SLEEPY HOLLOW Goes Berserk
S3E7″The Art of War”
[photo credit Tina Rowden/FOX]
Crane is dissatisfied and frustrated with every aspect of his life. He is not making headway with immigration in a country he helped found, he is still fighting to keep the archives from being destroyed, and they have no idea what Pandora is up to. Also, Abby beats him at chess.
Daniel Reynolds stops by and tells Abbie she’s in charge because he has to be gone for a few days. I guess the paranoia he displayed towards her in the last episode was the result of being stung. There must be some trust there.
Nevins is frantic. He digs furiously through ancient books in a room that I assume is in the back of the bait shop. Sophie, his lovely lackey, shows up and complains about what he’s doing to the books. This is the first time we find out that Nevins is working for someone else, someone that he is afraid of. Sophie offers to handle Jenny and Joe, not so gently this time. She questions that Nevin’s solution is to quote Norse poetry at them.
Nevins goes to Pandora’s ruins and raises her box out of the pool of water. The poetry he’s quoting is most definitely in English so we can understand it. He looks really surprised that it works. We get a closer look at the box than usual. While the symbols are Greek or Roman in style, they look a bit Egyptian as well. I swear one of them is a scarab. Three man shaped monsters appear and Nevins waves the outside part of the shard of Anubis under their noses and tells them to fetch.
Joe and Jenny are sparring when she starts glowing red, her eyes glaze over white, and she clobbers him. This alarms them enough to meet with Abbie and Ichabod by the trailer and tell them about the shard. Abbie is not happy that they went after Nevins after she told them not to and Jenny said she wouldn’t. Crane knows about the crystal within the shard. He says it is a binding stone, and is absorbed in the body, but mortals aren’t meant to hold so much mystical power. They come to the conclusion that Jenny’s life is in danger. While they are talking about it, the creatures come up on them.
The four are ready with shotguns and rifles but the wounds just close up immediately. Jenny turns red and attacks with a knife, slowing them down. They race through the woods to an opening to the tunnels. They are not followed. They quickly come to the conclusion that they were sent for Jenny, and that it was Nevins, although calling up demonic rage creatures was above his pay grade but not Pandora’s, therefore Nevins is working with Pandora. Jenny gets woozy.
They repair to the archives. Jenny is philosophical about her condition, Abbie is focused, Joe is deeply worried but not very useful, and Ichabod is frustrated. Crane tells Joe that he should talk to Jenny about how he feels. Ichabod has an aha moment and realizes that the monsters might be berserkers. He looks them up and finds that they are only susceptible to mistletoe. This makes a bit of sense as in the Norse legends, Baldr is killed by mistletoe, since all things on the earth were sworn to not harm him, and it is not of the earth. Jenny goes red, eyes white, and we see visions of a shadowy figure with a staff, fire, and the inhuman eye that she saw in her dreams. In a deep voice, she says “Behold my glory, for I am coming.”
It’s a real “I am Zool” moment.
Reynolds meets with his superior in Washington about the Nevin’s case. It’s a real clandestine meeting, since they meet on the front porch while there’s a birthday party inside. We find out that Reynolds and Abbie have eyes on them. That’s it.
Jenny is wiped out by the trance and we have a tender moment of Abbie taking care of her while the guys prepare arrows with mistletoe and hunt down the berserkers. They find them in a junkyard but the arrows don’t work and they run away.
The mistletoe having not worked, Crane wants to poke around Nevin’s office to find out what spell he used but Abbie doesn’t want to ruin the FBI’s investigation. But she agrees with Crane and hands him a lockpick set that she keeps in her purse. She distracts the surveillance team that is on the bait shop. It’s a good thing she doesn’t go along since Crane runs into Sophie. Sophie slams him against a wall and pats him down. (lucky girl). She lets him go (and vice versa) after a bit of banter.
Returning to the archives, Crane has found out that Nevins replaced Odin’s name in the spell with Pandora’s, which is why the mistletoe didn’t work, but no clues as to what would work. He gets the idea to set their foes against each other, which is probably why they had three of them in the first place. This time in the flashback it is Daniel Boone, completely with coonskin cap, who raids both British and Hessian camps and sets them against each other. At least it’s someone we know was actually in the Revolutionary War.
We next see Joe withdrawing some red, sparkly blood from Jenny. Joe does tell Jenny how he feels; he kisses her. She kisses him back. It’s a nice scene, very natural.
Our intrepid heroes are in the woods with mountain climbing equipment. They drop down from the trees like spiders and drop Jenny’s blood on the berserker’s backs. The berserkers turn on each other and kill each other. Our heroes do run them through to make sure. They then go up in a puff of dirty smoke, conveniently getting rid of any evidence.
Crane has a moment with Abbie after their successful mission. He tells her that sometimes he thinks the twenty-first century is an unbeatable foe, no matter how much he wants to assimilate. She tells him that she and Joe and Jenny are the twenty-first century, and were battling against the twenty-first century to help him. Unfortunately, Nevins and Sophie interrupt this moment and demand Jenny at gunpoint. Nevins says that he works for someone so bad they make Pandora look like a home room teacher. He puts a gun to Joe’s head, showing how little he cares for his old friend’s son. They have no weapons out and it appears that Joe is going to be killed. Suddenly Sophie declares herself to be FBI and points her gun at Nevins. He ignores her warning so she shoots him. It looks like a good hit but he doesn’t appear very wounded. Joe grabs his gun and Sophie handcuffs him. Abbie finds out that Reynolds placed her there and didn’t tell Abbie.
They return to find Jenny gone. She is at Pandora’s ruins, pouring her power into the pool. Pandora comes out of the tree, with a tall robed figure with mummy hands. Pandora commands Jenny to kneel, and the figure takes her hand. “Behold my glory. I have arrived.” He raises a red hook over her head.
I swear, when I said they should kill someone off, I didn’t mean Jenny! Of course, we don’t know that she’s dead yet. But since this guy is probably going to start taking eyeballs and tongues pretty soon, it can’t be good.
The show smoothly turned their B plot, which we have been getting bits and pieces of, into their A plot in this episode. The solution to how to kill off monsters that grew stronger with each wound was good. I liked the episode better with more Jenny and Joe and less Pandora and Reynolds. That Sophie was an undercover agent was a good surprise, although I had my suspicions. I’ve always liked her. It makes me wonder if we are going to find out that there is an X-Files type branch of the FBI. It would certainly solve a lot of problems for Abbie.
The monsters were okay. I’m afraid they looked like wrestlers painted red. I think they could have done more to make them more grotesque. They are never seen by the outside world, at least anyone who survives seeing them. They look pretty scary in a dark corridor but not so much in the woods, in the daylight. But mostly, they are not berserkers or the least bit Norse. I mean, they don’t have to have viking helmets since evidently vikings didn’t really wear horns but berserkers are almost always portrayed in furs. I realize that might make it hard to see their wounds close up if they had anything on their chests, but a snarly wolf or bear head on their head wouldn’t be out of place. Why are they bald? I don’t know. I am thankful that they were wearing pants.
The real problem lies with whatever the heck it was that Nevins thought he was doing. Were the berserkers supposed to bring Jenny back alive? I can’t see them doing that. Does the little disk reappear if its host dies? And if so, does it reappear in the outside shell? How do the berserkers get it back without getting affected? (no gloves). I can’t see them accomplishing much except finding Jenny and tearing her to shreds. If that happened and Nevins magically got the crystal back in the container, that should have been explained. Maybe it was and I missed it. And, of course, in the end, it didn’t matter at all. Jenny carried herself to Pandora’s place on her own little feet and did what they wanted. Nevins could have avoided being shot and arrested if he hadn’t panicked. Some kingpin of supernatural smuggling he is.
They were careful not to show any scenes with Jenny in the previews. We may or may not see what happened to her next week.
