Monday, November 11, 2013

Sleepy Hollow 1.07: "The Midnight Ride"

“It’s always going to be this. Cancelling last minute, lying about it, keeping secrets. The most important parts of my life, the parts I want to share they’re off limits. So what’s the point?”
- Abbie

We begin this week in April 1775 in my current home city of Boston as Paul Revere does his famous ride. But it’s not what we think. He and a group of men are being pursued by a not-so Headless Horseman and it seems Paul needs to ride like the wind to escape the deadly ax. I love how they tweak history to make it fit their mythology. It’s one of the best parts of the show.

Now that the Horseman is back, Abbie and Ichabod need to prepare. Abbie hit the bargain supermarket that sells in bulk and we get some classic Ichabod reactions to bottled water and his sad attempt at answering a phone. He gets a message from the masons that they have a theory on the Horseman’s weakness. So while he goes off to meet them, Abbie goes to grab Corbin’s shotgun from the station (girls aren’t allowed). Abbie runs into Luke and he begs her to have coffee with him and he hopes they can go back to being friends. Too bad Andy’s back and he basically threatens Luke in a shady alley. Andy rambles on about being the only one who can protect Abbie from “the end” that is coming. Yeah there is something not right about him at all. Abbie gets back on the road now that she’s armed and gets a voicemail from Ichabod. He’s going to rectify the no girls allowed policy with the masons as soon as he arrives. This proves difficult seeing as they are all dead. Pity they wasted James Frain in only one episode. We barely got to enjoy him being a good guy for once.

Captain Irving shows up on scene and he basically tells our heroes that he cannot have another report of a Headless Horseman attacking people. Ichabod is not taking things very well which is to be expected. Despite these guys kidnapping him and strong arming him to commit suicide, they are still his brothers in arms and they were traditionally the protectors of artifacts and keepers of secrets for the side of good in the war that’s been raging for centuries. Ichabod tosses the library and finds a book with what he thinks he needs but all the pages on the Horseman of Death are cut out. Ichabod quickly realizes that the Horseman came to find his head. So now they need to convince Irving to let them destroy it because Ichabod needs the Horseman to go down big time. Irving unfortunately sent the head to a lab elsewhere so he’s going to need to venture out to get it. Ichabod is still a bit cross and informs Irving that he will have to make calls to families until the Horseman is stopped because he will keep killing. This motivates Irving to get the head back. Too bad the Horseman has followed him to the lab. I guess he will finally get his chance to see that the Horseman is actually real.

Irving and the Horseman have a shootout and Irving is kind of freaking out when he gets back to the precinct. He was kind of hoping they were all just lying and it wasn’t real. He’ll get over his shock I’m sure. With the head in their possession, Ichabod and Abbie try to destroy the skull with various methods of going boom. None of it works. As they head out of the night, Ichabod notices a series of 4 lanterns and it turns out to be the masons’ heads. Gross! Anyway, Ichabod relates the real truth about Revere’s midnight ride. He explains that Sam Adams gave Paul a manuscript before heading out on his ride and that Paul recounted an enemy following them on their ride into Lexington. It would seem the manuscript contained information on the Horseman’s weakness. So now they need to find a way to get their hands on the manuscript.

Abbie takes Ichabod to a museum which doesn’t sit well with him. The tour guide is not telling the truth about Paul Revere. In typical Ichabod fashion he tries to clear up the confusion including that Paul did not say “The British are coming” since they were all technically British at the time. Anyway, Abbie heads off to return a call from Luke leaving Ichabod to crack a cypher from the manuscript that they managed to find online. This of course gives us some seriously awesome Ichabod vs. technology hilarity. He even ends up on an internet porn site. Whoops. But he figures out the cypher was written on the Horseman’s teeth (maybe Revere actually was a dentist). And Abbie gets a creepy visit from Andy in the tunnels as she’s making her return call to Luke (who is kind of losing his mind). Andy says he wants to help Abbie and tells her that the Horseman has a secret weakness just as Ichabod breaks the cypher and figures out that they need a witch to turn the moon into the sun. Since they can’t exactly summon Katrina from the beyond (even though Ichabod thought about that…and not just to help with their headless problem), Abbie suggests the use UV light and get the Horseman down into the tunnels. But they’re going to need some help so they enlist Irving for some back up. As they prepare their trap, Ichabod is horrified to learn that not only did Thomas Jefferson father children with a slave but he stole a great line form Ichabod. I love it!

As night falls and Ichabod’s meeting with the Horseman nears, Abbie confesses that she doesn’t think it’s worth trying to make even a friendship work with Luke since the most important parts of her life she can’t share because it’s craziness. Ichabod commiserates with her and proposes that maybe being the Witnesses means they only have each other. I like the strength of their relationship but I really don’t think the writers are aiming for a romance here. You don’t have to put two leads together just because they have awesome chemistry.

Ichabod goes to meet the Horseman at the cemetery and their plan kicks off. He lures his foe down into the tunnels and thanks to some decoys and some Halloween balloon skulls, they manage to get the Horseman right where they want him and hit the lights. The Horseman kind of starts to smoke and sizzle. They’ve got him, now what the hell are they going to do with him? Sadly we have to wait a week to find out.

No comments:

Post a Comment