Season 2, Episode 5, “And the Abyss Gazes Back”
This is the time of year when, at least in the suburbs where I live, spiders — big ones — become particularly resourceful at finding their way inside the house to escape the life-threatening nighttime temperatures. And so, let’s just say the final scene of Monday night’s “Sleepy Hollow” was NOT something I needed to see.
That final shot, in which a spider that Henry fabricated from a puddle of deadly poison crawled into the mouth of the sleeping Katrina, was the whole point of the episode. Yet what will no doubt generate more discussion is the opening scene.
It showed Abbie and Ichabod doing yoga and discovering that they had radically different slang expressions for “buttocks.” Ichabod’s was “double jug,” a revelation that caused me to immediately remove the Double Jug Beverage Dispenser I had seen on Kohls.com from my Christmas list. Anyway, let’s have a vote right now: All in favor of making “double jug” the new preferred name for that particular feature of the human anatomy?
The episode centered on Joe Corbin, the son of the deceased Sheriff Corbin, who was Abbie’s mentor. Just back from Afghanistan with an honorable discharge earned under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Joe turned out to be afflicted with a curse that causes him to change into a monster from time to time. He was, in short, the featured creature of the week, the Wendigo, a forest beast with an appetite for human flesh.
The best moment of Abbie and Ichabod’s pursuit of Joe the Wendigo was the discussion of Daniel Boone’s headwear. Ichabod apparently knew Boone — of course he did; they were contemporaries, and it was a small world back in the 1700s. Having hung out with Boone, Ichabod was able to correct Abbie and a two-century-old inaccuracy: Boone, he told her, preferred beaver pelts to the coonskin cap he is most identified with. And so we have a new entry for our Top 10 Lines Spoken by Abbie Mills in this series: “As much as I would love to debate the variety of rodent hats that existed in your day, can we please refocus?”
There are two developments of note from this episode, which was a pretty good one. First, Hawley has now definitely been established as the go-to guy whenever Abbie and Ichabod need details on some supernatural phenomenon. Is this starting to seem lazy on the part of the show’s writers? Give the two main characters a vexing puzzle, then pull Hawley out from the wings to solve it for them. But the writers of this show are too smart to settle for that easy formula. Hawley simply has to be destined for something bigger — either sinister or heroic. Doesn’t he?
Second, the episode finally brought Frank Irving (Orlando Jones) back into play in a significant way. I don’t know what Mr. Jones has been doing for the last four weeks, but he certainly hasn’t been logging much time in front of the cameras. Monday, he was given some substantial work to do, as Frank fought off the urge to kill the man who injured his daughter and reached out to Abbie by phone for help. The show needs this guy back in the mix every week, don’t you think?