By Monique
Last night’s Sleepy Hollow, “Spellcaster,” is possibly the first episode in a long time that has left me pondering about theories and stuff. That’s great—in that respect, it feels more like the show I originally loved.
Also great is that the Cancellation Bear has Sleepy Hollow at “likely to be renewed” by May, the deadline for networks to renew shows. So since this is the case, there are some things I’ve been thinking about now that we’re past “Spellcaster.”
Irving is evil, or is he?
As you might have read in my recap, it took me a couple of moments to get in the mindspace of having an evil Irving in Sleepy Hollow, but now I’m completely invested. There’s a lot of storytelling gold in this plotline, what with Irving double-crossing Team Witness and all. I literally can’t wait to see Orlando Jones take on this new dynamic to his character.
But, how evil is Irving, really? I get that Irving’s now on the side of Henry because Henry still owns his soul, but Irving did fight the good fight really hard before his death. Now that he’s back, the point that Irving’s a free man legally and mentally was hit hard. Irving has got a second chance at life, and now, he’s in it for his own gain. Something tells me that even though Irving is handing over the Grimoire to Henry, Irving just might be trying to play the ultimate double-cross: working with Henry to vanquish him and come out as the victor.
Some of this might just be wishful thinking, but Irving still remembers what Henry did to him. For him to willingly go along with Henry is interesting. Irving also wanted to know in S1 what his place was in this apocalyptic war. Perhaps his death helped him realize that his place might be the sacrificial lamb role. He might feel he could offer his help in the form of working with the enemy to ultimately save the greater good.
Or, after his death, Irving might feel like his goal should be to just take what’s his. I’ll need to see some more of Irving 2.0 to really get my theory clear-cut.
Ichabod’s mack game
The Ichabbie portion of the Sleepy Hollow fandom is still riding high after Tom Mison said that Ichabod is “completely in love” with Abbie. If you were on Tumblr this weekend, you would have seen the parties people were having in several tags. I watched everything go down, and mentally poured out one for the Ichatrina fans, who are probably never going to watch Sleepy Hollow again. Especially after “Spellcaster.”
The portion of the episode involving Ichabod pouring out his love to Abbie must have been one of the reworked portions of the script, since I’ve never seen Ichabod go this hard in the paint when it comes to securing Abbie’s attention and affections towards him (and, knowing how Mison plays Ichabod during his interactions with Abbie, that’s saying something).
To quote myself from the “Spellcaster” recap:
Ichabod also gave us his standard “Must Make Verbal Love to Abbie” moment, but after Tom Mison’s declaration of Ichabod’s total devotion to Abbie, it feels like Ichabod ratcheted up his macking moment. Instead of saying the usual “We’ll be strong together” shtick, he said that they must fight for love and each other while he looked directly at her. He also asked Abbie if she saw a future for them…in no uncertain terms.
Calm your butt down, Ichabod. Your wife isn’t even evil yet and you’re already trying to make some moves on Abbie. He’s been reading Spider-Man and learning about Edward R. Murrow; perhaps he’s also been listening to R. Kelly’s “Feelin’ Single” since he’s not only asking Abbie about their future and love, but he also casually knocked his hand next to her knee as they were conversing about Kent in the cabin. Ichabod has always been a little of a mack daddy when it came to Abbie, but now he’s laying on the mack game too strong.
So now that we know Ichabod’s over the moon for Abbie, how far is this cat-and-mouse game going to go? In this episode alone, we had Ichabod calling Abbie for house hunting advice, tell her to fight for love (with nonverbal communication making us believe he was telling her he loved her) and went to town on Solomon Kent all because he didn’t Abbie to believe that he’d be untrustworthy to her. To top it all off, he left his wife—who could have used some counseling at this point in time, to be honest—to go have beers and talk with Abbie. And they aren’t even dating yet.
I just hope that when the Ichabbie stuff really starts to happen (because, believe it or not, we’re still at the friendship stage) that it won’t be forced or heavy-handed. I don’t want the writers to think that they have to completely shove major last-minute Ichabbie moments down viewers’ throats just so they’ll come back. The short of it is that I hope they just take it slow with building the romance when it’s time to build it. If Ichabbie comes together in an organic way, I’d be happy.
Katrina’s finally evil!
Hooray, Katrina’s finally embracing The Dark Side! However, I don’t have anything to say about it except “finally.” I’d already written at length about Katrina being evil, so I don’t really have much more to say on the subject, except that I just wish she was made to be a key player early on. Like in Season 1. Now that she’s evil, it’s like, “Okay. It’s too late for me to care, but okay.”
But the writers had to finally put their foot down on this, though, otherwise, fans would be leaving in bigger droves than they were before. In any event, Evil Katrina might show us that Katia Winter’s actually got more acting skill than Good Katrina’s allowed her to show. We saw that she can have depth of feeling as Katrina’s grandmother, Helena. Perhaps Katrina getting her Anakin Skywalker on will show us that Winter does know how to captivate the audience.
What do you think of Irving and his possible plans? What do you think about Ichabbie? How are you feeling about Evil Katrina? Give your opinions in the comments section below!
Screencaps: @TVTagSH. Photo credit: Brownie Harris/FOX
Julian 