Sleepy Hollow: “The Lesser Key of Solomon” Review

Well, yesterday was Monday, and that meant Sleepy Hollow again. In case you haven’t guessed it, there are spoilers after the jump.

Our episode begins with Ichabod reminiscing about his past to a NorthStar assistant—because he needed the car unlocked—over the phone, while Abbie’s still in the sanitarium looking for her sister. Abbie comes out and tells Ichabod what’s happened and the two of them head back to the station.

Captain Irving wants to send a whole team after Jenny, since she’s methodical and dangerous. He also still doesn’t believe that Jenny has any connection to what’s been happening in Sleepy Hollow recently, but Abbie manages to convince him to let her and Ichabod deal with Jenny. The two of them manage to track Jenny down at a secluded cabin that used to belong to Corbin, Abbie’s late partner who died in the first episode. It turns out that Corbin and Jenny knew each other well, and that Corbin believed everything Jenny said about their childhood while Abbie had denied it.

The reunion between the two sisters doesn’t go all that well, and it starts by them pulling guns on each other. Ichabod talks some sense into the two, gets them to put their firearms down, and momentarily, the two sisters are capable of working together. Jenny came to Corbin’s cabin to find something he left there—Corbin wanted her to protect it in case something happened to him. It also turns out that he potentially knew Death was going to kill him.

We discover that Corbin had hidden away a map leading to a weapon. The weapon is a book that can be used to summon seventy-two demons. Unfortunately, the demon in the woods has sent Hessian soldiers after Jenny to find the weapon first. During a gun fight, the soldiers manage to steal the map and head off to raise the demons. Thankfully, however, Ichabod has an eidetic memory and can easily recall what the map looked like, so he and the two sisters know where to go as well.

The Hessian soldiers have already started to raise the demons when our heroes arrive on the scene. After a bit of a fight, good triumphs over evil, and catastrophe is averted.

During this fight, did the one Hessian get thrown into this hell pit? And no one cared?

Later, Jenny sits handcuffed inside an interrogation room when Abbie comes in to remove her bindings. The two sisters have a much needed conversation. Jenny still feels betrayed by Abbie, but Abbie is finally able to apologize and she offers to become Jenny’s legal guardian in order to get her out of the sanitarium. Jenny responds that she doesn’t know if she can ever forgive Abbie for abandoning her. Abbie leaves Jenny alone to make her decision and the episode ends on a bit of a sad note.

I like this episode, as I have liked all the previous episodes, but there are still a lot of things that bother me about this series so far. To start off, Ichabod’s character is starting to annoy me. We’ve complained before that he’s too progressive for a man from his time. Sometimes it feels as if the show is purposefully going out of its way to make him as perfect as possible. I just want some kind of flaw to his character. We’ve spent the past couple episodes being exposition-bombed about Abbie’s past and learning about the bad things she both did and went through, and watching her overcome them. It makes her a far more interesting character because of it.

Pictured: character development.

While this episode also delved into Ichabod’s past—we find out that he started the Boston Tea Party—it doesn’t really flesh him out that much more, and it should have. However, my biggest grievance with him this episode comes during the opening scene, when he’s on the phone with the NorthStar assistant. He relates his tale about how he and Katrina are separated to the kind woman, and ends with this advice to her:

I offer this tale, no matter how cruelly he may have treated you, to suggest that you do not give up nor give into anything less than certainty in matters of the heart.

She then thanks him for his advice and he thanks her for unlocking the car from afar and teaching him how the entertainment system operates. This entire scene—which is our humorous “Ichabod doesn’t know things about the modern day” scene—is entirely out of context and that’s where the problem comes from. We know nothing about this woman and her partner. Maybe the two of them had a fight, maybe they had a misunderstanding, or maybe he used to beat her horrifically. We don’t know, so as far as I’m concerned, this was a funny scene in which Ichabod told a battered woman to get back with her abuser and we should be entertained by it. And even if that wasn’t the case, which it probably isn’t, it can still be perceived that way.

Which is how it came across to me personally.

The saving grace for this episode comes from Abbie and Jenny, who we had not seen on screen together as adults before now. I like that we have some real conflict between the two of them, that Jenny feels betrayed and that Abbie feels guilty. It makes them seem like real people, and right now, they’re the only two characters I can really get invested in.

In terms of plot, the episode was pretty good. We learn that the demon in the woods is really called Moloch, who is an ancient pagan god of child sacrifice from the Old Testament. Moloch has a bunch of Hessian soldiers living in Sleepy Hollow, ready to do his evil bidding—in this episode, some of them brutally torture and behead one of Jenny’s friends—but we don’t know how many of them there are. One of the Hessian soldiers even tells Abbie and Jenny that Moloch has been living inside both of them since the day they saw him in the woods.

However, I think I’m a little sad that our characters managed to save the day completely at the end and none of the seventy-two demons were able to rise. While we learned a lot this episode and a lot happened, specifically with Abbie and her sister, I wanted there to be more consequences to everything.

The next episode looks like it’ll be fairly interesting as well, and I think I might have seen Famine in the promo. We’ll see. Until next week.