SLEEPY HOLLOW Fall Finale Review “Desperate Times”

By Jennie Bragg

Sleepy Hollow finally showed us what we’ve been waiting for this week: what the big bad has in store for the town.

The episode opened with a deceptively gorgeous autumn morning at the lake. But the camera pans down to show Jenny lying unconscious by the water, and Pandora engaged in what looks like a baptism. She raises a mummified looking figure from the water and we find out what she’s been planning all season. The mummified figure is her husband, and he’s been “reborn” so that he and Pandora can reclaim the earth from the mortals who have ruled it for millennia, fouling and despoiling it. Unfortunately we also now know what role Jenny will be playing in this. Pandora’s husband – who is, as Crane says, an actual living god - must feed on the shard’s energy to be fully renewed, and he and Pandora are happy to use Jenny for that purpose. (A husband whose wife placed him in suspended animation and then revived in the modern world, a world he finds bafflingly changed from the one he knew? That has such a familiar ring to it….)

Meanwhile Abbie’s conflict between the FBI and her role as a witness finally comes to a head, in a big way, with Jenny as the catalyst. Abbie has to make a huge sacrifice not once, but twice in this episode, and it’s not clear where she’s going to be when the Sleepy Hollow returns after its winter break.

The show promised a big send-off and it delivered one.