The season finale for Sleepy Hollow, Tempus Fugit, aired this week. Spoilers will be in this post so if you haven’t watched, bear that in mind if you choose to read this first before watching the show. I’ll go ahead and say this here: I wish they could have done things a bit differently but, overall, I was very pleased with the show and enjoyed it more than I have most of the second season!
Time travel pops up in all sorts of show from super-naturals to fantasy to science-fiction. Sometimes it’s a bit cheesy with cars and boxes used as transport but, I think when it’s dealing with a rift in the space and time continuum or, as the case with Sleepy Hollow, a witchcraft spell, it feels a bit more … plausible, so to speak. Last week Katrina cast a time-travelling spell to send her back to the day Ichabod died so she could ‘set things right’ and prevent him from killing their son. Abby, on instinct, jumped into the rift Katrina opened up and found herself in the 1781 version of Sleepy Hollow.
Honestly, I thought it was going to go so cheesy here I wouldn’t be able to watch.
I imagined Abby being put up for auction (as a slave) and Ichabod having to rescue her or her having to find traditional garb to blend in more or … being paraded through town as they take her, in chains, to the towns square for punishment of some sort. I’m SO glad they did none of these things! They let Abby be Abby, strong, intelligent, determined, non-wavering. Her mission was to save Ichabod, a mission that meant saving the world by default. Lofty goal but in the realm of the super-natural, one that’s perfectly acceptable.
Abby was given the same treatment as she entered 1781 that Ichabod did when he entered 2013 … put in a jail cell while they tried to suss the situation and who she was out. Continuity is a nice thing! She would only speak to Crane so they sent him her carefully worded message to get him off the battle field, thus saving him from the Horseman. Current-day Ichabod doesn’t flinch when being confronted with demons and witchery but Captain Crane was a hard sell. I liked that! It makes sense that he has a propensity towards believing the unbelievable given he awoke over 200 years after he died but it felt spot on seeing him question such ideas in the past.
We met up with Benjamin Franklin again who wasted no time in accepting everything Abby told him as fact. That made sense as well since we now Franklin, Washington and Jefferson, to name a few, knew of the need for a secret army against evil. Franklin told Abby as much when he said he’d been grooming Ichabod for a long time just for this task. His egotistical bragging, if you will, fit well with what we’ve come to learn of Ichabod’s Franklin, another great touch! He didn’t question Katrina being evil for a second, something that makes me believe even more that Abby and Ichabod did themselves a great disservice by blowing up Jefferson’s Fenestella!
Having the Horseman burst into Franklin’s room and behead him, however, was odd. He’d just told Abby that the time-travelling spell cast by Katrina could be undone by Grace Dixon, Abby’s long-dead relative whose journal has been a valuable resource as they fight against evil. Abby had the information she needed which meant Franklin was no longer needed. Still, his decapitation felt gratuitous and, since we knew Grace could undo, or ‘set things right again’, it didn’t add any feelings of urgency or worry. Had it been Katrina killing Franklin instead, that may have caused me to worry a bit.
Which leads me into the biggest thing I wish they’d done differently. Dark-side Katrina was FAR more interesting than ‘save me from fill-in-the-blank Katrina’. It’s a shame that as soon as she had something to do to warrant screen-time they killed her off. They could have stretched this out a few episodes, a small arc even, and told a great story. They could have had Katrina work with the grimoire more, really give her dark magic a good run. That would have been interesting, Abby and Ichabod going up against such a personal enemy that knows them so much better than Henry ever did!
Still, I get it. If this was a series finale and not just a season finale, it ended on a good note, reuniting a core focus from season one, that being Abby, Ichabod, Jenny and Frank. That’s a pretty fearsome foursome, especially given everything they’ve been through to get to this point! Like with Katrina this season I felt they wasted a lot of opportunity with Irving having him locked up in Tarrytown, hands tied and unable to help Abby and Ichabod fight. My hope going into season three, should there be one, is that they stick to a core group and not add more Hawley’s or anyone else just for the sake of a stereo-type. Give us meat, not silly trope.
And bring back Henry! It could work, right? Please?
Moloch was the big baddie for a while, until Henry killed him. What’s bigger than Moloch? I hope we find out in a next season. #renewsleepyhollow I think the show has a chance now that they’ve retooled it, set it right. Season one was amazing! More of that, please!