Sleepy Hollow "And the Abyss Gazes Back" Review: Better, But Still Not Great

Sleepy Hollow S02E06: "And the Abyss Gazes Back"

Last week, I expressed some disappointment with the overall quality of Sleepy Hollow's sophomore season so far, and now I'm going to be honest with y'all: "And the Abyss Gazes Back" was better, but it still wasn't great, and it definitely wasn't enough to convince me that the series is back on track.

Ichabod was doing yoga to try to calm himself down at the beginning of the episode—another monster-of-the-week outing involving Sheriff Corbin's son Joe being cursed by Henry—but I personally didn't see any reason why Ichabod was so wound up. Yes, he was upset and feeling hurt by all of Katrina's lies, but his life isn't all that bad right now considering everything that's happened since Sleepy Hollow debuted. And as I mentioned last week, it's hard to be upset about Ichabod's strained relationship with Katrina when we've got no emotional attachment to it. It's just an obstacle manufactured by Sleepy Hollow's writers to create conflict when there isn't any.

Ichabod and Abbie have been battling some pretty nasty creatures as of late, but weekly baddies are child's play in comparison to preventing the apocalypse and fighting an invincible horseman without a head. The longer Sleepy Hollow goes without movement on the Horseman or Moloch fronts, the more concerned I get that the show is doing everything backwards, probably as a result of a Fox executive asking for more standalone episodes in an effort to hook new, more casual viewers. It wouldn't be the first time a network ruined a series that way (*cough* Veronica Mars *cough*), and it certainly wouldn't be the first time Fox didn't understand a genre show.

Supernatural TV series usually start out with the formulaic monsters-of-the-week format and gradually transition into more mythology-heavy serialized stories as time goes on, not the other way around. But while the intent with Sleepy Hollow might be to make the show more accessible to new fans, the fact of the matter is that the show is now losing the ones it already had. In Season 1, Sleepy Hollow blew through storylines the way a former child actor goes through cocaine at a Hollywood nightclub. I know that Season 2 has been extended by five episodes and the writers probably had to make adjustments, but for comparison's sake, in Season 1, Ichabod and Abbie captured the Horseman at the end of Episode 7 and interrogated him in Episode 8. The pace of Season 2 has been much slower, so the danger no longer feels all that urgent and on a scale of one to apocalypse, the stakes are almost non-existent.

Linking the wendigo storyline to Abbie and her past with Sheriff Corbin was a nice touch—it's about time Sleepy Hollow tied something to Abbie instead of Ichabod, and this week's "It's all connected!" story was much, much more successful than last week's. Plus, it's always great to see Clancy Brown. However, was "And the Abyss Gazes Back" enough to forgive the show for a third straight week of (mostly) filler? I'm conflicted. Having Henry curse Corbin's son made the story personal—Abbie used to babysit Joe when Corbin first decided to mentor her—but Joe eventually blamed Abbie for his father's death, which meant he wasn't all that willing to open up to her about his cannibalistic supernatural struggles.

As a standalone episode "And the Abyss Gazes Back" was fairly well-done, but since it followed two similarly structured episodes, it was brought down a bit, at least for me, by general frustration. And in hindsight, it's easy to see that the three episodes were little more than an overly complicated scheme designed by Henry so that he could procure a specific kind of poison to use on Katrina. What might seem like a clever plot on paper was actually convoluted and silly in execution, and it nearly slowed the show's momentum to a stop. You see, Henry needed the poison-containing box that Sheriff Corbin left for Joe via coordinates in his will, so Henry hired Hawley to track down the pied piper's bone flute so he could crush the flute into dust, sprinkle the dust on a letter to be mailed to Joe, and perform dark magic on the dust in order to curse Joe into becoming a wendigo... all so that Joe would come home from Afghanistan and find said poison-containing box.

Did you get all that? Good, because it wasn't that confusing, but it was kind of ridiculous. Now that Henry has what he wants, I hope Sleepy Hollow will finally move on from the various monsters, tormented spirits, and demons and get back to what's really important: Ichabod and Abbie's role as witnesses in the apocalypse and whatever the hell the Headless Horseman is up to these days.

Elsewhere, I don't mind if Brom wants to play house with Katrina—that story could actually be very interesting and worthwhile, as it pertains to Brom's true motivations and intentions and his role as a soldier in Moloch's war—but Sleepy Hollow currently has them quarantined in a C-plot that hasn't seen real movement in weeks. What does Brom do when he's not on-screen? Has he taken up knitting? Is he addicted to Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives? He's one of the more intriguing characters the writers have at their disposal—especially now that he can speak to us via his scenes with Katrina—yet he languishes away off-screen. With the new development involving the poison, I hope we'll being seeing more of the Horseman and Katrina, and very soon.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of "And the Abyss Gazes Back" was Ichabod deciding he wasn't ready to give up on Henry. Unfortunately, the parallel that Sleepy Hollow tried to draw between Abbie not giving up on Joe when he was a wendigo and Icbabod not giving up on Henry was shaky at best. The two situations are more different than Icahbod realizes because Joe couldn't control his change; he was at the mercy of the monstrous curse that was placed on him. Henry, meanwhile, has free will and has chosen a path of hatred and destruction because he was left to spend eternity in a pine box. Everything he's done, he's done out of spite for being abandoned by his parents (albeit unknowingly or against their will). If Ichabod's choice to keep fighting for his son gives him the strength to carry on in this war against evil, then so be it. But if Sleepy Hollow continues to exist in this limbo state where the characters we came to know and love during Season 1 run around solving weekly mysteries like they're on a CBS procedural, then Fox is digging its own grave and it can kiss Abbie and Ichabod's "seven-year journey" goodbye.

SHERIFF CORBIN'S FILES

– Decapitations this week: STILL FREAKING ZERO! IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK THAT SOMEONE LOSE THEIR DAMN HEAD? I MEAN REALLY.

– Things that confused Ichabod this week: Video games (though he seemed to get the hang of them by the end); why anyone would do yoga (dude, I feel you)

– It can't be a coincidence that Ichabod mentioned Peter Parker and arachnids in the same episode that a creepy, spider-like creature just happened to crawl into Katrina's mouth while she slept. In related news: I'm never sleeping again.

– Did Henry actually use the U.S. Postal Service to mail the letter covered in white powder to Joe Corbin? If so, I'm calling shenanigans. I'm willing to believe that Joe turned into a wendigo, but I'm not willing to believe that a letter covered in a white powder made it to a marine in Afghanistan. The military has protocols, man. Now, if Henry magicked it there, that's another story...

– Hawley totally wants to be the filling in a Mills sister sandwich (I don't know what that means).

– Ichabod's Halo handle: IchabodCrane1749. Also, if we don't get to hear him insult the people who kill him on a weekly basis, I'm going to be so sad.

– Abbie at least knows that Henry has stolen Irving's soul, and I'm 100 percent interested in watching his personal struggle, which means the show needs to break him out of Tarrytown ASAP. Locking him up was a horrible idea.

– Am I the only one who saw a resemblance between Joe the Wendigo and Frank the Bunny from Donnie Darko? It's been years since I've watched the film, but every time the wendigo was on-screen—which, kudos once again to the Sleepy Hollow makeup team for creating another truly creepy monster—I kept flashing back to Frank saying, "Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?" Maybe the wendigo's antlers reminded me of the ears, I don't know, but I'm going to have to go back to therapy either way.

thekaitling:list:sleepy-hollow-what-did-you-think-of-and-the-abyss-gazes-back/