The Revised, Relocated and Repopulated SLEEPY HOLLOW

Season 4 Episode 1 “Columbia”
Written by Albert Kim
Directed by Russell Lee Fine

Sleepy Hollow has done something I’ve never seen before. The first, second and third seasons were very different from each other, but with the departure of one of the leads, they have completely reformatted the show for the fourth season. They’ve moved to another city, ditched or killed off all but two of the characters, and brought in a new bad guy. For all of the differences, though, there is more that is the same and that’s not necessarily a good thing. It depends on whether they kept what was working and threw out what wasn’t, or vice versa.I’m thinking that’s something the viewer will have to decide for themselves.

Silly me. When the government came and hauled Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) away at the end of last season, I thought that they were going to make him the head of the organization that George Washington formed to protect the newly made United States from supernatural dangers. After all, that’s what Washington intended before Crane was killed in battle. I was wrong. He was put in a cell and interrogated for two weeks and given no information. Finally he knocks out the guard and escapes. He finds books on demons and blueprints on the Lincoln Memorial.

Meanwhile we meet Crane’s new partner-to-be, Diana (Janina Gavankar). She discusses with her partner, Eric (Ace Marrero), how single she is. They seem to be bonded as partners but nothing more. It doesn’t matter. It’s best not to get too attached. They get called to the Lincoln Memorial because — get this — Lincoln has been beheaded. When they arrive there, they are alone. Where is the person that called it in? Gawkers? The partner immediately gets killed by a ghoulish figure in a short cape and pork pie hat. The demon pokes his long green finger through disposable partner’s brain.

Crane shows up and hits the demon with a brass pole a few times and saves Diana’s life. It’s a good way to meet. It turns out that she’s a skeptic, but how skeptical can you be when the first thing that happens is that you meet a demon that disappears in a puff of smoke? It doesn’t help that no one believes her.

Diana trails Crane to where he was held captive and they bond a bit and decide to hunt the demon together. The demon kills a souvenir seller (Daryn Kahn).

Meanwhile we get to meet the new mad scientist, Malcolm Dreyfuss (Jeremy Davies). Mad magician, I guess, since he’s working with magic and not science. Emphasis on the mad.

Diana discovers the part of Homeland Security where all the reports of supernatural events go. They go to check it out and this is the department that Crane was supposed to head. Or, what’s left of it. They find a dusty little room with a young guy (Jerry MacKinnon) in it. He recognizes Crane because he’s been filing reports about Sleepy Hollow. An explosion gets Jake’s attention and he opens the door to a huge, beautiful library. He has a partner, Alex (Rachel Melvin), a young woman who likes to experiment with artifacts. This actually seems like a good development. Crane gets his own Cisco and Caitlin. His own FitzSimmons. His Mythterns, if you will.

The library has a secret entrance to a network of tunnels. Diana and Crane check them out. They talk, and we find out that she was in the military before she worked for Homeland Security. She has a daughter, a ten year old who fainted in class a few weeks ago and then turned mute.

They figure out that the demon is in fact, John Wilkes Booth, who turned himself into a demon to get past Mary Todd Lincoln’s magical defenses and kill Lincoln. Nice that they make Mary Lincoln a person of ability and courage. She hunted him down, found him in a barn, and trapped him under the Lincoln Memorial. Or at least, where it was going to be.

They theorize that the demon is triggered by patriotic symbols and now know where it is going to be-a concert where hundreds of people have been encouraged to dress patriotically. Crane carries a flag and sings the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Not a song from his time, but one certain to anger a Confederate demon. There’s a funny bit where a Hamilton fan disses Crane’s outfit.

It works and they lure the demon to an uninhabited area, where he starts tossing around Crane’s mythterns. Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood) comes in as a Deus ex machina and saves them.

They vanquish the demon and Crane decides to stick around. Jenny has been in Tibet researching soul migration and says Crane may already have met the person that Abbie’s soul migrated to.

They didn’t find the person who raised the demon and we see Dreyfuss in his lab again. His right hand man pulverizes Lincoln’s head with laser beams from his eyes, revealing a disk that the bad magician wants. He wants the rest of the disks, too, wherever they are.

We meet Diana’s child, Molly (Oona Yaffe) at the end of the episode. She takes out a secret notebook full of drawings of Ichabod. Nicely done, detailed drawings that are far beyond her years.

It wasn’t until we got to the secret tunnels that I realized the show is exactly the same! If they were going to take advantage of the shift in personnel and location to try to fix its flaws, or strive for a better premise, they didn’t try very hard. Trying to change the show to survive after the loss of Nicole Beharie is not enough when the ratings are as low as they are.

The archives are now a beautiful and more spacious library with all of the information gathered by Washington’s supernatural agency through the years. The library even leads to a subterranean tunneled world for them to travel through and keep things they don’t want the world to see. Crane has his liaison with the police, who is also a possible love interest. The ‘Witness’ part of the persona of Abbie has been relegated to the police contact’s daughter. This split is similar to what they attempted to do last season by adding Sophie Foster to the cast. I like Diana but she is in the same mold as Abbie or Sophie.

We had a twistory flashback. The main difference in that flashback is that it wasn’t Crane’s memory. We have a villain who will be using the supernatural to achieve his goals, just like Pandora.

Not everything is the same, but the differences seem superficial. It mystifies me that the show moved to Washington, D.C. Does it mean that it will be more National Treasure and less Supernatural? And how can they call it Sleepy Hollow now?

With the addition of the mythterns (histerns?) and Diana’s daughter, the show will be skewing younger. Does that mean that they are trying to get a younger audience? I think that maybe that’s something they should have been doing from the beginning. However, anyone young and impressionable will fail history after watching this show. They just told us Mary Lincoln was a witch and Abraham Lincoln was killed by a claw through the back of his skull.

Why are they letting us see who the new Witness is so soon? Barring any plot twists, it has to be Diana’s daughter.

Crane is lonely in D.C. and without his partner Witness. So far no one knows that he is resurrected from the past and not just a historical consultant, as he claims. He has three quests: to find the new Witness, to find the people who kidnapped him, and to find the person who freed the demon. I believe that the last two are the same. The loss of Abbie (Nicole Beharie) woobifies him. As long as he misses her and suffers from her loss, it will make it easier for the audience to bear the fact that they killed off one of the two leads but kept the show going.

Crane waxed sentimental at the end about Columbia and how the colonists made up their own goddess to represent them. This is the kind of thing that I am glad they kept.

 

Sleepy Hollow airs on FOX at 9Pm/8c on Friday nights.