Sleepy Hollow Return Review

One Life

We start in flashback land as Betsy and Crane do recon, but Betsy spots Nathan Hale spying and rips him a new one for being obvious. In the present Crane’s on a motorcycle liberating The Lydian Jug from some crazies. He tells Jenny and Joe that he needs it to find Abbie’s spirit in the underworld but he’s on the verge of a breakdown and burning out, making this all about him. Jenny calls him on it and tells him to take a knee while she and Joe look into a lead they have.

At Pandora’s Snack Shack and Crazy the Hidden One is pitching a fit at Pandora for failing in bringing him back sooner and at full power. She tells him she has a plan. He tells her that she better.

Finally we see Crane head to Pandora’s creepy garden to use the jug to try and contact Abbie, using a spell to call souls that roam but he’s not specific enough and while at first it seems it doesn’t work, it does. It just doesn’t bring Abbie back. He does however pick up on his tail: Sophie Foster who would like to know where the hell Abbie is and lets him know he’s a person of interest in Abbie’s disappearance. He tells her to charge him or bugger off. What Crane doesn’t do is grab up the jug or double check to make sure nothing went wrong, which, of course it did.

This episode is interesting as it’s almost a reset but not quite. While I had assumed the Abbie being stuck in the underworld thing would be resolved quickly it isn’t and surprisingly we don’t even see Abbie beyond photos until the very end of the episode. What we get instead is an episode dedicated to how the crew is dealing with her absence with highlights on Jenny and Sophie.

Shockingly it works: Jenny is dealing with her sister being missing, and more importantly with her sister being missing due to sacrificing herself to save her, by reverting back to Terminator!Jenny from season one: all business and ass kicking. This is how Jenny copes with pain and loss, by dealing with the situation on the ground. It’s a subtle reminder that in the end Jenny is a soldier through and through, even if her war is with the supernatural.

As for Sophie, due to Ichabod’s increasingly reckless behavior, she gets pulled head first into his world. Jessica Camacho is so natural in the part that she succeeds where two seasons of Katrina Crane failed: we give a damn about her and she feels like she’s always been around instead of like an unwanted intruder. It helps that since the season began she has shown herself to be ruthlessly competent as opposed to Katrina who we were told repeatedly was a big gun but who never really came across that way until she went batshit.

Regarding everything else, Abbie is still alive, the question is where and whether or not Ichabod and the crew can get to her before Pandora does. Speaking of Pandora: I still miss Headless and while Pandora is great the Hidden One isn’t doing anything for me and I suspect he’ll be dispatched pretty soon if Pandora’s growing resentment is any indication.

The fact that there’s a monster convention coming to town makes me giddy and also gives me hope we’ll see both Headless and Orion again as their relationship dynamics with Ichabod and Abbie respectively were interesting and deserve to be explored further.

I give this premiere 3 out of 5 Onryo Demons