SLEEPY HOLLOW “The Way of the Gun” Review

By Clara Pullman

Whoa! This is a show that loves the surprise twist and Sleepy Hollow had two this week that were huge. One of them was spooled out a lot more effectively than the other, but they’ve both set up what should be two action packed final episodes for the season.

Oh, also, my predictions of what was coming from the last two episodes were terrible. Apparently my powers of prognostication stink. (That may explain the state of my March madness bracket. Whither Vanderbilt?)

What I totally THOUGHT was going to happen was that Henry aka Jeremy Crane was coming back in his role as one of the four Horseman of the Apocalypse thus giving Malcolm a full set and the ability to …. carry out some nefarious plan to take over America. But it turns out, like son like father, and Crane ends up as the Horseman of War. Even though it was supposed to be Diana. Who Malcolm made into the Horseman of War so he could become a father figure to Molly. Who has appeared as her future self through time travel.

That was a lot of twistiness to absorb in the final minutes of this episode!

This week the monster is just Malcolm himself, rather more smartly turned out than in recent episodes, which seems to make Jobe a much happier demon. Jobe seems excessively annoyed at having to work for a slob – or maybe he’s just happy that he doesn’t have to see Malcolm shirtless any more. Either way, he looks to be fully back on board with Malcolm’s evil plot to get the Four Horseman together so he can remake America into his own vision of tyranny and candlelit dinners on the White House lawn.

What he needs is the final totem for his Four Horseman: a gun that turns whomever it shoots into the Horseman of War. The team is trying to find it first, and is also being shadowed by a mysterious girl, Lara, whose motives at first aren’t too clear. She’s after that totem too and she keeps warning Diana and Crane of the potential dire consequences of getting in her way.  Almost like she knows something they don’t. Which she does. Since she’s actually Molly from the future, having been sent back to stop Malcolm by the old dysoptian version of Crane we saw a few weeks ago.

This Molly reveal was well done. First, they hit the jackpot with the actress they found to play adult Molly, Seychelle Gabriel. Not only does she actually resemble the actress playing kid Molly enough to be plausible as her adult version, but she’s terrific in both the action sequences and in drawing us in emotionally to this character, who has to be both new and familiar at the same time. Not easy to pull off.

It was also a smart and well played out reveal. Getting to see Molly in action as a Witness, not just as a kid, was awesome.  I love the scene with her going up against Jenny. Who knew little soccer playing Molly would turn into a rockin’ badass to rival Jenny? And they dropped enough little clues so you can find the trail when you go back, but not enough to give it away too early. And there is still plenty of mystery left. Now we understand why she seemed so fond of Malcolm in his vision of the future: He became like a father to her after turning Diana into the Horseman of War. She still seems to hold affection for him, and I’m curious to find out why that is, since she now knows he took her mother away from her. And imprisoned Crane.

Speaking of Jenny and badassery, the scene of her dropping from the ceiling onto the goon guarding Alex and Jake in the middle of their heart-to-heart is one of the greatest things I’ve seen on Sleepy Hollow. That Jenny knows how to make an entrance – and how to cut off any conversation drifting into the sentimental.

I am feeling a little sentimental about Jenny though. This week she made a few more steps towards leaving the team. She’s accepted that cool job tracking down artifacts as the leader of her own team. And she’s trying to teach the young pups Alex and Jake how to fend for themselves once she’s gone. (By the way, Jake continues to have some of the best lines of the season. Like when Jenny asks him, as they’re doing recon in the woods outside Dreyfuss’s hideout, what would you do in this situation without me? He deadpans, “Jenny, we wouldn’t be in this situation without you.”)

This episode spent a lot of time exploring Alex and Jake’s complicated feelings for each other. Are they best friends? Can they be more than that? Would Jake even want that? Their scenes are lovely, but I feel like Sleepy Hollow is spending so much time on this storyline and on building the audience’s emotional connection to them somewhat at the expense of building our emotional connections with Diana or Crane right now.

Crane spent most of this episode doing his Revolutionary era Zelig / man out of time / eidetic memory thing. You know, things like pronouncing complicated words, behaving oddly at a children’s play and figuring out that he helped Ben Banneker on a mission to hide that Horseman of War totem.

And then the big twist at the end where we see him turn into War. Not cool, guys, not cool.

I think a little more build up on this particular twist would have helped. We only had about 30 seconds to go, OMG Malcolm wants make Diana into the Horseman of War before we realize that Crane has sacrificed himself to save her and now HE’s the Horseman of War. Life comes at you fast. A little less heart-to-heart from Jake and Alex and a little more time on this scene would have made it more emotionally resonant.

Sleepy Hollow’s show runner Albert Kim revealed in a post-episode interview that we’ll be seeing that future, dystopia Crane in the next episode. And presumably we’ll learn how he got there and how he managed to send Molly back in time to prevent Diana from becoming War.

And I’m giving up on predictions but there are some there breadcrumbs being dropped that seem like they have to mean something. I think? For some reason “acting” was a repeating theme for the night. Crane at Molly’s play, and his overwrought rendition of a few lines from Richard II; Banneker asking Crane if he’d ever trod the boards; even Malcolm giving a sarcastic performance of dying after being shot – only to reveal that he is indeed immortal.  These have got to be headed somewhere, right? Will Crane be faking out Malcolm to convince him that he’s the Horseman of War? Ok really, that’s it for me on predictions. Next week learn how I got it all wrong again.