SLEEPY HOLLOW: The Show is at its Best — and Worst — in “Incommunicado”

By Chris B.

“Incommunicado” leads us through another enigmatic hour of Sleepy Hollow, showing us its best and its worst.  The Hidden One goes big, then goes home; Joe takes a walk on the wild side; and Abbie and Crane learn that being Witnesses is in the blood.

The unexpected arrival of The Hidden One to the archives leaves Crane cut off from the outside world by an “impenetrable barrier” that seals the archives, raised amid Crane’s outrage at the threat his opponent made for Abbie to suffer a “slow and excruciating" death.  (Yes, Crane fears not his own demise, but Abbie’s?  That’s another matter.)  As The Hidden One throws his lethal ball of energy at Crane, it is caught mid-air by the metal symbol, the Emblem of Thura.  It feeds on the power of the gods, so the more The Hidden One tries to escape, the more likely the confrontation will end in “a maelstrom of fire.”

Team B handles the obligatory monster of the week, a banshee, while Abbie faces the prospect of working with Pandora to free Crane.  But as they move to kill it with iron arrows, a sudden missive from Abbie halts their efforts—they need it alive to break the energy field.  With a bit of Beethoven and a sound blanket, they capture the banshee, but when she struggles free and begins her wail, Joe has no choice but to kill it to save Jenny.

Since the B team could not bring Pandora an evil entity, they offer up Joe instead.  The wendigo inside him is the only monster they have in a pinch, so he volunteers to allow Pandora to turn him into the beast on the hope that it will save Crane and free him from that darkness forever.

Jenny is able to talk him down from a rage that takes him outside of the protective circle Pandora has established by offering up what he longs to hear (and what we’d rather hear exchanged between Crane and Abbie): “I love you.”  Of course, it works; he becomes amenable to the ceremony.  Just as Crane seems resigned to a final drink in the archives, Pandora fits together her box pieces, directing the wendigo energy upward, assaulting the energy field and allowing The Hidden One to escape.  Left behind is dust instead of the tablet and symbol; now these relics are gone, but Abbie still counts it as a win whenever they emerge alive from a stand-off with a bona fide god.