Sleepy Hollow - Episode 5 - Recap - John Doe
Sleepy Hollow - Episode 5 - Recap - John Doe
FOX's Sleepy Hollow continues its dynamite first season with another zany installment of the action-fantasy cop show. If you haven't gotten on board with this show yet, try to imagine all the fish-out-of-water parts of Thor combined with all the cool monster mystery parts of Supernatural or Angel. Revolutionary War turncoat Ichabod Crane comes forward through time to stop the apocalypse with the help of Police Lieutenant Abbie Mills. It is among this season's best new shows, easily competing (in my mind) with Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
At the top of the hour, an old-timey little boy is chasing a girl through the forest when she vanishes, and a behorsed samurai starts to chase him. The boy runs out into modern times somehow, and the samurai dissipates. Meanwhile, Abbie and Ichabod settle Ichabod (who is having trouble with the concept of plastic) into the sheriff's old cabin when they get a call. At the scene, the little boy from earlier (much earlier, heheh) is covered in weird black veins and starts to speak Middle English, which of course Ichabod knows for some reason (he studied it at Oxford, what a dork). At the hospital, the boy is quarantined, and the cops get Ichabod hilariously on one side of a webcam so he can talk to the boy without breaking quarantine. Turns out the kid (Thomas is his name) is from the Lost Colony of Roanoke! Haha this is great! I mean the virus spreads to the EMT that treated the boy so that isn't great, but the lore stuff is really neat.
Anyway, Abbie and Ichabod decide to retrace the boy's steps. There's a hidden path in the woods that leads them right into an old-timey village and yes okay it's the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Everyone there is infected! Oh no! But it's fine because they've got a spell on them. The Horseman of Pestilence is the reason behind the plague, and Thomas leaving Roanoke was a part of his plan to spread it. The pair of heroes heads back to reality to get Thomas and take him back so that the infection goes away. Back in the hospital, oh no! Ichabod is infected! In the struggle to keep him from being taken away to quarantine, the cops sedate him. Ichabod then has a trippy wife dream like he sometimes does. She keeps talking about and being sad over her being trapped in dreamland by Moloch (this season's big bad).
In the land of the wakeful, Abbie finds herself hiding out in the hospital's chapel, where she prays for help. Despite the show's penchant for supernatural intervention, nothing explicitly magical happens, but she does see the holy water and realizes that the water in Roanoke may be what keeps the citizens there safe from the infection's spread. Captain Orlando Jones helps Abbie orchestrate taking Thomas and Ichabod back to Roanoke, because he's out of ideas so he figures it's time to believe in magic (which, conveniently, is real). Ichabod and Thomas take a dunk in the water. They come up cured and the colony promptly vanishes into the aether.
Throughout the episode, Detective Morales (another cop who has a romantic past with Abbie) has suspicions about Ichabod and whatever his deal is that he's allowed to freely wander onto crime scenes. Morales calls Oxford to confirm Ichabod's phony back story about being a history professor on loan to the Sleepy Hollow police, and he gets a call back that it is in fact real (whaaaat). Mysterious...
Another solid episode in a solid series. The only thing that this show needs more of is jokes about Ichabod not knowing how modern times works. Seeing him confounded by plastic and webcams was nice, but more of that would be even nicer. The mysteries this week are intriguing, even if they don't have spectacularly mind-blowing endings. The show has a lot of charm and a lot of potential to grow, but this first season has been aces so far. Check out the preview below, but don't come back next week for a recap. Sleepy Hollow is on a break for a few weeks, coming back November 4th!