If you live in Sleepy Hollow and you at any point in your life turned a blind eye to justice, you better stock up on the energy drinks because the Sandman has come to town and he’s serving up some sort of twisted brand of demon-vigilante justice.
This week’s episode of “Sleepy Hollow” gave us a little more background on Lt. Abbie Mills and her sister, Jenny, and introduced us to a much different monster than the crispy witch from last week in the Sandman. This version of the Sandman is actually a demon who haunts the dreams of people who have “turned a blind eye to justice” – in this case, those involved with covering up the fact that Jenny Mills is actually sane. Jenny’s psychiatrist is the first to bite the proverbial dust, followed by the rancher that found Abbie and Jenny in the woods after their encounter with the demon, and finally sets its black-holes-for-eyes on Abbie. Luckily, with the help of a Mohawk Shaman, Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills are able to enter their dream while controlling their actions and fight the white demon.
I don’t know if I have made this clear yet, but “Sleepy Hollow” is ridiculous.
Ridiculous in the best of ways.
We have a man from the Revolutionary War running around in his period clothing with a police lieutenant who saw a demon as a kid battling demons to prevent the four horsemen of the apocalypse from laying waste to everything. Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills have fantastic chemistry together and the writers continue to play on the fish out of water angle with Crane without over playing that hand. I appreciate the fact that the general public in this small town aren’t just all suddenly aware of the supernatural, but I am also happy that those have been exposed to it regularly as of late aren’t too dense to accept something weird is going on. Abbie is becoming more accepting of this crazy new world, and even Captain Frank Irving (Orlando Jones playing the straight man very well here) may not be a “believer” quite yet, but he’s loosening the reigns on the Abbie and Ichabod and seeing how things play out; he knows there is something bigger going on here, I just don’t think he’s ready to admit that vocally yet.
Of course, horror is a big part of this show and once again it was not lacking in this episode. The Sandman was a legitimately creepy character; completely white with black-hole eye sockets, no mouth, extended fingers, and a black slit down the middle of its head. The way the Sandman moved by sort of “glitching” around gave me the chills and the fact that after you are killed by the demon your eyes turn white and burst open, spewing sand out completely caught me off guard. Sure, there were some obvious allusions to Freddy Krueger, but this creature was a fantastic creation and made a great monster of the week for our heroes to face off with.
This is now three weeks in a row that this new FOX series, “Sleepy Hollow”, has delivered a fun, creepy, and adventurous episode. While it seems the show will be following the monster of the week format much like other great shows in the same vein (Buffy, Angel, X-Files, etc.), it will also be building to the bigger, over-arching plot each week as well – the same thing that made its “spiritual predecessors” so great as well. It’s truly becoming a show that I tune in to, live, each week to catch.
If you’re not watching “Sleepy Hollow”, you really should give it an honest go, it really is just great, quality fun. You can catch it Mondays on FOX at 8:00pm MDT.