SLEEPY HOLLOW “Insatiable” Recap

By Clara Pullman

Sleepy Hollow “Insatiable”

This week’s Sleepy Hollow had a bit of split personality going on. Much of the episode was a Monster of the Week story – including an old school Crane flashback to That One Time He Saw That Thing that helps them solve the mystery – and not much more. This was bookended by two lovely, poignant scenes between Jenny and Crane, and a pretty huge reveal at the end.

The monster that Jobe and Malcolm dredge up this week is a hunger or famine monster. This demon kills people by making them feel ravenous, whereupon they gorge themselves but paradoxically die of malnourishment. Tracking this back to the past leads to the Donner Party, sadly immortalized as the traveling companions who ate each other. Some of you who are quicker than I am might get some ideas about what the “famine” monster could lead to. I mean, besides an awesome Monty Python reference about eating just “one more tiny wa-fer thin mint.” Jake is a man after my own heart.

We spend a lot of time tracking down this monster’s trail of victims and following the typically convoluted path to defeating him, and I wish some of this had felt more inspired. But there were some fun bits, including Jobe freaking out a security guard when his horns appear on the full-body scanner. Seeing Jenny’s skills in junkyard salvaging, solving Rubik’s cubes, and driving a forklift truck. And there was a 3D printer. Which sadly we only heard about and didn’t see. Maybe that was not in your props budget, Sleepy Hollow, but couldn’t you have just knocked on the door of the Big Bang Theory set? They probably have a couple lying around.

Also Headless was back. Which is good. We like Headless. Well, you know.

But really the best bits were those bookending scenes with Crane and Jenny. Finally we got to see what Jenny’s thinking about her pathway this year. We’d been trotting along comfortably with Jenny in her role as guide to the new Witness and, essentially, a member of “Crane’s team.”  Now we see Jenny reaching a point where she isn’t just looking to run away, as she always has, but rather is looking to become the leader of her own team, in the same way that Crane is.

This episode was also very much about home, and what home means for Crane and Jenny. The show wants to show us that Crane has settled into D.C. in the usual way: by throwing a huge party where a bunch of people you don’t know drink your beer and dance to 80s new wave spinning on the turntable (wait, turntable? Crane really is a hipster!).

Crane is also pleased at how well the team is doing (by the way, “our team” is this season’s “our bond” — a thing that we don’t need to hear Crane say nearly as much as the writers think we do. He is also not too subtly trying to suggest Jenny make DC her home as well, perhaps by taking a vacant apartment down the hall.

The final scene between them very nicely came full circle with the opening episode, when Jenny told Crane that he had a claim to DC as his home. This time it’s Crane telling Jenny she has more of a home than she realizes. Crane tries somewhat unsuccessfully not to look bereft when she tells him she’s been offered a job chasing down artifacts in the four corners of the globe.  Crane’s reaction kinda mirrored mine. With Jenny and Crane the only two characters left from the original Sleepy Hollow, the idea of her moving on to her own thing feels sad and like an ending.  A huge upside of this season has been getting to see these two together. I always wanted to see more Crane and Jenny scenes, because of their shared sense of dislocation and “not fitting in together” as Jenny once so aptly put it.

These two scenes between Jenny and Crane were easily the best, and there is that revelation at the end which I’ll get to…but considering there are only four episodes left of this short season, and a lot of plot and character development is in motion right now, this episode could have used more urgency. We spent a lot of time with Alex and Jake, and Alex’s newfound, possibly more than platonic feelings for Jake. These two are still fun to watch but we are spending a lot of the limited time left mining this unrequited crush angle.

As someone who doesn’t understand the mania for “shipping” characters on every TV show, I’m not totally getting why Sleepy Hollow needed to go there with Alex and Jake. Who seemed perfectly fun as friends who push each other’s buttons. That said, watching Alex begin to see Jake as other women see him, as cute and charming and attractive, rather than the slightly awkward nerd she’d assumed he was is cute.

In any case, Crane is not the only one with a team, folks. Malcolm is busy building his own team. That social media kid who spread the viral video. His former CFO who is “famished” for power. And the Headless Horseman. Famine and Pestilence and Death. For reals.

That was a pretty good reveal, and I’m slightly peeved that I didn’t figure it out. The original concept of the Headless Horseman as one of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – that was genius. I never could understand why Sleepy Hollow dropped it.

So you know what’s next. Malcolm just needs War. Aka Henry Parrish. Aka Jeremy Crane. He’s coming back. And so is the Apocalypse, looks like. Maybe in a weird new configuration having to do with taking over the American government but still, it’s Sleepy Hollow and the Four Horseman.