Sleepy Hollow: Whispers in the Dark

October 8, 2015 7:33 PM - Season 3, Episode 2

Crane and Abbie are forced to face their pasts in surprising ways when a new form of evil is unleashed.

*The new regional chief, Daniel Reynolds, is a former classmate of Abbie's, and they used to have a thing.
*Chief Corbin's son, Joe, returns to Sleepy Hollow.

posted by oh yeah! (4 comments total)

Not quite as much fun as last week, but not dreadful. I'm not thrilled with the addition of Corbin as a series regular - we just got rid of Hawley, and they're already giving Jenny a new dude to eat up her screen time? Blarg.
posted by oh yeah! at 7:37 PM on October 8, 2015

I don't mind Corbin Jr. nearly so much - somehow he manages to feel less gratuitous than Hawley, to me. But what really bothered about his appearance in this episode was how intent the writers seemed to be on ignoring that the first time we saw him he'd been turned into a damn Wendigo so pretending like he is a complete stranger to the world of mystical insanity that his dad and Jenny inhabited requires a certain degree of willful amnesia. It just made all that "you know, once you open that door you can't close it again" stuff ring really irritatingly false to me. Dude's been turned into an 8-foot horned furry blue monster before, even if he doesn't remember a lot of it he's still got a more-than-passing familiarity with weird mystical shit at this point.

It did throw into stark relief how much more I liked Jenny and Ichabod hanging out together last week, though. I...I think I might be coming down with a case of the dreaded "shipping", you guys.

I still don't love Betsy Ross as much as the show clearly thinks I'm supposed to. Abbie's new boss, no strong feelings one way or the other yet; I'll give him some time I guess.

Lingering metaphysical riddle of the evening: how many people have to know a secret before it's no longer a secret?
posted by mstokes650 at 9:00 PM on October 8, 2015

AV Club: It’s continually amazing how a show with the wit to cast Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison can fail so disastrously and repeatedly when it comes to to casting secondary roles. Like Nikki Reed as Betsy Ross. What was the decision making process behind this? It’s possible she’s a fine actress outside of period drama, but as Ross, Reed is laughably bad; anachronistic and forced and entirely unconvincing, a generic “strong female character” who, so far at least, exists solely to replace Katrina as a flashback love interest for Ichabod. Her presence is so fundamentally tone deaf that I find myself scrambling to come up with some justification for the character. Maybe it’s satire? Or… gah, I don’t know, demons?

I don't know why the writers think Crane even needs a love interest. It's much more entertaining to see Crane being completely oblivious to someone's interest in him than to see him being purposefully suave. At least with Ross existing only in flashback-land I can hope that the writers will see that they've screwed up again and phase her out or use her way more sparingly, they're not stuck with her like they were with Katrina.
posted by oh yeah! at 4:28 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think the best word to describe this episode is, exactly, boring. The monster-of-the-week wasn't that interesting, the secrets really Abbie and Ichabod had weren't that good and I hoped we could have seen Ichabod doing his most ichabodian speech to keep the Archives building intact.

I'm ok with Joe Corbin being back and made a regular because it's one of those really good casting choices, Zach Appelman really looks like he could be the son of Clancy Brown. Plus, Joe does have a very good reason to get into the whole "saving the world" business, where Hawley seemed a shitty attempt at a Indiana Jones style character to get a shot of writing a spin-off or something.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:18 AM on October 9, 2015