SLEEPY HOLLOW Loses an Eye
S3E8 “Novus Ordo Seclorum”
[photos: Tina Rowden/FOX]
An all-seeing eye, which is what the red disk in the shard of Anubis is. They lose a lot more than that..
The story begins with Pandora bathing her mummy in a beautiful pond in the woods. They are surrounded by golden light. Surely nothing bad could be happening in a place of such beauty. She unwraps some of his bandages and tells him that she has waited for millennia for this moment. He complains about what has happened to the world, extinction, pollution,global warming. He must be very in tune with nature to feel this right away. We see Jenny on the shore, glowing and still suffering. He also knows that a mortal has bonded with the eye. Pandora mentions the Witnesses and he is not happy to find out that they are still around.
Abbie, Sophie Foster and Abbie’s boss, Daniel Reynolds, have a conference in his office. They are not happy because their investigation has been cut short and Nevins won’t talk. Abbie is not happy that she was not told about Sophie being an undercover agent. She walks out of the meeting because she has to find Jenny.
Joe and Ichabod find Jenny’s truck. Abbie catches up with them as they follow Jenny’s trail. The mummy absorbs some of the power from Jenny’s body, but Pandora cautions him against doing it too quickly for fear that Jenny will blow up and they will lose the power of the eye. He then touches his hook to her forehead, causing more visions, and Jenny screams. Our trio hears the scream and run towards it. They see the mummy, Pandora and Jenny, who all disappear, leaving nothing but smoke and a few scraps linen behind. Crane realizes from the Sumerian script on the wrappings that they are not facing a monster this time, but a god.
Back at the archives, Crane researches their villain. He says his name is something like “Ettu, Ileum”. Since that would roughly translate to “You too, my small intestine?” I’m pretty sure I got it wrong. Crane says his name translates to “The Hidden One”. The books mention an all-seeing eye. They rush to Jenny’s sick room and look at her drawings. There is an all-seeing eye like the one on our money. Franklin insisted on it, Crane says. They translate the motto on the seal. “Novos Ordo Seclorum.” A New Order for the Ages. “A warning against the threat of imperialism,” Crane says. “Or an ancient evil,” Abbie says. Or possibly announcing the new way of governing that American democracy will bring about, like history books say. At any rate, they have to get an important Masonic book for more information. Crane knows exactly where it is. It’s at a university, where it can be studied by the brightest minds in academia.
Which is how they end up at the toga party. Isis is playing, people are dancing and throwing up. Crane tries a secret handshake when they are challenged. It doesn’t go over well, so Joe hits the guy and they accidentally start a melee. They slip into the building while the fight is going on. Crane knows just where the secret room is and the secret to making the book pop out. I keep forgetting for him that this all happened yesterday. He reads about Paul Revere’s nephew touching the eye in a staff that George Washington found. The poor boy ends up going into the woods so as not to hurt anyone and explodes.
Back to Pandora’s chambers, where we find out that the Hidden One wants to see humanity burn and he pulls more power from Jenny.
More study reveals that Revere went back to the woods to find destruction and his nephew gone but the eye was intact, young Jonathan having burned around it. He brings the staff near it and the eye flows back into it. Abbie says she hopes that Crane is about to say that he has seen the staff before — and he has! He saw Revere melt it down and turn it into a lump just by chance. That sort of coincidence is stretching it a bit. But they need to have that information to know that the shard of Anubis contained the eye (and hides it) and can draw the eye out of the person possessed by it. Which explains how Nevins thought he would retrieve the eye in the previous episode. Abby goes off to the evidence locker to retrieve it.
Abbie gets the shard and picks up an ancient book on the grounds that it might be useful. Nevins will only talk to her so Sophie Foster arranges for her to meet Nevins in the van transporting him. Unfortunately Pandora gets there first. She is more upset that Nevins used the box than she is that he let a mortal get the shard. When Abbie gets there, the guards are dead and the van is empty. Nevins is gone. Given the volume of blood in the van, he’s not likely to be found alive.
Pandora confronts Abbie and tries to convince her that there will be a place for Witnesses in the new world. She also knows that Abbie is driven by her failure to back Jenny up when they were kids, resulting in Jenny being treated as being crazy. Sophie runs up behind her but of course sees no one. Reynolds wants to see Abbie.
Ichabod cleans out the armory in the archives of everything down to the oldest musket and smallest knife. There’s not much. He finds out Joe has been researching lycanthropic curses. He wants to be turned into a monster again so he can save Jenny. Which is sweet. Crane is having none of that.
Abbie and Reynolds fight. He pushes her too far and she turns in her badge and gun. I am thinking, “well, he just lost her.” And then he calls someone and tells them that they just lost the asset they were cultivating.
However, before she turns in her security badge she requisitions a bunch of heavy artillery and breaching equipment. Yes! I have to say I like this aspect of Abbie in this episode. Once she is on the mission to save Jenny, nothing she wants gets in her way! No sacrifice is too great. And she has the guts to grab what she needs from the FBI and the forethought to know that she needs it.
Abbie and Crane have a nice talk about their time together and the foes they have vanquished as they walk through the forest. The three of them go into Pandora’s lair, guns a-blazing. Crane has the book that Abbie took from the evidence room, the book Nevins used to raise the berserkers. He tries to take control of Pandora’s box, using the spells from the book. She fights back, and the box spins around up in the air. This distraction enables Abbie to get to Jenny and try to draw the power back into the outer casing of the shard. The Hidden One takes the shard from her and squeezes it, breaking it into pieces. Joe comes in and shoots him, to little avail, but it does get his attention. Abbie gathers up the shards of the shard and gets it working again. Pandora wins against Crane. The box closes and is put back on the shelf. The Hidden One has Joe up in the air, hands around his throat.
Abbie succeeds in drawing the power out of Jenny, but she is now holding a broken, leaky casing. The door to the Underworld opens. I don’t know why, and I don’t know why the ruins are starting to fall apart, either. That’s just what happens at the grand finale if you have a fantastical lair or mad scientist’s laboratory. She tells Jenny it’s the only way she can keep her safe, and walks towards Hell. Crane blurts out a soft, sad, “Leftenant, no.” Abbie tells him “Take care of each other.” Bossy til the last. She walks into the tree, it closes behind her, and there is a massive red explosion. The Hidden One is felled, it looks like. The box is shredded. Ichabod recovers first. We can see that Joe is stirring and Jenny is alive. Crane runs to the mouth of the tree but Abbie is gone.
Wow! I have to say again that I loved Abbie in this episode. From focused, driven fighter to making the ultimate sacrifice, she is the hero of the piece.
There were lots of little bits of information to gather, once again confirming that the show is now a magical/historical procedural. I have conflicting emotions about the historical bits.They take it too far to suspend disbelief sometimes. Every case has a connection to Ichabod and he has seen or known some key element every time.
On the other hand, the flashbacks and his occasional explanations as to how things really were are some of the most enjoyable parts of the show. The plots are continuing to hang together, with this week’s episode fleshing out some of the unknowns of last week.
On the negative side, The Hidden One is just not frightening. I don’t know if it’s the lovey-dovey stuff between him and Pandora, or the fact that humans are a blight on the earth, or just that there are movies like The Mummy that did it much better. The makeup was less then horrifying. It looked like he had wax spilled on him. He needs to munch a scarab or take someone’s eyeballs or something. With more time, they could have had our Witnesses lose a fight with them badly to make the Hidden One more impressive before the final battle.
I’m not too worried about Abbie going to Hell. Lots of people have been to Hell and come back: Virgil, Dante, Persephone, Sam and Dean Winchester. The explosion was more worrisome, although she was holding the eye and didn’t have it absorbed into her at the time. However, the effects on the survivors should be devastating. I hope we get to see some of that when the show returns.
When Sleepy Hollow returns on Feb. 5th, it will have changed nights. It will be in the Friday night death slot now, Fridays at 8 pm, 7 central. I don’t know why they are changing nights when they went to so much trouble with the crossover event to pair it up with Bones, which airs on Thursday nights.
