Sleepy Hollow S02E04 – “Go Where I Send Thee…”

Sleepy Hollow “Go Where I Send Thee…”
Written by Damian Kindler
Directed by Doug Aarniokoski

If there is one thing Sleepy Hollow is good for, it’s providing completely crazy monster scenarios. This weeks episode, “Go Where I Send Thee…”, is a prime example, thanks to a demonic Pied Piper who dates back to the Revolutionary War. How often do you see demonic Pied Pipers on your television screen? And yet, Sleepy Hollow does so brazenly, and it fits right in with their on-going mythos, to the point where no one is batting an eye!

The Pied Piper is the monster of the week, and he’s kidnapping a young girl as part of a family curse that has been happening for generations. Like all the prior family curses on Sleepy Hollow, it all dates back to the Revolutionary War period. Fake Revolutionary Daniel Forbes Lancaster (who Ichabod explains joined the rebellion only after it was apparent the Colonials would win) had a British detachment of troops staying in his house, which got a little too grabby with his daughters. So he hired a local demonic Pied Piper assassin to kill them. I guess back in the 1700s, you could just hire demonic fairy tale assassins with relative ease. In any event, after the Pied Piper slayed all the troops (in super fast cool knife fighting moves!), Daniel Lancaster has the demonic Pied Piper shot with arrows and dumped in a lake. This betrayal doesn’t end well, because demonic powered assassins tend to not stay dead, and he returns every generation to abduct a female member of the Lancaster family on her 10th birthday.

First of all, why would you betray a demon-powered assassin? That’s just looking for trouble. Secondly, why would you betray one with a Pied Piper theme, since the town’s betrayal of the Pied Piper in the original tale ended badly? It’s like he’s too stupid and arrogant to learn the morals of these fairy tales. And the Lancaster family now has trouble for generations. Good going, moron!

This and Amber Alert, missing white girl, and everyone panicking. Luckily for us, Nancy Grace never shows up, proving that Sleepy Hollow is from a superior strand of the multiverse. Ichabod and Abbie end up searching for the child in the middle of the woods, where Ichabod finds a bone flute that when played, puts Abbie in a trance-like state where she starts walking towards a mysterious destination. Thanks to the era of mp3s, they play the son on a loop to find where it leads, only to be interested by last week’s new recurring character, treasure bounty hunter Nick Holi. Who has been injured by the Demonic Pied Piper, which he found while looking for one of the bone flutes, as he was hired to get by his unnamed patron. Thus, they team up (much to Ichabod’s chagrin) to find the girl.

The episode goes beyond being a simple monster episode by focusing in part on the monster/curse’s effect on the Lancaster family. After rescuing the girl, a bit of research reveals that the one prior time a child was kidnapped and saved, all the other children in the family died. We now have a distraught mother trying to reoffer her daughter to the creature to save the other children, while Ichabod and Abbie then have to stop her and finish off the monster to end the curse.

The Pied Piper is still partially decked out in Colonial garb, but he features lots of make up that makes him some sort of pig demon thing. From the abandoned basement he inhabits, he must just chill in the woods every 25 years until it is showtime, occasionally hunting. As so many monsters inhabit the spooky woods, it is probably that they’ve been running into each other. There is probably a whole monster dynamic and ecosystem unique to the spooky woods. Heck, they could do episodes where they just have random monsters of the week running round in the woods and fighting each other, Abbie and Ichabod dealing with the disruption they’ve caused by eliminating so many parts of the monster ecosystem.

While Jenny Mills and Katrina Crane are both MIA this week, we get a brief bit with Frank Irving, who reads up on his lawyer (and Horsemen of War) Henry Parrish, and sees a Bible burst into flames. He also finds it’s impossible to fire him, thanks to that whole accidentally signing a contract in his own blood thing. Oops! There is a cool bit where we get a glimpse of Irving’s vision, him all Ramboed up and slaughtering policemen and civilians with a sword as flaming ash falls down on the destroyed city. Irving is now a major player in War’s army, at least until his character gets an episode dedicated to him and isn’t stuck in the B plot.

Ichabod has finally learned how to drive, at least good enough to drive fancy scary around a parking lot (he’s been getting lessons from Jenny, who has had her license suspended twice!) There is a funny bit where he curses Ben Franklin and the odometer, which was total Ichabod and got us another Ben Franklin reference. The best scene was when after Abbie was called in to help the missing kid case, Ichabod tries to sneak into the house through the window, and Abbie is yelling at him to go away.

Since Nick Holi is going to stick around, let’s talk about him. He’s an obvious Han Solo template, a loveable scoundrel who works for the highest bidder, but will eventually go good and will probably be dating Abbie in another two or three episodes. He doesn’t quite have the loveable thing down this week, largely due to children being threatened, and turning your back on saving kids sort of makes you a dick. By now we know what he is, time to start making him do slivers of the heroism he’ll eventually be doing full time.

It is nice to have an episode that’s not part of the big story arc, even with Parrish procuring the bone flute for purposes of his own. Monsters outside of the main mythos help build realism to the world, because in a place where there was an organized demonic conspiracy, there’d be all sorts of side weirdness going on. In that aspect, a demonic Pied Piper fits in nicely.

A good return to crazy form, only lacking Jenny Mills running around, as she would easily defeat the Pied Piper. The fight sequences, particularly when the Piper slays the entire band of British troops, were well done. The noise-related weapons of the Piper were sort of unevenly used, and the touted electronic earplugs did little except glow and provide silence (the impact of which was muted by the background score not going silent!), and barely affected the final fight.

Besides the small flaws and weird premise, this episode was a good time. Perhaps more demonic creatures of legend will be popping up soon, all having extensive Revolutionary War histories. Until then, stay sleepy!