Sleepy Hollow S02E12 – “Paradise Lost”

Sleepy Hollow “Paradise Lost”
Written by M. Raven Metzner
Directed by Russell Fine

Sleepy Hollow jumps ship from it’s plotlines and starts a new thread, in a neat mid-season reboot of everything that causes characters to reflect on their life while still showing the scattered remains of a cancelled Apocalypse. The switch up is rather refreshing, both because it was so unexpected and because the end of the world danger was moving too fast to begin with. We were still down two Horsemen and five years before things are supposed to transpire. So even though I don’t trust this reboot, that’s long enough to have several other reboots that get the End of Days back on track.

Ichabod, Abbie, Jenny, and Katrina awaken by the four white trees to find Moloch’s head lying in a pile of ash, no sign of Henry, and the end of the world postponed for now. Six weeks later, things are still quite, though Ichabod and Abbie are still looking for any clue they can possibly find to show evil is still present in the city. It’s enough that Ichabod takes the slightest clue of a rotten fruit as evidence of occult activity, though in this case it shows there is strange goings on at a farm.

A Doomsday Cult run by actual demons (called the Devoli), who are searching for their master, Moloch. Ichabod and Abbie’s interruption of their activities are also interrupted by a random Angel named Orion, who slays one of the demons. He claims to have been trapped in Purgatory since the Revolutionary Times, where he was slain by the Headless Horseman back when he had a head, and only just now escaped Purgatory along with a lot of other people and things, including the Devoli. Orion claims to be the only one of the angels who goes to directly fight evil, and admires that the two Witnesses (Abbie and Ichabod) did more than just witness the end, but actively fought it. Of course, we all know this angel is going to be more than he appears, and it turns out he’s a rather single-minded destroyer of evil who has gone too far, and wants to steal the powers of the Horseman of Death for his own to purge mankind of wickedness.


Ichabod and Katrina are in the midst of reevaluating their marriage thanks to him being upset over her deceptions over the years and the time she spends around Abraham van Brunt/Headless Horseman, who is currently chained up in Thomas Jefferson’s demon prison. Katrina thinks she can separate the man from the Horseman, but secretly frees him when she finds out Orion has come to slay him. We come to the difficult position where Ichabod has to defend his greatest rival and enemy the Headless Horseman from a killer angel, and we begin a story arc where the Horseman might become human again.

There is still no sigh of Henry Parrish by the end of the episode, so there is no talk of if he needs to be separated from his Horseman Avatar (though the actual Avatar part melted into slag last week!) As a different character also manages to escape death/Purgatory in the very end, you can expect Henry Parrish to pop back up soon enough. His return will probably facilitate more Ichabod/Katrina rehabilitation as they try to become the family that was stolen from them 240 years ago.

One of the best parts of this episode was Ichabod complaining about this generation remaking and reinventing things in an episode that reinvents the show, which is a reinvention of the classic stories from Washington Irving. The only disappointing part (besides Orion being too obviously evil from the beginning) was Jenny and Nick Hawley being relegated to a tiny B story where he interrupts her hitting on a bartender to try to solve the mystery of an egg artifact, which was just to break it open. Hawley seems to have ditched his attraction for Abbie and refocused it on Jenny, though he also admits he spoke up too late to have any meaningful relationship with her. As much as I don’t think Hawley works, it’s largely because he seems too inserted as a doomed love interest than the never-ending source of magic artifacts that he works best as. I’d certainly prefer Hawley dishing out magic crap to some cliched wise old guy.

As for the return of everyone’s favorite Sheriff, all I can say is:
“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!”

So here’s hoping the new direction can have time to establish itself before the old dangers return. Until then, stay sleepy!