Sleepy Hollow: Go Where I Send Thee...

Welcome to this season's first Filler episode.

You know, I'm kind of fond of filler. It can be interesting to watch familiar characters in stories that don't mean a damn thing, as when released from the constraints of story-arcs and important character development, actors are often given the chance to have a lot of fun.

A filler episode is never going to be the best episode of any given TV show, but sometimes it can become a fan favourite – especially if they highlight the dynamics of the cast.

This is not one of those episodes.

That a pretty convoluted backstory that posits a terrible moral conundrum is glossed the heck over it for the sake of Ichabod and Abbie laughing over coffee is a bit of an odd juxtaposition, but hey – filler. It's not trying that hard anyway.

A ten year old girl is the Victim of the Week and a Pied Piper is the Monster of the Week (everyone kept calling him a PIED Piper, even though the writers/costume department clearly have no understanding of that word), which means this is our first episode in which the antagonist has absolutely no connection whatsoever to Moloch and his plans for End of Days. He's just a demon hanging out in the woods, doing his own thing.

A Piper? Sure. A Pied Piper? Nope.

Which is stealing ten year old girls from the Lancaster family as part of a curse that stretches back to the days of Daniel Lancaster. Apparently he once hired a Not-Pied Piper to lure a bunch of Red Coats out of his house and slaughter them all, only to betray the Piper and have him killed. Evil doesn't stay dead for long, and since that time he's returned to the Lancaster house in order to steal a daughter on her tenth birthday.

No one brings up the fact that it's the dudes who started this mess and yet the women who are punished for it, though I assume it has something to with the fact that Daniel Lancaster originally hired the Piper because his daughters were being threatened by the Red Coats. So targeting the girls is poetic justice or dramatic irony or something. It still sucks.

She's gonna need So. Much. Therapy.

Especially if you're Mrs Lancaster, who went out of her way to adopt boys before she accidentally got pregnant with Sarah. Knowing about the curse, she's reluctantly willing to sacrifice Sarah in order to save her four adopted sons, all of whom are struck by an affliction when Ichabod and Abbie save Sarah.

Getting ahead of myself here. At first the Witnesses start plumbing the forest, only to stumble across a bone flute. After putting their fingerprints all over this vital piece of evidence, Ichabod reveals that he has unexpected flute-playing abilities, which immediately put Abbie into a trance. He concludes: Pied Piper (sans the pied).

I'm not even going to pretend to be surprised at this stage.

A neat bit of logic involves Abbie pointing out that the Piper's MO had changed completely from Daniel Lancaster's time to today, but on figuring out the nature of the curse they decide to use a recording of the flute music to entrance Abbie and have her lead them to the Piper's hideout.

Personally I think the laws of magic would consider this a big cheat, but as Sleepy Hollow has always been about melding past/present and using technology to find magical loopholes (David Xanatos would be proud) I'll give it a pass.

In what has to be the twelfth unlikely coincidence of this episode (and we're only at the half-way mark!) the duo run into Hawley, who wants to get his hands on a valuable bone flute. In dialogue that seems to be cribbed directly from Star Wars: A New Hope, Abbie and Ichabod are totally and utterly disgusted that Hawley is trying to make some money out of a bad situation. Hawley is Han Solo. Abbie is the more impartial Luke. Ichabod is Princess Leia, which makes a surprising amount of sense when you think about it.

But honestly, the two of them put up such a fuss that I ended up wanting them to give Hawley the damn flute. Is this the writers' sneaky way of making me care about him? Because that's going to get old, fast.

It's as thrilling as it is confusing.

But a couple of glowing ear-plugs and a badly-lit fight scene later, a team effort rids the world of the Non-Pied Piper for good. Abbie and Ichabod congratulate their victory while Mrs Lancaster desperately books every therapist she can find so her daughter can get past that whole "mum tried to sacrifice me to a demon" thing.

Meanwhile, over in the significantly more interesting B-plot (how often does that happen?) Irving is making good use of his free time by reading up on the End of the World. He's thumbing through Revelation when he has a vision of himself in a war-torn Sleepy Hollow, dressed in post-apocalypse gear and wielding a pretty hefty sword. The blackness of his eyeballs doesn't look too promising, and he puts two-and-two together by realizing he's been tricked into signing away his soul to Henry Parish.

Cool guys don't look at horsemen with flaming swords.

Which again, feels like a pretty big cheat. You can't commit to a signed-in-your-own-blood deal without consciously agreeing to it. That's just one of the rules.

And in a last-minute attempt to link all this into the bigger picture, Hawley sells the remains of the bone flute to a dealer who takes it straight to Henry, who crushes it up in a giant mortar. Honestly? My first thought was that he was going to use it as fake snow for his town diorama. Hey, for all we know, that is what he's going to do.

Miscellaneous Observations:

A little girl's safety is a pretty easy way of getting an audience's investment, even though the story's emotional centre was with Mrs Lancaster, a character who has to make Sophie's Choice with none of the in-depth exploration or consequential fall-out. It's probably not a good idea to introduce such a life-destroying decision only to drop it completely during the course of your filler episode. Just sayin'.

It's becoming a habit of the writers to start with Ichabod making a portentous speech while the camera slowly pans his face, only for him to be in the middle of some completely mundane situation.

But last week he got fake ID, this week he revealed he knows how to drive a car – Ichabod is slowly becoming a 21^st century man. And this week's most poignant moment has to be Abbie trying to make Ichabod as independent as possible in case something happens to her.

A super-creepy detail was the fact that the Piper actually makes his flute out of the bones of his last victim – which means that Ichabod had his lips on Mrs Lancaster's dead sister's femur. You're welcome.

All in all, this was an odd episode. Jenny's absence was felt in a story that surely would have improved with a little sisterly bonding, but instead we get another appearance from surfer-dude Hawley, all wrapped up in an episode that didn't have anything to do with Moloch.

Or pied clothing.