by Chelsea Doyle, Editor

There will be spoilers in this recap for the pilot. You have been warned.

All right so I’ll admit I was skeptical. There’s nothing I love more than shows that accept their ridiculous premise however, and Sleepy Hollow seems to be very into the idea of going ‘yeah we’re silly let’s go with it.’ Sci-Fi or horror doing that is an automatic win in my book. Embrace the laughably weird here. I have a few concerns about the show in terms of longevity, but I’ll get to that in the end of the recap. Let’s start with the main idea. Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) is a soldier working for George Washington, and he’s tasked with the mission to kill this demonic enemy. During a fight he manages to slice his head off, but that doesn’t exactly solve anything, as we’ll find out later. Ichabod is fatally wounded, but he hears his wife crying his name, and then he wakes up in a weird dirt pit in a cave. Yuck. Luckily when he gets out he immediately falls into a nearby stream, so that clears the worst gunk off him. We want our handsome hero slightly dirty, but not covered in mud, that’s the rules. He finds himself in modern day, and as expected, he’s completely confused. He almost gets run over by a car immediately, and still doesn’t have the good sense to get out of the road.

Meanwhile the lovely female lead Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) is having food with her grizzled older partner. They exposition that she’s gotten into the FBI program and she’ll be leaving them soon. Except obviously she doesn’t because her partner is murdered by the Horseman, now walking around without his head and pretty much unstoppable. John Cho guest stars as some guy whose name I forgot and I mean doesn’t that give you a clue right there? I’ll just call him John Cho. He catches Ichabod and we have some funny back and forth with him and the others. It’s a classic fish out of water, but I have to say Mison plays it well. It’s not too over the top, but the things that do pop out to him are rather pragmatic. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he does know that Abbie saw the Horseman for herself, and he brings up his knowledge about it. This catches her attention, and she advocates for her, although that doesn’t stop Orlando Jones from sending him to the mental institute. This town has one of those? All right. It just didn’t seem that big. Abbie and Ichabod bond, although they address her being a WOC right out front with him asking if she was emancipated. A favorite moment of mine (and probably others) is when he gets offended she thought he had slaves, and she’s like YOU’RE OFFENDED? With the perfect amount of attitude.

Anyway she breaks him out of the institute and knows this will probably cost her the FBI job, but she doesn’t care because she’s out for vengeance. She’s also learned more about all the creepiness in town because apparently her partner had all this information about the occult and tapes for her to listen to. This is information that might’ve been helpful before you got murdered, yo. The show straight up draws comparisons to the Bible and the end of the world, and that the Horseman is the physical manifestation of Death. If he finds his head, that’ll start the Apocalypse. We learn more about this when Ichabod’s wife Katrina (Katia Winter) speaks to him from beyond the grave in some dream world. She was a witch, and managed to save him so he could come back later to stop it from happening. Cool! It looks like she might be a regular guest star, and that’s interesting, I love the supernatural details in this. Meanwhile we find out John Cho knows the Horseman and is helping him out. He gives him guns, and I will never stop loving the image of the Horseman going around on a horse with a gun. Damn right he can take out everyone with any weapon you give him.

The thing is he can’t come out during the day (vampire much?) so Ichabod and Abbie manage to have the head and keep alive until he flees. John Cho is revealed to be a bad guy, and then Death comes back to kill him while he’s in jail. Through a mirror? It’s hard to say. Abbie sees the death dude in the mirror and it breaks. Also there’s a story about Abbie and her dead sister having seen something supernatural when they were kids, but no one believed them, so she’s tied into all of this. Ichabod seems to think they were both born to work together to stop the Apocalypse, and she’s like all right. Whatevs. I’m on board. I’ll be interested to see where it goes from here. I’m not sure how they are going to make this a long show. Can they really run away from the Horseman for like 22 episodes? Ehhh. Or are they going to do a supernatural bad guy of the week with an overarching plot? My leaning is toward the latter there, since they have to be aware that the Horseman will get boring after awhile. There’s a lot of supernatural stuff going on in the town, and everything seems to be on the table, so bring it on. If they manage to have a reasonable story each week, I’m so on board. I loved the two main characters and they seem to have decent chemistry so far. The show embraced the cheesiness without guilt and it had some pretty decent special effects. I think it’s fairly clear that they put some work into it and plan to have a good time. So I’m in it to have a good time, you’ve won me over for now!

Sleepy Hollow is on FOX Monday nights at 9 PM EST.

Rating: – It was a good solid start and I went in with low expectations! Interested to see where this goes.

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