SLEEPY HOLLOW Recap: The Bride of Franklinstein

Season 3, Episode 11: “Kindred Spirits”
Written by Heather V. Regnier
Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

[Photos courtesy Tina Rowden/FOX]

I’d rather thought the show had forgotten all about Zoe (Maya Kazan). We haven’t seen or heard from her since before the break. It seems that Crane (Tom Mison) did forget all about her in his single minded obsession to find Abbie (Nicole Beharie). It’s fitting that she shows up again because this episode, strangely, is all about romance. And neglect.

We first see a couple parking. What starts out as a normal date quickly turns into a date rape situation. The girl is saved when a strong hand reaches in and pulls the guy out. We can hear him being chopped to bits on the other side of the car. The girl is grateful to be saved, but repulsed by her savior, who is the Kindred. He then chops her up, proving that he has no idea how this hero thing works.

The Kindred is a monster created out of dead soldiers by Benjamin Franklin but never brought to life by him. Crane and company resurrected him to fight the Headless Horseman. He was definitely on Crane’s side then, but something different is happening with him now.

Crane awakes to find Abbie up in the wee hours of the morning. Things are not right between them, or most definitely not right with Abbie. She’s not sleeping or acting like herself. They have a discussion about Crane letting her houseplants die. He admits that he neglected everything because he was intent on finding her. She admits that he was her Wilson. I have no idea if he knows what that means. He asks her to go to the green house to get new plants and then have breakfast. She goes for a run instead.

Crane goes to the greenhouse to buy Abbie new plants where runs into Zoe Corinth. He hasn’t talked to her in two fortnights and a half, which is the entire time Abbie was gone. He can’t explain himself and she is ready to call it quits. She tells him to take the ferns back and get cactus, which don’t require any maintenance.

Reynolds (Lance Gross) calls Abbie while she’s on her run and asks her to come look at the crime scene. She does, but quickly realizes that the damage was caused by the Kindred’s halberd, which has a point and an axe, and that the footprints are from a large heavy man. She excuses herself from the case, knowing that she is going to have to solve this as a witness, not an FBI agent. She suggests he use Sophie Foster (Jessica Camacho), because she’s good. He protests that Sophie is not her. (But isn’t she?)

Abbie tells Sophie it’s not a normal case and to meet her at the archives. She calls Crane, who is happily and bemusedly bringing succulents home. The game is afoot.

It’s Pandora’s (Shannyn Sossamon) turn to whine. She isn’t at full power, she misses her box, and she looks more like a mortal than a goddess. They did call the Kindred with the signal from the surviving piece of the box. She sees him as abandoned by the Witnesses.

Crane and Abbie bring Foster up to speed and correctly deduce that the Kindred was raised by Pandora and the Hidden One (Peter Mensah). She is given the task of trying to figure out where the Kindred will strike next. Going through Benjamin Franklin’s things triggers a memory of Crane and Betsy Ross (Nikki Reed) meeting for the first time. They also find out that the glass armonica was made to soothe Kindred monsters, and that Kindred proxies (other creatures created by Franklin) return to burial sites. Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood)  and Joe (Zach Appelman) are to steal the glass armonica, and Crane and Abbie are to find the Kindred’s home.

I had a small thrill at the mention of the glass armonica. This is an invention of Franklin’s that I knew about. It works in the same way as running your finger on the edge of a glass, but he laid bowls of glass on their sides, connected together, so it could be played in a similar fashion to a harp.

Jenny and Joe steal the armonica, spending most of their time talking about her dad. In the room behind them there is a decorated door shaped vaguely like a key. Ichabod and Abbie find the Kindred’s coffin and lair. He has bits of his victim’s stuff — shoes and hair. He also has attempted to write on bits of newspaper. Abbie and Crane come to the conclusion that not only has the Kindred turned evil, he is becoming more human.

The Kindred attacks a couple coming off of a Sleepy Hollow carriage ride. Sleepy Hollow is the last place one should take a carriage ride. Sophie has been staking it out and she shoots him, which does nothing. The couple is saved, however, and the Kindred summons a horse and rides off into the mist.

Crane and Abbie decide that the Kindred is jealous of the couples and that is why he kills them. They feel responsible since they raised him but didn’t teach him anything, and now he’s more like a person. Sophie points out that he still has to be stopped. Benjamin Franklin rewrote “Come Thou, Almighty King” to “Come Now, Almighty Kin” so they know that that’s the tune to attract the Kindred. They plan to draw him with the armonica and trap him in the Masonic cell in which they once held the Headless Horseman.

They are ready for their plan, but Crane left the sheet music in the archives. Zoe comes in to retrieve a loaned book, but really to confront Crane about their failed relationship. The Kindred rises from his coffin but ignores the music Joe plays (which is “Greensleeves”, not the right tune) but he is attracted to the quarreling couple. Abbie sees that the Kindred has been cutting out and piecing together pieces of pictures of women’s faces and realizes that he wants a wife. The monster grabs Zoe and carries her off.

Abbie deducts that the Kindred would take Zoe to the carriage house where The Headless Horseman kept Katrina (Katia Winter). Joe notices that the symbol on Franklin’s book is the same as the one on the key shaped door at the Opera House that they stole the armonica from. Crane remembers hiding medical supplies with Betsy Ross at the same place, their first job together. He realizes (taking several leaps in logic) that Franklin built a female for the Kindred and hid her behind that door.

They fetch the Kindress and take her to the barn behind the carriage house, where Sophie is being attacked by the Kindred. Jenny and Joe battle the Kindred while Abbie and Crane raise the Kindress. She is not a pretty sight. I guess Franklin couldn’t find an intact head and she has a lot of stitches and complexion problems. Like the Kindred, she is an action figure complete with weapon. While he has a halberd, she has a flail.

Crane and Abbie race towards the barn, which is burning now, pursued by the Kindress. The rest of the gang leave the barn, pursued by the Kindred. They meet up and it is eyes across a crowded barnyard — love at first sight. He bows to her. She curtsies to him. A face caress, a drawing away, another caress.  They kiss and walk off hand in hand.

Crane returns the book to Zoe and they say goodbye on better terms. Reynolds comes to Abbie and lets her go — telling her how much she means to him but that she needs to do what’s right for her. Abbie says she’s ready to come back to work. She may be wrong about that.

At this point I am wondering what’s going to happen with the Kindred and Kindress wandering around. Are they going to the Hidden One? Are they going to wreak havoc? Make baby Kindlings? That answer is answered quickly. The Hidden One sees that The Kindred is not coming to him and is leaving Sleepy Hollow. He destroys them with a splash in Pandora’s pool. Sad, but probably for the best. They were happy and never saw it coming.

Abbie and Crane play chess and drink beer, neither of them looking very happy. Abbie cuts herself and then finds herself sketching a symbol in the blood, a symbol from purgatory. It can’t be a good sign.

Thoughts: I love this story. I loved it when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote it, I loved it when it was the Bride of Frankenstein, and in many other incarnations. I don’t really care that it’s  derivative. In the original book, the big bone of contention between the Frankenstein monster and his creator is that Victor Frankenstein will not create a mate for him. The monster is lonely and unique in the world. Victor is afraid that he will create a race of monsters that will wipe out mankind. It never occurs to him, because it never occurred to Mary Shelley, that he could create a woman without a womb and not worry about that happening. Benjamin Franklin did foresee the monster needing a bride. We don’t know if he thought about reproduction, however, since the couple got killed off. And Crane is the one who thought of a mate as the ultimate moderating influence. Which turns out to be true. I like that the monster got his bride — and that she didn’t scream at the sight of him.

They also touch on the responsibility issue — bringing something into the world that you can’t control and didn’t take care of. Of course, they then blew it by having the monster walk off with his monstrous bride without knowing what was going to happen.

And really, the name — Kindress? It’s bad enough that Kindred is actually a plural, or an adjective, but Kindress?

Sophie Foster isn’t going to last long at this rate. Without backup from the Sleepy gang or the FBI, she ended up facing the Kindred alone TWICE. She is not nearly powerful enough for that. Did it really take all four to figure out the puzzle while she was hiding out by the barn?

Pandora made a bad bargain. And the Hidden One ignored her when she was practically begging to get her power back. The last bit, where he railed against human weakness and losing his soldier to love, does not bode well for her.

You know, the Kindred and Kindress would make good action figures. Very Goth. The Kindress looks like she was sewn together out of parts made from torture AND smallpox victims. Not to mention the lovely tattered colonial garb.

Next episode: Nevins, and something that looks like Gollum.

Sleepy Hollow airs Fridays at 9/8c on FOX.