Sleepy Hollow continued its roller-coaster ride into myth-meets-history with the Sandman popping up in tonight’s episode, For the Triumph of Evil.
The episode kicked off with a dream sequence. In her dream, Abbie Mills ends up interrogated by a possessed Ichabod in front of witnesses in the police station. Ichabod’s eyes are all white, and then Ichabod is replaced by a white, faceless demon. Abbie wakes up to a phone call. There is a jumper, and she is demanding to speak to Abbie.
Dr. Mara Vega, who used to care for Abbie’s sister Jenny, is on a ledge and is threatening to jump. Dr. Vega demands to speak to Abbie. When Abbie gets up there, the doctor states that, “It was my fault. Everything she saw was real.” Dr. Vega then turns to Abbie with the same glazed white eyes that Ichabod had in the dream, and she jumps from the roof. Her final words are that she had it coming, and so does Abbie. When the police examine the body, the white eyes blow up, spill sand, and turn black. After seeing this, Captain Frank Irving immediately secures the body and states no one is to go near it. He sends Mills to Tarrytown Psychiatric Hospital, where the doctor worked, in order to learn more.
Abbie reveals to Ichabod the details of her nightmare, including the fact that Dr. Vega was in it, even though Abbie had never met her before. Ichabod thinks the dream is prophetic and pertains to the seven years of tribulations as stipulated in the Book of Revelations. The faceless demon, he thinks, is part of the army of evil that he and Abbie must face as the two witnesses also foretold in Revelations.
Ichabod and Abbie go over Vega’s files in the records room. They learn that Vega thought Abbie’s sister wasn’t delusional, but nonetheless, she kept her institutionalized. They look at old taped sessions of Abbie’s sister in therapy. Ichabod thinks that Abbie and her sister are some sort of threat to this demon, and he demands that he and Abbie track down Abbie’s estranged sister and talk to her.
They arrive at a sanatorium where her sister is kept. Abbie hasn’t seen Jenny for five years. They learn she is in room 49. The chief’s words, “Don’t be afraid of number 49,” come back to Abbie, but she’s not ready to make a connection. Abbie’s sister won’t see her, but she agrees to see Ichabod out of curiosity. They form a tenuous bond when he admits to seeing the same demon she sees, and tells her what happened to Dr. Vega. He demands to know what she knows, and relates the tragic deaths that have occurred over the last several episodes, as well as Vega’s warning. Jenny sends Ichabod away stating that she doesn’t know any more than he does, and that her conscious is clear. Her final words are to ask Abbie if her conscience is clear.
Abbie then tells Ichabod that when they were lost in the woods years ago, and then found, she didn’t admit to having seen anything. Jenny did, and that’s why she was committed. Jenny mentioned the demon, and a rancher that came up from the ground to find them. The rancher also, according to Jenny, saw the demon. Abbie has never changed her story, and Mr. Gillespie, the rancher, never admitted to having seen anything odd.
Abbie and Ichabod then go to see Mr. Gillespie. Before they can get there, he nods off to sleep. He wakes up to noises, and cuts himself on a nail. The blood spatter ends up in the tattoo shape that Ichabod has. Gillespie calls out asking if it’s Paige. He has a firearm, and ends up shooting the demon from Abbie’s dream that then disappears.
Back at the police station, the Captain asks who hung a headless horseman sign in his office. Morales admits to having done it and the Captain admits it was a good joke. They then proceed to the Gillespie ranch where they had a report of shots fired. They meet up with Abbie and Ichabod, and learn that Gillespie is holding his wife hostage and asking to speak to Abbie.
Abbie enters the house. She finds cracked mirrors and photos. Eventually she sees Gillespie on the kitchen floor where he is holding his wife hostage at gunpoint. He has the familiar white eyes. Suddenly he fires into the air as the demon walks unseen by Abbie behind her. Abbie radios the captain that she is all right and to stand down. Gillespie tells her that, “The Sandman is coming for you next. The next time you fall asleep you are dead.” He then shoots himself.
Ichabod and Abbie have a heart-to-heart. Ichabod tells Abbie it wasn’t her fault, and Abbie admits that maybe she should have done things differently, and that the Sandman is coming for her. Abbie tells Ichabod the story of the Sandman because he has never heard it. They return to the records room to research dream spirits, and to try to stay awake. They realize that the demon is from Mohawk legend. The demon would strike when people didn’t do what they should. Sometimes a symbol was used to ward the spirit off. They visit a Mohawk descendant, used car dealer Wendel Clark, to ask him to help ward the spirit off, but he initially refuses to help.
Ichabod pursues him, and Clark states that his conscience is clear, so he personally has nothing to fear from the demon. Ichabod then quotes Edmond Burke, stating that, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” He further asks who will help Clark if the demon visits him for doing nothing to help. Clark reluctantly agrees to help. He takes them to a lodge where he tells them the history of the demon. The demon’s goal is to torment his victims into killing themselves over their bad choices. Once you die, the evil go straight to hell and those in-between, the demon claims.
The only way to fight the demon is on the dream plain. If they fight the demon on the dream plain and win, they are victorious. If they lose, they die in real life too. To enter the dream plain they have to take a tea potion, and be stung by scorpions. They enter the dream plain and are separated. Abbie encounters the demon first. The bullets in her gun do nothing to stop him. He tells her that her life has been weighed and measured. The demon comes at her in a whirl of dust and she finds herself flashing back to being interrogated with her sister after their four days in the woods. The interrogating officer is the demon in disguise, and back then, Abbie refused to admit what she saw.
Meanwhile, Ichabod is faced by a red door in the middle of the forest. He passes through it and ends up in a building seeing the Sandman’s victims hanging from nooses. He comes upon the Sandman attacking Abbie, and tries to stop it. The demon starts to attack Ichabod, and Abbie realizes what she has to do. Abbie finally admits to what she saw, and that she was a coward for not admitting it. The Sandman freezes and Abbie destroys it.
As they recover from their experience, the Captain finds them in the records room. He tells them he’ll get them a key to the room, and just wants to know that the attacks are over. Crane stays in the room to rest, and Abbie goes to find her sister. She discovers that her sister has escaped from room 49 through the air shaft.
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