Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Sleepy Hollow 2.09: "Mama"

“Just be careful exactly what you’re looking for. This place is filled with so much pain, most of it the kind that can’t be cured.”
- Jenny

So this episode as you can probably guess from the title focuses on the sisters Mills. It’s been a while coming, especially since we learned that their mother had been committed and was seeing demons. Abbie is dreaming about finding her mother in Purgatory when Ichabod wakes her up. He’s caught a cold and so he’s on bed rest as Abbie heads off to handle this week’s creepy case; three suicides in as many days at Terrytown Psych. She brings Jenny along as an expert of sorts since Jenny knows firsthand what the victims went through living in the hospital. They swing by to chat with Captain Irving who confirms that the victims weren’t really suicidal before they died. Jenny and Abbie then decide to check the surveillance footage of the first victim and as Jenny reveals that she snuck in to the hospital when she was young to try and see their mom (it was not a good visit) and Abbie admits that she let their mother’s commitment haunt her for a very long time, we see that their mother’s ghost plagued the first victim as he hung himself.

Ichabod tries to be somewhat useful when Abbie heads back to the archives but he’s still miserable and crabby about the home remedies she keeps making him try. She recounts her memories of her mother before being committed and I can see why she and Jenny were scared. Her mom was definitely presenting as mentally unstable. Yelling at them one minute for talking to friends and the next hugging them tight because she didn’t want to lose them. Very informative I must say. Nick shows up with some drugged soup and some books and such from the cabin. Ichabod gets knocked out after he points out that her mother may be back at the hospital now because Moloch is in this world and because the hospital is situated on a convergence of ley lines. It makes sense to me. So Abbie, Jenny and Nick head back to the hospital and manage to stop a patient from cutting his wrists but as soon as Abbie sees her mother’s ghost, Abbie disappears. That can’t be good! I thought at first it felt like a creepier version of the Ghostly Plane on Charmed but it turns out it was the old wing of the hospital. Abbie’s mom appears and warns her eldest that she’s not safe. Then a nurse finds Abbie and so she realizes she’s not in Purgatory or something. Jenny also gets a visit from Mama Mills and she leaves a code to a session tape in the glass of one of the doors. So it’s back to the archives to watch the tape. At first Jenny doesn’t want to see it. She clearly has far worse memories of their mother than Abbie does. Or maybe it’s the fact that Jenny was younger when all this happened. But Abbie convinces her to watch because they need to do this together to understand what they are up against and what their mother was fighting. The tape reveals that their mother believes the nurse that found Abbie was telling her to kill herself. Which leads to a harrowing scene with the nurse talking to Irving and he nearly drowns himself before everyone busts in and saves him.

This however is actually a breakthrough in the case. They find that the nurse was an “angel of mercy” killer back in the 1950s and she was electrocuted for her crimes at Terrytown Psych. So it seems that their mother isn’t trying to hurt patients, she’s trying to stop the nurse from hurting more people. This prompts a visit back to the old wing and the room that their mother was locked in. According to Jenny, if patients make trouble, they get locked away and forgotten. I truly hope that isn’t what most psych hospitals are like because that just means the system is failing far too many people. In the room, the girls (and Nick) discover that their mother carved a mural of sorts on the way of the girls’ faces and the music to “You Are my Sunshine”. This triggers a rather upsetting memory for Jenny. One day, their mom was acting like she’d given up and she tried to suffocate herself and Jenny in the car (letting the exhaust run in a closed garage). Mama Mills appears and even Nick can see her. She’s trying to keep her girls safe.

Mama Mills explains that there’s an old hex that will get rid of the nurse and she was trying to perform it to save the other people but she couldn’t remember. So Jenny has to go find her old journal. And she’s going to need to work fast because creepy Nurse has got Abbie and she’s trying to kill her, too. Which would be super beneficial for Moloch I’m sure. But in the end, Jenny manages to banish the bitch and their mother disappears along with her. But Abbie wanted to say goodbye so they hold a séance. It’s a really touching scene and superbly acted by both Nichole Beharie and Lyndie Greenwood. We learn that it wasn’t Mama Mills that was trying to kill her and Jenny, it was a demon and she ended up saving them both. And she looked after Jenny when she was in the hospital. She also lets them know that there’s a weapon in her journal (which was a nice call back to the Mills ties to the Cranes back in the day) and that they need to use it ASAP. She is now free from being stuck in the hospital and she is so proud of her girls. They are left with tearful goodbyes as they realize just how much strength their mother gave them, even if they couldn’t understand it at the time. And it seems that Captain Irving is making a break for it. Whether this is his own volition or somehow Henry’s doing, we’ve yet to figure out.

And over at Frederick’s Manor, Henry is trying to goad Katrina into holding baby Moloch. He lies and says the child is an orphan and needs motherly affection. It is quite obvious that Henry is jealous as he flashes back to all the things that led up to Moloch being “born”. Why am I not surprised that he’s suffering older sibling jealousy syndrome right now. And can we just stop for a minute to contemplate the fact that now Henry is sort of half related to Moloch? Ew, gross. Luckily, Katrina realizes that the baby is actually Moloch and steals out to grab a plant which I’m assuming has some healing properties to it. Actually it turns out it was poison that she was going to feed to baby Moloch (she’s also not looking so hot now that he’s fed on her). Unfortunately for her, Moloch’s grown up a bit and he’s not a little boy (maybe age 8 or 9). Well, that’s going to be problematic.

It is definitely going to be an exciting fall finale next week. With Katrina having to deal with an older, more manipulative child version of Moloch and the rest of Team Witness trying to find a way to also stop Moloch, goodness knows it will be crazed. And don’t forget that Abraham is lurking about somewhere, likely to mess up at least one person’s plans. While this season has had a few filler episodes, it is still very strong and twisty and it rarely disappoints in making me laugh and sit on the edge of my seat.

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