Sleepy Hollow season finale

[chelseagirl]

Hey, it's the first day of classes and we're expecting a Snowpocalypse just when I'm up in Washington Heights for the afternoon, oh joy.

So, Sleepy Hollow. ibshafer and I survived this by livechatting on FB (and I hope we weren't annoying to our flists), but oh wow. OMG, you're going to be one of THOSE shows, aren't you? Seriously, that was a cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers -- who is left standing at the end?

While I have no doubt it will all come right in the first episode next fall -- or at least the first arc -- it *looks* like they have painted themselves into a corner. Who is left standing? Even Macey is under suspicion; I'm going to have to rewatch but I'm unclear whether Luke has been nailed for the death of his partner. Without a deus ex machina . . . I'm guessing Abbie will get out of Purgatory by the sheer strength of her awesomeness, because unless Irving has a good lawyer, I don't see anyone else being in the position to save them all -- Ichabod is under a considerable amount of dirt, Jenny will be in the hospital for some time, and even if Katrina's magic abilities come back more strongly, I'm guessing they won't be enough to overpower Death himself. (Death, pissed off that I broke up with him . . . not who one wants to run into at a party.)

Also? I've suffered enough Matthew Crawley trauma (Downton Abbey). I keep reminding myself that Jenny a) was not in an open car, like Matthew was, b) was wearing a seatbelt (you were, Jenny, weren't you?) and c) hadn't been publicly telling the producers she wanted to leave the show. Still, seeing a beloved character in/near a wrecked car with blood coming out of her mouth at season's end . . . unpleasantly familiar. And she's not in the opening credits -- show, don't you dare!

I'm glad Katrina wasn't evil, but wow, the Jeremy/Henry thing -- I confess I was waiting for the sin eater to be overcome by the sins within him, because I've seen that before, but I was not expecting it to take that form. (Also, if he was the one warning them away from the map, that would suggest it actually was okay that they went to Purgatory.)

I really hope they can figure a way to get Abbie out of Purgatory (again, sheer strength of her awesomeness) without sending Katrina back, and I hope that three-quarters of the fans don't ragequit the show when it looks like Ichabbie won't be happening immediately. [ETA: I looked at Tumblr and apparently I was watching a different episode than Tumblr users were; Abbie is my favorite female character on the show, but when I see Katrina getting bashed or ignored, I want to come to her defense.]

My husband was watching Highlander when I got home this afternoon, and it was funny to see Clancy Brown as the Kurgan (Kargan?) and then see him as Corbin in the same day -- evil punk rock Immortal Clancy Brown and fatherly supernatural investigator Clancy Brown. Also, I hope that wasn't the end of Andy. John Cho has put in some serious time in the special effects makeup chair this season; I hope his character gets some kind of a redemption payoff. Plus I want to know more about Andy and Abbie's backstory.

Comments

[retsuko]

I agree with you at the Henry/Jeremy twist--totally did not see that coming! All my theories about Irving being evil were completely wrong, and I suppose I'm glad about that, since he's been getting quite a noble arc here in the end of things.

I think Abbie might be able to escape Purgatory with Jenny's help, largely because I highly doubt that Jenny's really dead, and she's clever and resourceful enough to find the item/spell/get-out-of-Purgatory-free-card that will get Abbie back.

I'm sure John Cho will be back, too. Moloch wouldn't power his henchman up only to make him weak enough to get crushed by something as silly as rocks. ;)

[havocthecat]

Moloch wouldn't power his henchman up only to make him weak enough to get crushed by something as silly as rocks. ;)

I figure it'll take him a while to dig his way out of all that styrofoam.

[retsuko]

I bow to you and your Star Trek TOS reference, madam. ;)

[chelseagirl]

Now I am picturing him carving his way through Styrofoam rocks with a little pocketknife. He should make his way out by September. ;-)

[chelseagirl]

I want a Jenny lives! button or something, because of course she survived, but . . . like I said, Matthew Crawley trauma is still surprisingly fresh. I think that's a good call that the sisterly bond will be important -- perhaps Jenny, while unconscious in the hospital, will be able to visit Purgatory in a disembodied state . . .

[havocthecat]

I thought he was warning them away from the map as a way to encourage them into it. It's been known to work before.

I think Abbie and Jenny will both be in purgatory, and in the dollhouse, and will have to forgive each other to get out.

Hopefully, Katrina will dow some of her own rescuing, but maybe Abbie can rescue her and then Katrina and Jenny can dig Ichabod out together? While Abbie saves Frank?

But yes, I was watching via Twitter and that was a very different episode than I'd seen.

[amaka]

>"and will have to forgive each other to get out."

I'm right there with you on the forgiving! Katrina very clearly told us how people can get out of Purgatory -- and it's not even very bad theology! -- so I'm counting on that being Abbie's solution.

(I'm looking forward to rewatching the episode so that I can hunt other solutions in the dialogue. ~grin~)

I hadn't thought of Jenny going to Purgatory, however. New! Were you thinking that she's wounded to death and will be going there in the ordinary course of things, or that she'll use the map, or...?

My social media is just DW/LJ, and mostly just you guys. :-) This spares me much anguish with the special broadcast feed for deluded tween shippers. :-)

[chelseagirl]

As an Episcopalian, most of what I know about Purgatory is from Dante, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people are working their way out. Well, Katrina said in an earlier episode that some of them were moving on but she didn't necessarily indicate they were all moving on to Paradise. Their Purgatory confuses me.

I was wondering if Jenny might be caught between life and death in the hospital and able to travel to Purgatory in a non-bodily form?

[amaka]

>"but it doesn't seem like a lot of people are working their way out."

The show's theology doesn't makes a lot of consistent sense (though it may all come together yet; I'll wait ~grin~). It also doesn't read Revelation as my faith tradition does, and contemporary theology doesn't match the gothic tropes the show is gleefully wielding. And of course I could have misheard! But what I thought I heard Katrina say was that for her to be released from Purgatory, she had to be forgiven from earth.

None of them tried to think of who there could be in the land of the living who hadn't forgiven Katrina and could be persuaded to; they leaped to someone taking her place.

Obviously, on this side of the story, it was her son's grudge holding her in Purgatory all this time...

If I heard correctly and someone must be forgiven from earth in order to leave Purgatory before the duration, then Jenny traveling to Purgatory probably won't be the answer. Someone back home will be the key, I'm thinking. Maybe someone we haven't yet met?

[chelseagirl]

I'm trying to think who else might have a grudge against Abbie besides Jenny, who does seem to have forgiven her. Maybe Luke? But breaking up with him wasn't so much a sin. I do wonder, again, if Jenny visits Purgatory via some spirit realm while she's still in the hospital, and works with her -- maybe that's Abbie's ticket out of Purgatory *and* the moment Jenny comes out of a coma and miraculously recovers.

As for Katrina: the two people who have something against her would now both be Horsemen. (Her track record with personal relationships, not so great.) Abraham/Headless holds her dumping him against her, but again, is breaking up with someone a sin? Henry/Jeremy has the more serious charge of parental abandonment against her, though if she was unaware, does that count? I'm not sure, if you're the embodiment of an evil, if your continued anger counts towards keeping someone in Purgatory, you know? Either she's well and truly screwed, since the Horsemen are immortal, or they don't count and there's someone else. Considering the Reverend and some of her coven mates had been alive all this time, that's still a possibility.

[amaka]

As Katrina presumably didn't get into this Purgatory in the usual way (i.e. dying), then its usual rules might not properly apply to her -- that is, leaving may require forgiveness from earth regardless of the existence of any sin/offense that might legitimately need forgiving. She may have been trapped by the letter of the law, not its intended application.

Personally, I think that the lieutenants of evil in this scenario still have souls and should therefore still "count" as people who can forgive or not, and even turn on their master or not. Death and War there are not demons; they're men making choices... and only one of them is even dead.

Back to Abbie, do we know her parents' fates? That is, I know they're out of the picture from a young age, but are they canonically anything after that point? Perhaps the forgiving "from" earth actually runs the other direction, and Abbie will have to forgive one of her parents?

[chelseagirl]

But they are not merely men anymore; their choices have made them immortal. (Abraham has proven that on numerous occasions.) And if they have chosen to be minions of Moloch, then there's no chance they will ever forgive her, because they are embodying their hatred. Nor will they die. So she is stuck eternally while others have the option to move on. Ichabod had better not die either, or he might find himself in the same position. (And how is it theologically sound that you are atoning for the feelings of someone who is perhaps in an eternal sulk about you? God is presumably more objective about things than a rejected fiancé or a son who doesn't understand his parents didn't want to abandon him.)

I'm actually a bit fuzzy on Jeremy -- if he "died" in his teens and was resurrected when Abbie was in her early teens, then he should only have aged another decade or so, instead of which he presents as being 60-ish. (And was I the only one in the world who had no idea that was the same guy who played Denethor? Oh my goodness. I knew he was popular because of Fringe, which I don't watch.)

[amaka]

I suspect that we may be on slightly different pages, here. :-)

>"And how is it theologically sound that you are atoning for the feelings of someone who is perhaps in an eternal sulk about you?"

It isn't! Rhetorical question, I trust? :-)

When I wrote, casually, in initial glee over the episode, that "it's not even very bad theology," I may have chosen my words poorly. I didn't mean to imply that it was correct theology, but literally that it was not wretched, not as completely divorced from reason and tradition as it usually is. I meant to refer happily to the fact that the episode had asserted that people on earth can do something for people in Purgatory -- that the living and the dead are connected in the present as well as the past and future. That's all. I appreciated that tidbit very much. I didn't mean to suggest that the show had accurately portrayed the nature of that connection! It hadn't.

(The show's reading of scripture is fun but almost completely wrong, of course, to the limits of my little knowledge, starting with misunderstanding the nature of prophecy as foretelling the future rather than as speaking truth to power in the present.)

I may not have understood the earlier episodes correctly, but I thought that Katrina was alive, that she had ended up in Purgatory not according to the proper path -- whatever that may be in this show's reality -- but through a side door. If she got there outside the rules, then the rules are not necessarily able to explain her situation, or vice versa. I don't think that we can necessarily extrapolate from Katrina's situation to the show's reality's rules for people following the normal path.

>"And if they have chosen to be minions of Moloch, then there's no chance they will ever forgive her, because they are embodying their hatred."

Surely as long as they have souls, they can choose and re-choose? I can see the argument that the dead one is past choice, but the living one... redemption and salvation are never impossible in the real world. They shouldn't be in the show's world...?

>"if he "died" in his teens"

I thought that he never really died, at least not for more than a very brief time when first buried. I need to see the episode again and scrutinize the dialogue, of course, but my initial impression during the first airing was that he was alive and conscious pretty much the entire two centuries.

>"And was I the only one in the world who had no idea that was the same guy who played Denethor?"

:-) I didn't know who Denethor was until I Googled the name just now. :-)

[chelseagirl]

I think she is (alive) -- as her grave was a fake -- but after 250 years there I do wonder whether back to the land of the living is the direction she'd want to move in, anyway.

I'm not sure about that -- in Buffy, obviously, Spike makes a choice (whereas Angel/us has it thrust upon him), but that's about *himself*. It seems that if Katrina is held to ransom . . . I could see a storyline where Henry/Jeremy forgives her, but not so much Abraham/Headless. He seems pretty focused, and also likely to stay around 'til the very end.

Did you not see the Lord of the Rings movies? Not your thing?

[amaka]

>"Did you not see the Lord of the Rings movies?"

I read the books before the movies came along, and I saw the movies on the big screen when they first came out. I've never reread or rewatched.

I admire Tolkien's accomplishments, but his stories never reached me, personally, in the deeply committed way of fandom (or scholarship).

I have my mom's copies of his books. When I was six, she was reading The Hobbit... and I came to understand her illness for the first time when I began reading it myself and found how quickly I outpaced her, because she had to start at the beginning every time. I put the book aside and didn't go back until it was culturally imperative.

[chelseagirl]

That's possible, re. the map but I also think that Abbie has to face Moloch and come to terms with her past denial and what it's done not only to Jenny but to herself, and therefore it was right to go there.

I wish the scriptwriters would recognize that if they made Katrina a powerful witch, perhaps constantly putting her in "needs to be rescued" mode does not make sense.

[alizarin-nyc.livejournal.com]

I would also like to see more Andy and Abbie backstory. I felt that Andy was sort of immediately cast in the weird, dead role and I now wish that they'd given him more time to be "normal" and Abbie's friend. Does he love-love her, or have a crush on her, or love her as a person? I feel unclear on his whole motivation. Moloch's minion or Abbie's savior? MAKE UP YOUR MIND DEAD!ANDY.

I'm not yet convinced by Katrina as a character, but Katia Winter is in the opening credits whilst Jenny is not, so I think she has a long arc coming. Plus, Jenny better not be dead!

Clancy Brown, for me, is memorable for his role in Carnevale, one of the most underrated shows of all time.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

I think he's in love with her, and also I get the sense it never was reciprocated except as friendship. I think he wants to be on Moloch's side but protect Abbie, so for him the obvious choice would be to get Abbie on Moloch's side and we know that's not going to happen. I wonder if Moloch first approached him because of his unrequited love for one of the Witnesses.

I feel like there should be a Jenny lives! campaign like the Sherlock lives! one . . . luckily, we only have to wait until September.

I think Katrina plays an important role in the narrative but she's been so underwritten and inconsistently written that nobody knows what to make of her. I am sorry that the fandom in general is so hostile to her, as the message "meet someone amazing and dump the wife who made all this possible through her magic and waited for 250 years for you" is not a message I really like. (I would like to see Ichabbie happen say, after Ichabod and Katrina are reunited and reasonably happy for a bit, but Katrina realizes that after 250 years in Purgatory she's ready to move on in the other direction, not the coming back to life one.)

We loved Carnevale! Although we gobbled down episodes far too quickly, since we borrowed the box sets.

[alizarin-nyc.livejournal.com]

Yes, I like your Katrina storyline. One thing for sure is, they can't cross the UST line yet because these things must be dragged out for audience pleasure.

Katrina has definitely been written in a weird way. A Quaker-artistocrat-witch and all that... too much backstory, not enough actual storytelling.

Yes, the dump the wife idea is NOT ON ~ is this what Tumblr is up to? Reason #457 not to go to Tumblr.

Carnevale: there were moments SO CREEPY I couldn't really believe it, it just blew my mind. I wonder if it would hold up on a rewatch.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

I did a very small Sleepy Hollow fic exchange and ended up being asked to write a story about Katrina, so I put all her pieces together. It made me like her a lot more, because I could see how she could live up to the potential, rather than being the Convenient Plot Device she's mostly been used as. it's up on AO3, if you'd like to check it out, under chelseagirl.

[ibshafer.livejournal.com]

Sorry this isn't more, but we've already discussed all of this elsewhere and it's late and you know how well I didn't sleep last night...

I remember how disappointed I was that John Cho's character died so early on, and then being bummed that he was a bad guy, but they have done so much more with him. How often do we see a demonic/possessed character so conflicted and nuanced in his feelings? Actually fighting against the being that controls him - all to protect someone he has feelings for. I am thrilled with his performance and that he made it through the season. Though I do hope that transformation isn't final - and I do hope he survived the collapse of the...the pyramid under the Hudson!!! I'm sorry - growing up ON the Hudson, I'm just tickled at the idea that there was something cool like that under our river - and so close to Bannerman's, another very cool place...

I cannot believe that Jenny is dead. I think there would have been cues were they planning on offing her. The melodrama meter would have been pegged out a little bit more. They had an emotional exchange and hug - and I am so loving their renewed relationship - but to me it was more of a 'here we go into battle, good luck to us both!' kind of hug, not a the kind you see right before characters die. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. : )

And you know I'm for the story they want to tell us, not getting them to tell me the story I want to hear. Or maybe it's just that I'm truly happy with the relationship between Crane and Abbie - wittnesses, equals, friends - and don't need (or, really, want) anything more than that.