I do admit at around 9:58 Monday evening sitting around trying to process all that was thrown at us in “Necromancer.”  It’s a habit I picked up long ago via Supernatural and Lost, trying to make everything add up (I gave up trying on The X-Files around season six).  After all, it was a reveal I didn’t see coming.  Death is a person?  That person is going against all biblical prophecies because he has a vendetta against Ichabod, and it involves an old love triangle with Katrina?  Really?

I’m sounding like I’m complaining.  Of course not!  I loved the episode and was enthralled with every second of it even though I had to wrap my head around that reveal.  I mean, come on, Evil John Cho was a Necromancer!  He was the voice of Death!  His deep scary voice was awesome!  And yes, I know his real name to be Andy Brooks now.  (I still like Evil John Cho better.)


I’m jumping ahead though.  Before all that, some Hessians found Death’s red eyed horse and knew something was amiss.  We were lead to believe that they committed a robbery of some artifact that could break the binding spell they had on Death, and this is where delightfully see that Team Stop Apocalypse can now work in two fronts. While Abbie and Ichabod handled their chained up guest (and Ichabod learning the fine art of fist bumping), a newly released from the nut house Jenny and Captain Irving went on the hunt for the missing artifact.  I loved Jenny and Irving as a pair almost as much as Abbie and Ichabod.  This should be a usual thing. 

So, while Ichabod interrogates Death via Evil John Cho, Jenny and Irving find the Germans at a power plant.  Hmm, why?  Well duh, so they can cut the power to Sleepy Hollow via a nifty explosion and suddenly the UV lights aren’t inhibiting Death anymore.  Yes, I’m sure I’m not the only one that wondered why a few high powered generators weren’t in the contingency plan. 
 


I’ll confess, I haven’t read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow since my final days of grade school.  Even then, it really wasn’t the authentic story but more a set of cliff notes.  So, it took a little digging on Google for me to remember that the story was about Ichabod and a guy named Abraham Van Brunt competing for the affections of a young woman named Katrina.  It was implied in the book that the headless horseman was Abraham in disguise before he scared Ichabod off into nothing.  
 

This program has certainly been guilty of its own twists, and in this case it was Abraham who disappeared after Katrina broke off the engagement to marry Ichabod, and not the other way around like the story says.  He disappeared when he and Ichabod were delivering an early draft of the Declaration of Independence.  Seems that a distraught Abraham got the straight truth from an honest Ichabod during that journey and that caused Abe to whip out his sword and try to kill his bastard friend.  Crane needless to say got the better of his now ex-friend and had no choice but to leave him dying for the Hessians to get him.  And think, it’s only THEN that things get weird.

What we saw afterward is what Crane didn’t see.  The Hessians figured out that this dying man had this vendetta to fulfill.  So, the demon Moloch showed up and offered him a deal.  He can be death, one of the four horsemen, and he will have his vengeance when the apocalypse starts.  He dies and comes back, so they dressed him as a Hessian, shaved his head, put a mask on him, and branded him with all those fun symbols that made him death.  A horseman is born! 
 

But hey, horseman are people too.  Death defied his master and went for his revenge on that battlefield, but Katrina did her thing that linked the two to save Ichabod.  That got her banished to Purgatory and since the horseman lost his head, he can’t bring about the apocalypse until he gets that back.  Ichabod figured out during his interrogation that death was defying his master by coming after him.  Thanks to the green pendant Death dropped earlier, Ichabod puts two and two together just in time for Death to break free.  You see, it was Evil John Cho that had the artifact, so he pulled it out of his insides and did the unbinding spell. 
 


So Death kills Ichabod, right?  Hee, of course not.  Just as he’s about to, Evil John Cho gets a message from his other master, the one calling the shots.  He shouts at Death that the master doesn’t want this, and Crane has to live so that they can control Katrina’s soul.  He zaps away Death and his demon buddies that came to help, leaving a shell shocked Crane alive.    

Final scene is Ichabod and Abbie in their office trying to process what just happened.  I am too.  So basically, the prize is the control of Katrina’s soul.  That can only happen if the four horsemen are together and the apocalypse begins.  Plus Death still needs his head.  So, they’ve found Death’s weakness, Katrina.  Which is kind of fine and dandy, but did Ichabod realize that Death’s weakness is his as well?  More coming on that I’m sure. 
 
Part of me is thinking that if Death had killed Ichabod, he would have gotten his revenge, but that would have put a huge kink in the master’s plan.  He needs his Death.  All this is kind of a game changer and it means there’s a whole lot of freaking story potential out there.  I mean, think about it.  If Death was a man born as a demon out of the need for revenge, what about the other three?  What are their stories and motivations?  I’m intrigued with the idea that all the horsemen used to be men once and were corrupted.  That kind of follows a theme in Supernatural, that all demons were human once.  I’ve always been fascinated by that possibility and it opens up so much more potential for stories.     
 

 

     
I’ll tell you what I love more than a good apocalyptic story.  A snarky Revolutionary War hero.  Was it just me or was Ichabod a bit more punchy in this episode?  I died laughing over his comment about how Jefferson designed the Devil’s trap to keep all sorts of horrible demons in.  “No doubt from his years of dealing with the French.”  My mother is British and even now says the same things about the French.  It just goes to show, some things don’t change in 250 years.  But even Captain Irving got in a great line when capturing the German Hessians.  “You check your math Adolf?” 

I’m not going to even fathom a guess where they are going with this next.  I just know that this show’s mythology is getting stronger the farther they get into it, thus stopping the fears for now that the show will be crushed by its own mytharc.  I’m just happy that I can be so stunned every week.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Sleepy Hollow is easily this fall’s most pleasant surprise.   
 
 

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