Review: “Sleepy Hollow” – Season Two

WISEMAN, Len, et.al., (Dirs.), “Sleepy Hollow – Season Two”, Sketch Films, K/O Paper Products, Twentieth Century Fox, 2015.

Is there a self-help organisation for actors who lay on the ham? Something like “Overactors Anonymous”? Well, after this, I’m going to assume there must be. Everyone in this show is enunciating to the back row. Melodrama has come to the ‘Hollow and the cast are agonising more about their personal relationships than about the demon in the room. At least with the first season of this show there were some laughs; now, the humour is as sparse as the heating at Valley Forge.

“Sleepy Hollow” kicks off with Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills stuck in Purgatory and trying to escape, which they do, this being the first episode of the new series and there wouldn’t be much to fill in the remaining 12 episodes if they didn’t. Once achieved, they hit the ground running, eschewing celebrations of their victories for humorous fist-bumps and cheering intermittent moments of “clarity” showing them the way forward. Of course, the miasma which prevents them from formulating a clear plan of attack is one which they repeatedly generate on their own, so I’m amazed the bad guys didn’t get them on the ropes sooner.

As in the first series, this story once more generates its own rationales out of tissue-thin pretexts, mainly of the “I studied at Oxford, therefore I know everything”, or the “I’m a policewoman so normal operating procedures don’t apply to me” variety. As with the first series, if these things bother you, then you will not enjoy yourself. Having also watched “Grimm”, I’ve come to appreciate how much that show obeys the rules of the real world and creates from them a further layer of difficulty which our heroes have to work around; in “Sleepy Hollow”, our heroes do whatever they want whenever they want with no consequences. In one episode, a ten-year-old girl is whistled off by a Pied Piper and Abbie sets up a dragnet to search for her, command of which she blithely walks away from to go ghostbusting with her bestie, Ichabod. I imagine there were lots of police officers sitting around twiddling their thumbs in the background of this story. Of course, in these stories, if our heroes aren’t free to go and kick monster heads, nothing happens; but at least the rationale of how they get the opportunity to resolve things should be written into the story. “Night-Stalker” did it; “The X-Files” did it; even “Grimm” does it: why can’t “Sleepy Hollow” do it?

I have a sneaking suspicion that, for the creators of this show, it’s less about making sense and more about the visuals. In this regard there’s lots to enjoy. The monsters are effectively realised; the special effects are genuinely special; the costuming and art direction are all top-notch. None of this matters though, if the writing sucks.

One of the things I liked about Season One was the random outrage that Ichabod displayed at discovering the world for which he had fought had seemingly abandoned its once-sacred principles. In the second season, these irruptions also occur, but there’s a staginess about them now, as if consumer polls were taken and this feature was identified as something the fans particularly liked. Now it’s formulaic. The rant over chaining pens to desks in banks is amusing in and of itself, but bizarre in that there are more important things going on which should be occupying Crane’s attention. Too, there are many moments in which Ichabod reveals a growing familiarity with the modern world that cuts across this outrage disconcertingly, his addiction to reality TV shows being one of these.

As to the other characters, Abbie seems to be the only one with any real focus throughout all of the mayhem. Unlike virtually anyone else in the mix, she identifies the baddies and focuses her efforts on taking them down. Along the way however, she has to juggle Ichabod’s wavering over fighting his son or rescuing his wife, Katrina’s “is she? Or isn’t she?” motivations, and her own sister Jenny’s mistrust of her position as a representative of Authority. Wrangling her so-called allies is what she spends most of her screen-time doing; the only other person in the cast as focussed as she is, is Henry, the Horseman of War, servant of Moloch and son of Ichabod and Katrina. Her default character tic is to roll her eyes a lot, and it’s not hard to fathom why.

A new semi-regular character is Eric Hawley, a louche dealer in supernatural artefacts, bounding out of Jenny’s past. His role is clearly designed to facilitate magical trinkets and ancient texts into the plots, but his attraction to Abbie, while fending off Jenny’s desire to reignite their old relationship, makes for some interesting character wrinkles.

Former sheriff Frank Irving becomes the tragic muppet of evil Henry in this season, tricked into signing his soul away and ultimately becoming War’s unwilling instrument. Some of his interactions smack of simply finding something for him to do (now that he appears in the opening credits) but there’s very little of that. His replacement as sheriff, hard-nosed latina police career-woman Reyes, suffers from ‘needs of the moment’ plotting as well: she busts Abbie’s balls, then lets her get away with murder in alternate waves, which make little sense in the scheme of things. Once again, the writers' need to let their stars out to play takes precedence over any kind of structural logic.

By means of a magic bauble, our Headless Horseman appears fully intact and no longer sans tete, a nod, I’m guessing, to the time and money it takes to digitally remove it in every scene in which he shows up. Sadly, there’s a glitch: Katrina is the one wearing the emerald, allowing her to see Abraham’s head, so why is it that Henry can see Abraham fully incarnate also? Hmm. It’s these little slips that start to let the show down. Another instance: Ichabod’s evil twin appears to Abbie in Purgatory and tries to seal her doom (punching out the real Ichabod en route). She spots the ring-in and decapitates him after he calls her “LOO-tenant” rather than Ichabod’s usual “LEFF-tenant”, thereby avoiding destruction. However, from this point on, Ichabod vacillates between the two pronunciations for the rest of the season – I was wondering if it was actually a cunning plot point on the writers’ part, and that the real Ichabod was quietly decomposing in Hell all the while. But no: just a continuity error, folks. Nothing to see here.

(Do continuity people actually do anything on a film set nowadays? Or are they as unnecessary as writers are rumoured to be?)

As to the historical background, the warping and perversion continue apace. Did you know that Benedict Arnold only became a traitor because he pocketed one of Judas Iscariot’s thirty pieces of silver? Or that Benjamin Franklin – an early naturist – only went kite-flying in the rain in order to try and destroy the Key to Purgatory? This show takes the same line as that god-awful series of films starring Nicolas Cage called “National Treasure” (which I have re-named “Notional Treasure” in my head) and runs in the same direction. I mean, it’s history people; how is it not interesting anyway, before you start to mangle it beyond all recognition? This is why there are people out there who think Game of Thrones is real...

In the final analysis, where I was hoping that the first season jitters would be overcome and the show would lift its game in the second outing, it seems that complacency has wandered through the district instead. Maybe things are a little too sleepy in the ‘Hollow and some laziness has crept in? Like last time, to enjoy this show, you need to leave your brain at the door and just run with the visuals: don’t try to analyze, and certainly don’t bring your master’s degree in American history – you will just start foaming at the mouth.

All the anti-intellect around this vehicle makes me think that the fans of this show, rather than being called “Sleepyheads”, should rather be termed “Hollow-heads” instead.

Two Tentacled Horrors.

Postscript:

The Lovecraftian references are thick on the ground here: apparently the Alhazred couplet ("That is not dead...") is a spell for animating dead bodies and Robert E. Howard's character Solomon Kane gets re-worked as an evil warlock named "Solomon Kent". I passed over these in the main body of my review because they're cheap and tawdry borrowings that just further show how lazy the writing behind this series truly is...