boy. By the time they get to the house, she is already gone and so are the ashes of the boy’s adoptive father, who is the real last descendant. They go back to the tunnel to find her bones, hoping they can still stop her from resurrecting by burning them. Andy is already digging the bones up for Serilda. Serilda manages to get her flesh back and starts to come after Ichabod since it was his wife Katrina who bound her power. We get another chuckle here as Abbie asks Ichabod why he dropped the gun. He claims it was empty because he already shot the bullet, not knowing that guns now carry multiple bullets. He manages to put fire to some old (very old) explosives and blows her back to ash.
When they go back to the office, Abbie opens the door to the sheriff’s office and there he is in his uniform working. Although startled, she tells him if he is going to haunt her to be helpful and she goes off on him for not telling her all he knew about Sleepy Hollow’s past. He says “don’t be afraid of number 49, that’s where you’ll find you’re not alone”. Right then, Ichabod calls her name and she turns to him. She turns back to face an empty desk in a vacant room.
In the final scene, we see Jennifer Mills (Abbie’s sister) in the institution getting her meds. After the nurse leaves she spits them out and continues her workout by doing pull-ups on a bar. We see a reflection of the faceless figure that she has been trying desperately to forget. She quickly turns around but there is nothing there. She goes back to working out hard as if she is preparing for something.
The Analysis
So far, I like the show. Although it seems cliché at times, I get a kick out of the Ichabod’s discoveries of the changes in the modern world. I was actually excited when the cops saw the headless horseman right off because that meant we didn’t have to go through a whole season of them thinking Abbie was crazy. Although I was disappointed that they recanted in this episode, I understand that it is a necessary layer of difficulty for the protagonist. I am intrigued as to how they will fold Abbie’s sister into the story. Somehow, I think he will increase the difficulty of the situation. So far my favorite part of the mystery is Katrina’s role and her mysterious, cryptic warnings. Captain Irving’s character urkes me with his blatant denial of the situation. With this only being the second episode of the entire series, this story can go anywhere at this point.
