Sleepy Hollow: Pittura Infamante

January 19, 2015 7:17 PM - Season 2, Episode 13

Following an art restorer's mysterious death, Ichabod and Katrina are reminded of a friend from their past; a visitor at the police precinct shocks Abbie.
posted by oh yeah! (6 comments total)

I thought this was an improvement over last week - decent monster-of-the-week plot, the Ichabod/Katrina scenes were nice, good to see Abbie, Jenny, & Irving interacting. When that first gunshot hit the painter-killer, I thought the shooter would be Reyes, and that would bring her into the circle.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:03 PM on January 19, 2015

Well, there wasn't a new episode last week (they reran "And The Abyss Gazes Back"), but aside from the visually-appealing nature of the painting, and one VERY scary penultimate moment, I was disappointed. Crane and Mills shared a scant few minutes of total screen time, and the humor level felt fairly low. Jenny's "turkey" scene with the bullets was endearingly gross, and they've definitely got me curious about what's going to happen with Irving, but otherwise, I found the whole thing fairly lacking in anything compelling. (I've tried to have patience with Katrina, and have no issue with her as a concept, but as portrayed, I find her so boring!)

I was also bothered by them not bothering to give Abigail Adams any semblance of a New England accent, and Crane make a fairly obvious grammatical error. But mostly, seriously, just a few bookending scenes with the stars of the show? Feh.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 11:17 PM on January 19, 2015

The bits with the picture gave me the creeps, but that's mostly me and my fear of haunted pictures killing people (must have been a plot in a Twilight Zone or something).

This episode did give me an idea for a sort of para-Bechtel test where a man and a woman have a scene where they discuss another woman not present. The show would always pass, of course.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:36 AM on January 20, 2015

This episode did give me an idea for a sort of para-Bechtel test where a man and a woman have a scene where they discuss another woman not present.

Heck, this episode even had two women (Abby and Jenny) discussing a third woman not present (Katrina).

Overall I liked the episode. A lot of really nice visuals, especially inside the painting. The episode was light on Abby but I felt like the Cranes needed some scenes between them where the drama wasn't just manufactured relationship drama and this episode did deliver that. I wanted to like Michelle Trachtenberg as Abigail Adams but she didn't really sell me on it or do anything interesting with it. And I do wonder about Katrina's very spotty understanding of the 21st century - how it is that Katrina has picked up on some social cues (it's okay to wear a dress that revealing to a dinner party) but needs Ichabod to explain others (mild touching in public is ok)? But those are relatively minor gripes.

Plus we got some good Frank Irving scenes. Frank, I missed ya. (Hawley, on the other hand, I've gotten to like okay, but I didn't particularly feel his absence when he wasn't around in this episode.)
posted by mstokes650 at 1:27 PM on January 20, 2015

Interesting point about Abigail Adams' accent. The subject of Colonial period accents is pretty interesting, and this article from The Toast gets into why Ichabod probably wouldn't be using Received Pronunciation (aka non-rhotic or BBC English.) This article goes a little bit into how various non-rhotic American regional accents, like Bostonian & Southern, emerged later as Received Pronunciation became popular among the wealthy in England and was imitated by status-conscious members of the former colonies.
posted by gimli at 11:09 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was reading the comments on a Sleepy Hollow post on Facebook and someone pointed out the scene between Abby Adams and Katrina discussing Katrina's pregnancy brought some of the previous story line into question. AA says that Ichabod must be pleased about the pregnancy but he didn't even know and was supposed to be dead-alive at that point but if that's true then did Katty know she pregnant before he died? Did she tell Mrs Adams but not her husband?
posted by fiercekitten at 10:20 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]