Sleepy Hollow Goes Full Masonic in its Season Finale

sleepyhollow

IO9.com

1/21/14

Genevieve Valentine

In a double-feature finale, Sleepy Hollow pulled out all the stops: big reunions, big plotcakes, big trouble, big reveals, big cliffhangers, zombie George Washington, and Victor Garber literally eating the scenery. What more can you ask for? (Nothing, there’s literally nothing left.)

Oh, Sleepy Hollow. The thirteen-hour B-movie that could has spent the season hurling every horror reference, fantasy stopgap, Masonic handwave, time-travel joke, and monster-flick trope it found. The finale goes for broke (which is saying something), screeching to a cliffhanger you just know everyone in the writers’ room cackled about, and leaves all the principal actors worried about their renewal clauses.

And wow, was this finale a trip. Its first half was the most National Treasure the show’s ever skewed, complete with an enormous tomb for George Washington (who’s dead in there despite taking a brief holiday from being dead so he could return as a zombie and draft a map to Purgatory, because of course), and a faceoff with Andy “Friendzone” Brooks during an escape from the alternate entrance from a thematic hidden tomb with its own rolling track whose vestibule contains a secret exit protocol, which is just about how I always imagined Masons spend their free time and extra money!

The second episode scoops everything the show’s been heading for into a blender and adds some new things, leading to a final confrontation that feels slightly like a food fight, except instead of a shoulderful of macaroni everybody’s miserable for eight months. (“Tune in next fall or else!” – Sleepy Hollow.)

Is it two hours of plotcakes? You bet. But it has its moments, and some great character beats. This show has always prioritized character continuity over plot continuity, and so that’s how we’re going to break this thing down.

ANDY

The first returning face: Andy, the kind of guy who in life will offer to watch your house while you’re on vacation and copy your keys, and who in death will repeatedly show up and offer to save you by making you his plus-one in hell.

Abbie’s actual line: “We need to talk about boundaries.”

The rest of the conversation is conducted with Andy chained to a radiator, because Abbie did not get to the season finale just to take chances with her personal creeper. Andy begs for Washington’s Bible, because it leads to a map (of course) that leads to the gateway between our world and Purgatory.

Shockingly, she’s not into it, and back in the tunnels he’s so angry that he begs (with a darkly comic shriek of “Take me seriously!”) to be turned into an instrument of Moloch’s glory.

It’s probably a tactical error.

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