SLEEPY HOLLOW: The Town is Abuzz

S3E6 “This Red Lady from Caribee”

[Photos: Tina Rowden/FOX]

This episode was anticlimactic, I must say. After all this time of waiting to see what Pandora was up to and what would happen when the last bud blossomed, we found out pretty much..nothing.

Flames blazing and swords flying through the air..and fruity drinks with pink umbrellas. Ichabod Crane is at a Japanese steakhouse with Zoe Corinth. The date is not going well, mostly because Ichabod is as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He later characterizes the date to Abbie as a disaster.

Abbie’s new boss stops by her office to make sure that she has told her sister to stay out of the way of the investigation that includes Atticus Nevins. He clearly has a lot riding on it. Abbie tries to reassure him.

Pandora, on the other hand, is not nervous. She is smug. Her plans are going well and she only needs one more blossom. She recites a poem about the red lady from Caribee and red buzzing insects come out of her box. The bees coalesce into a humanoid figure and Pandora commands her to go out and get the last fear she needs-the fear of fear itself.

We see a man in a study get stung. Next,  Abbie and Crane are walking down a hallway, discussing Crane’s case. They are going to court about him being caught smuggling artifacts, which happened in the first episode of the season.  The judge is ranting and raving on the bench and people are leaving the court room.

Unfortunately, the man who was stung is the judge in Crane’s case. He is covered with blotches. Crane sees the insects briefly form the figure of a woman. The judge dies in mid rant.

Abbie tells Jenny that they have to stay away from Nevins. Jenny says that she will tell Joe.

Crane discovers that the insects are wasps, not bees, and from the Caribbean. The judge died of an aneurysm. Crane has been researching the phenomenon and calls the wasps Jack Spaniards and says that the woman he saw is a soucouyant, which hails from Trinidad. He says that the wasp’s sting causes a fever and increasing paranoia. Abbie remembers a passage from her ancestor’s diary that speaks of George Washington becoming mad. Grace Dixon had been called to George Washington’s side by none other than Betsy Ross after he was stung. Grace gives Washington a potion to slow down the illness but tells Betsy that the soucouyant has to be destroyed for him to be saved. Betsy girds her loins and goes off to slay the soucouyant. They conclude from this that she found a way to do it, since George Washington did not die on that battlefield. The only other clue in the diary is a poem.

Abbie’s boss, Daniel Reynolds, calls her in because a PTA leader has died in her kitchen. First she went to the library and checked out books by Orwell, Vonnegut and Salinger and burned them in her yard. Daniel knows right away that this is the same as the judge. He has called the CDC and wants to keep control of it. Abbie calls Crane to tell them they have another victim. PTA leader, she says. “Acronym?” he asks, as if he has done it a million times before. Abbie comes to the realization that all of the victims were in positions of power, and theorizes that the queen of the hive might attack other leaders, those in the driver’s seat. Daniel Reynolds snaps at her as they leave and she gets into a van with him. He is in the driver’s seat.  We see that he is stung but Abbie does not. He starts driving erratically and aggressively and grilling Abbie on her secrets, and accusing her of trying to ruin his career. He stops in the woods and drags her out of the car but she pins him to the ground and handcuffs him.

Abbie takes him to their secret lair. Joe is there and asks what happened to him. “He was stung by a Trinidadian paranoia monster,” Abbie replies. “Welcome to Sleepy Hollow,” says Joe. Crane has discovered the meaning of the poem. It contains the list of ingredients needed to make the potion to slow down the poison. Jenny and Joe go to a potion shop to get the ingredient and the proprietor has a vision when he touches her, which is frightening but is a warning. He says that there is a shadow over her soul and she will be claimed. Meanwhile, Abbie gets an earful from Danny and he reveals that he is still stuck on her while she has moved on and wants to forget their fling.

Pandora plucks earrings off her tree and shows off her new dress to the soucouyant. (No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.) She does look less spooky and more regal. Her dress makes her look like a Greek goddess.

Abbie and Crane realize that they need to find the hive so they triangulate on the computer from the places the victims were stung. They see Pandora’s tree on the satellite image. Crane observes that it is like the tree on the back of the tablet, which has six blossoms — Abbie says that this is the sixth creature Pandora has sent — and voila, they have found the hive and Pandora’s lair.

Joe meets with Nevins. He says Mills isn’t a part of this, and shows him the picture of Nevins and August Corbin with the numbers on the back. Nevins says they are offshore accounts and asks for the shard, although he has given precious little information.

I don’t know why the Shard of Anubis is called a shard. A shard is a splinter or piece of broken glass, long and thin and presumably fitting into a greater whole. This thing is a lumpy black rock. It turns out that it is what it looks like, one of those fake stones that you hide a key in. Nevins opens it and removes a disk, while telling Joe that there is no good or bad, only power. He uses a glove when he handles it. He and his lackeys then leave, taking Joe with them. Jenny gets the drop on them outside the restaurant. She digs the disk out of Nevin’s pocket, which is obviously a mistake, since he used gloves. She and Joe escape, locking the bad guys in the restaurant. The disk disappears from her hand in a puff of red smoke.

Pandora’s place is in an ancient ruin (in America). The buzzing starts immediately. Crane searches for the hive while Abbie holds off the wasps with a homemade flamethrower, a lighter and aerosol can. Crane encounters Pandora, who thanks them for putting her monsters back in the box. Abbie finds the hive and Crane gives her a container of prussic acid. Crane holds off the red lady while Abbie pours it into the hive, killing the hive and the Queen. Crane and Abbie then bear witness to Pandora’s disappearing into the tree, which closes up behind her.

Daniel Reynolds is fine and has no memory of the incident. Crane decides to do something less stressful with Zoe — they go for a walk. Crane and Abbie discuss what happened and come to the conclusion that Pandora was planning something and will be back. I don’t know what they base that on, other than their own bad luck. Just as easy to think that Pandora achieved what she wanted and is gone.

Jenny is sleeping fitfully. Her hand and then her neck glow red. She is having nightmares and wakes up from them, gasping.

Next week they are chasing an unstoppable foe in the woods.

There is a lot of fire in this episode. Crane and Abbie have a fire going in the fireplace in the archives. There is fire at the Japanese steakhouse. There is fire at the Cajun restaurant. Abbie attacks the wasps with fire, Jenny burns from within. I don’t know what all the fire means.

Sleepy Hollow appears to have a lot of good restaurants for a town its size.

I don’t know what I think about Daniel Reynolds. Some really ugly stuff came out of him when he was mad and I don’t know if that was all from the paranoia monster or not. There has been very little to make him attractive to the audience except for a lot of flirting. We haven’t seen him brave, or self-sacrificing, or struggle with anything. All we know is that he likes Abbie and he’s ambitious. If they actually want us to like him, this episode may have been a mistake.

What’s happening to Jenny is very unfortunate, since she spent much of her life being intermittently possessed. She was starting to calm down and enjoy life, too. She didn’t quit pursuing Nevins, which may cause trouble for Abbie. This is Joe’s fault, not only because he dragged her into it, but because he was so unobservant that he told her to get the disk out of Nevin’s pocket without gloves.

What Sleepy Hollow needs is a sense that something could really happen to someone that we the audience or the characters care about. I didn’t care at all if Daniel Reynolds died, and I don’t think it would have mattered to anyone else either. I was more shocked by Abbie’s first FBI boss dying, and we saw him for less than one episode. If something happened to Miss Zoe Corinth, who is entirely too nice, we would believe that there is real danger. Or perhaps, if Abbie’s boss had been more likable, we would care more.

The show still needs more internal consistency, but it is improving.