Sleepy Hollow: Awakening
February 16, 2015 7:14 PM - Season 2, Episode 17 - Subscribe

Abbie and Ichabod battle against those who want to reawaken a witch coven that would pose a great danger to mortals; Jenny makes a discovery about Frank Irving.
posted by oh yeah! (8 comments total)
 
I agree with the AV Club recap - "Katrina never had enough character for any sort of arc—it’s like trying to get invested in which way rain flows down glass. There’s some novelty in the direction, but no real surprise. The scenes of her siding with Henry have almost no dramatic impact whatsoever; they make sense, vaguely, but only because the character is such a cipher that she could do almost anything and have it make some sort of sense."

Loved the parallels with the pilot of Crane's entry to the present-day Sleepy Hollow with Abbie's entry to the past. Really looking forward to their second first meeting.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:17 PM on February 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


Apparently even Katia Winter is unhappy with this show's treatment of Katrina.

Her turn to the dark side of the Force manages to be boring and predictable while at the same time utterly undersold and out of nowhere. It's kind of impressive in its own way. Irving hasn't been treated well by the writers either. His Jekyll/Hyde arc felt like it was on fast forward.

I keep watching this show because I like the premise and I love the cast and I am praying that the writers get a clue. Every episode is a volcano of exposition and recap and everything else feels so half-baked.

I do like the ending of this episode. Hopefully Parish's "death", Katrina's turn and Abbie's DeLorean trip can act as a mild reboot and shake things up a bit.
posted by brundlefly at 1:52 AM on February 17, 2015


Thanks for mentioning the AV Club recap, oh yeah! I liked this bit:
Stories aren’t about throwing out semi-random events because they’re vaguely related to similar events in other stories. There needs to be some kind of thread holding everything together, and while Sleepy Hollow isn’t purely surreal (and it’s never been a show that took its time to establish things), the cohesion is largely missing. It’s just a bunch of stuff.
posted by brundlefly at 1:59 AM on February 17, 2015


I do like the ending of this episode. Hopefully Parish's "death", Katrina's turn and Abbie's DeLorean trip can act as a mild reboot and shake things up a bit.

I really flipped for the ending. They're turning the premise of the show on its head, and I think it will be great fun. It's a good move on their part. Poor Abbie, though. Being a woman of color in the 1700's isn't exactly an optimum position. Add-in her liberated (in comparison to women in the 1700's) personality, and things could go very badly for her.

One of the faults of the show, imho, is the lack of a strong "stranger in a strange land" aspect. Crane adjusted to, and embraced, our modern world far too quickly and eagerly. After the first few episodes, he seemed to never be gobsmacked about anything.

There was also far too much of the "revolutionary leaders created this majikal device" deus-ex-machina trope, over and over.

Question...I honestly can't recall...Has Crane been on (or even seen) an airplane yet? Seen something like a 747 take to the sky? Or, has he been to a place like New York?
posted by Thorzdad at 5:47 AM on February 17, 2015


I don't think Crane has gone beyond driving distance of Sleepy Hollow yet. I feel like there must have been a shot of him seeing a plane overhead at some point in the pilot, but that may just be in my head.

My only concern about this Abby in the past plot twist is that with the low ratings of S2 there's no telling if we'll get an S3 pickup, and I can't imagine that the writers have been able to resist making another cliffhanger finale.
posted by oh yeah! at 7:44 AM on February 17, 2015


The last episode and this one have really felt a bit like they were finally recapturing the magic of Season 1. Enjoyed it a lot. The time-travel spell at the end was the perfect kind of breathtaking oh-shit moment that also makes perfect sense with what's been established (after all, it's the same time travel spell, from the same book, that the warlock guy was trying to cast in that earlier episode). And the parallels to the pilot episode were very nicely done.

I definitely hope they get renewed but I sort of wonder if they'd be better off going back to the shorter 13-episode season. This season has seemed kind of meandering, plot-wise, and had more than a few things which seemed kind of rushed and only partly-thought-out. I'd much rather see fewer episodes with less filler and more consistent quality. No matter how many episodes, though, they can now (and are probably planning to) use time travel to ret-con away the past season's more egregious mistakes and upset the status quo, bring back all the dead folks (ffs, stop killing Frank! and while I'm pipe-dreaming, I would also like to see Caroline brought back) and give themselves a whole new fresh canvas to play on with what they've learned.

I also kind of want to see a Sleepy Hollow/TURN crossover that completely upends all of Revolutionary War history and sends TURN spinning off into utter madness in its aftermath, but I'll allow as how I am not everybody and that is unlikely to happen.
posted by mstokes650 at 3:45 PM on February 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't know why they spent so much time dicking around with Hawley and his mystical pawn shop. They should have done this whole evil Katrina/kill Henry/time travel thing weeks ago. Just like Ichabod and Abby had no idea what they should do once Moloch was dead, neither did the show have a freaking clue what the hell it was doing.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:50 PM on February 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Katrina has been a problem ever since she was rescued from Purgatory. It probably would have been best for Crane to have rescued her, but then lost her in a pretty quick turn around, rather than try and have her adjust to the modern world and play off the marital troubles. I don't know if I'm happy or not that my speculation from earlier came to point, but I had thought the only way to try and fix the problem was to make Katrina a or the bad guy. How it was handled was agreeably, not very well done and poorly lead up to.

I also found Henry's death rather anti-climatic, too. I was ready to enjoy a series of a Moloch free Henry, but apparently, that wasn't in the books.

I'm also intrigued by Mills to the past, and found it interesting how they totally tipped their hat to it at the start of the episode with the discussion of travelers out of a time.
posted by Atreides at 8:43 AM on February 22, 2015


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