Recap: SLEEPY HOLLOW Turns Up Bad Pennies
Season 3, Episode 12, “Sins of the Fathers”
Directed by Wendy Stanzler
Written by Damian Kindler
[Photos: Tina Rowden/FOX]
The Hidden One (Peter Mensah) is still the world’s worst God-like husband. He gives Pandora (Shannyn Sossamon) just a little sip of her power back, and when she complains, he says as long as he is suffering, she will suffer. He whines that one monster at a time is not enough to feed him-but that’s all he gets, because this is another monster of the week episode.
Our old friend Atticus Nevins (Bill Irwin) is back. I guess Pandora didn’t finish him off in the back of the van after she broke him out of jail. He’s running through the woods when he gets stopped by a cop. Unfortunately for the cop, a creature we can’t see kills him.
Crane (Tom Mison) cooks Abbie (Nicole Beharie) a fancy meal. I know it’s fancy, because there’s lots of music and chopping involved. This from the guy who threw frozen lasagna in a skillet when Abbie was gone. It’s hard to tell if Crane is courting or just being courtly, but he lights candles and there are flowers on the table. Abbie is carrying a journal. She is writing down her experiences in purgatory, she says. Ichabod invites her to see E.T. with Jenny and Joe. Abbie turns him down and heads to the firing range, where she accidentally meets Daniel Reynolds (Lance Gross), who asks her to the pancake house. She turns him down as well. She gets a message and heads out. It’s Nevins. Him she shows up for.
He looks awful. Not just the scratches on his face, but his skin is bad, his clothes are ragged, and he has an intermittent cough. He shows her the dead officer and tells her that she will need his help to stop the creature.
Meanwhile, Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood) is meeting with their father (James McDaniel) and expressing some of her feelings about their abandonment as children.
They tie Nevins up in the Masonic room and Jenny and Joe (Zach Appelman) interrogate him while Abbie and Crane watch from the other room. He shows them the scar Pandora left. She took his spleen. Nevins wants a passport, safe passage, etc, for helping but he folds when offered dinner. Probably Abbie’s uneaten meal. He tells them the story of finding gold in a cave in Iraq with August Corbin (Morgan Ayres). They were attacked by the creature and only Nevins and Corbin survived. He then finds information about the creature in August’s files. It’s a Mesopotamian gallu, or ghoul. Which makes sense because that’s where the myth originates. I love how Crane just found out this information, like everyone else, but reads with such authority and certainty. The ghoul is controlled by a golden scarab.
Two goons get into Nevin’s storage locker. One of them looks like Mr. T. They are hoping to impress Randall (Anthony K. Hyatt), who’s taking over the operation. Instead they get killed in a frenzy of sharp fingernails.
Jenny tells Abbie she saw their dad. Abbie has to go to an FBI briefing. It being more boring than the briefing in the archives, she drifts off..well, she has flashbacks to her time away and keeps seeing the symbol that she traced in blood on the table in the last episode.
Abbie and Crane suspect that Randall may have the scarab, so they send Joe and Sophie(Jessica Camacho) to look through Randall’s stuff. Sophie impressively puts a guard in a chicken hold and makes him pass out. They find a ghoul sized crate but Randall appears and shows them that it’s full of money.
Suddenly a white arm with long fingernails appears through Randall’s chest. The ghoul takes out Randall’s men as well and Joe and Sophie fight with it. We hear a ringing and the ghoul leaves, having heard its master’s voice. Realizing that Randall was targeted, they know that Nevins has the scarab. He admits it and the scarab crawls out of his splenectomy scar. They show him getting the scarab in a totally unnecessary flashback to Iraq. He tells them that he needed to get to Corbin’s files because he had a buyer for them and would be able to buy his freedom. He then sicks the ghoul on them, calling him Fido, even. Would you call your ghoul Fido? He sticks the scarab into the ghoul’s chest.
Abbie calls Jenny to tell her to stop Atticus Nevins and get the files back. Abbie and Crane fight the ghoul. Their guns and swords are ineffective. Crane thinks the ghoul can be killed by shooting the scarab. The ghoul fights with Crane, with Abbie waiting for the right shot. She flashes back again, sees the symbol and almost waits too long.
Joe comes up on Nevins, who has Jenny. She is unconscious. They have a tense confrontation but Joe talks to him about how the two of them really loved August Corbin, and Nevins lets Jenny go.
Jenny and Joe have a tender moment talking about their fathers. In this episode, they really salvage August Corbin’s reputation, because Nevins paints him as a boy scout, not like himself at all, despite their association.
Abbie meets with her father but asks about their mother, her mental illness, how long it took, how did it manifest. It’s the first time we are aware that she is aware that there’s something wrong with her.
Nevins brings Corbin’s secret files to the man who Daniel Reynolds has been meeting with secretly. They contain the coordinates to the Nine Sacred Sites. The man retires Nevins by shooting him. Or they faked us out and he just took a kidney or something.
Crane and Abby decide to go to the bar for hot wings. “No poultry is safe in Sleepy Hollow this dark night.” Abby says she has some work to do first. She goes to a shed, where the symbol is painted on a wall. She opens her journal, which is full of the symbol, crosses her arms in front of her, like the symbol, and says “You saved me. I’m yours.”
Thoughts: So the big revelation is that Abbie is now an acolyte of some unknown being. I didn’t think she was okay and she definitely is not. Poor Ichabod has been as mushy as possible without going over the line. Abbie talked to him and imagined him there with her when she was gone , and they made a big fuss over their bond when she returned. But she’s been ignoring him! Drifting in and out of this world and the next.
The timing of their father’s arrival in Sleepy Hollow is suspicious. Does he know anything or does he think their mom went mad? Could he be a monster drawn to Sleepy Hollow by Pandora and the Hidden One?
Joe’s piece of the story arc went well, as usual. He’s come full circle in regards to his father. He and Jenny are comfortably together. Sounds like a good time for something awful to happen.
The show might be improved if Jenny spent more time knocked out.
I don’t understand why Nevins had to plant the scarab in the monster’s chest. He couldn’t have done that with the other murders. Abbie and Crane had him locked up when they happened. Unless the ghoul originated from there, but we would have seen that on the security cameras.
This is the second time recently that the Sleepy gang stopped a monster but had the bad guy get away only to be killed by outside forces. Is the show afraid to have our heroes be the judge, jury and executioner? To me, it just seems that they are leaving unfinished business.
Other than that, it was a middling episode. The monster was okay. It looked like an alien. The plot was all right. The grossest thing about this episode was Atticus Nevins, from the way he looked to the way he ate to the scarab under his skin. Why so yucky? Is he Sleepy Hollow‘s Gollum?
Next week, it sounds like a manticore or chimera for our monster.
Sleepy Hollow airs on Fridays on FOX. 8pm, 7c.
