Sleepy Hollow Mea Culpa

It's me again, Sleepy Hollow Fan Girl, back to make some amends, apologies, and further (more positive) reflections re: the season premiere.  Just to be clear, no one--no fan, no one from Sleepy Hollow--has written to me requesting this.  This comes purely from my own conscience having seen the premiere a third time, and having had more time to reflect on the script.

First off, major mea culpa, and a profound apology, to both Mark Goffman and Tom Mison, for my having accused Ichabod/Tom of speaking ungrammatically in the premiere's climax.  He did not.  I accused him of using "me" as the subject of a verb, and what he actually used was "we," which is entirely correct.  I pray you both, Mr. Goffman and Mr. Mison, will forgive me for this grievous error.  I shall go back to my original post and draw a line through that paragraph.

Second, although I adore Tom Mison's eyebrows and any chance to comment upon them, even in jest, in all fairness, his eyebrows did not behave really badly in this episode.  I'm sorry, Mr. Mison.  I shall also draw a line through my snide remark along those lines.

Third, and these remarks are directed more at Mark Goffman:  I feel like I have a much better understanding of and respect for what you were trying to do in Act I.  On serious reflection, I think your idea to put Abbie and Ichabod under the illusion that a year had passed was extremely clever and very creative.  I also think that you were quite intentional about having them behave strangely, having the scenes feel "off" so that we the audience would be in on the twist.  I think you were trying to do something very sophisticated and layered; I wish it had worked for me.

Also, I wanted to go back to Fake Crane.  I feel like I understand better why you felt you needed him. You felt you needed a confrontation between our heroes and Moloch, and there's no way they would survive (we've been led to believe thus far) a direct confrontation with ole Ram Horn Head himself.
Also, him taking the form of Crane is a marvelous poetic device, in that, as we've been told, Crane's decision to redraw the map to purgatory led to most of the hot water our major characters found themselves in last season, and that is going to continue to be an issue for him and Abbie.  So, the image of him fighting himself, will--I suspect--have reverberations throughout the season.  Thanks for having Abbie go all Ms. BAMF on him too.

Fourth, I must make some apologies to both Ken Olin, the director, and Nicole Beharie, Mr. Mison and John Noble.  While I stand by what I said about direction, performances and tone and how they didn't work for me, I can see how others would see the episode differently, how the sheer terror of the predicaments Abbie and Crane were left in could require such heightened expressions of fear and intensity throughout the episode, and I can appreciate why the episode was directed thusly, and why our actors felt the need to ramp up their performances to express such intensity. I still wish I could have felt it, viscerally, and thus believed it. I think that perhaps part of what didn't work for me was trying to mix in light moments, such as Ichabod's adorable failed recording on the cell phone, with that darker textured story.  It works when the shift isn't as dramatic quite well.

Further, Mr. Noble's performance was more complex than I gave it credit for being.  I apologize to both him and Mr. Olin.

I must also apologize to the editor.  Upon re-watching the episode, I can see how Abbie's fear in Moloch's cave could lead directly to the scene in which she is searching for the amulet.  I don't feel it, viscerally, and I didn't see it the first two times I watched it.  But the third time I was watching it with an eye to criticizing myself, and things I may have gotten wrong.  I think I got that one wrong.

Finally, I must offer kudos to the art department/director/writers for Moloch's field, the place where he is raising his demon army.  On seeing it the third time, I realized the field was designed to look like a revolutionary war battle field, and that is magnificent.  Speaking of great poetic devices.

Sleepy Hollow Season Premiere: Team Apocalypse is in Serious Trouble

Fake Crane hugging Real Abbie in purgatory.
He was really nice till he started growling.

Monday night I watched the Season 2 Premiere of Sleepy Hollow with a dear friend I'll call “Sleepy Virgin.” I was thrilled he was watching it with me because I was sure he would love it as I did.

I turned to him 2/3 of the way through Act I and said “I'm so, so sorry.”

My beloved Team Apocalypse is in serious trouble, and I don't mean from War, Headless, or the-villain-that-Sleepy-Virgin-has-taken-to-calling-“Mollusk” (as in, “as frightening as a...”).  I mean from its makers, and I'll be damned if I'll let them jump the shark this early in Sleepy Hollow's tender life without a fight.

I am an unrepentant Sleepy Hollow Fan Girl. I LOVE this show. I love the whole bonkersawesome premise, the characters, the relationships among the characters, the humor, the tenderness, the action, the actors, the writers, the special effects team, the stuntpeople, the key grip...you get the idea. But, Guys, Monday night's episode was...just...bad. I write this out of love, because I just can't bear a Season of Bad, and I want to remain a Sleepy Hollow Fan Girl.

First let's talk about what worked.

As any fan or writer would recognize, the Sleepy structure requires each week some supernatural event/person/thing our heroes have to stop (or find) to keep Moloch and Company from entering the world thus bringing about the End of Days. But the first episode of the new season had to serve a different, much more challenging purpose as well: it had to get most of our major characters out of the insanely difficult predicaments the writers put them in during the season one finale, and, most important to any story, provide a potent emotional resolution to said predicaments.

This is a huge challenge, because in order to service all three objectives, the writers had to fundamentally shift the priorities of our hero, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), for this episode and make them run counter to his personal motivation for the entirety of the previous season (to rescue and reunite with his wife). Choosing to rescue his partner, Abigail Mills (Nicole Beharie), before his wife was essential to servicing the needs of the series, and the desires of the fandom, who had a primal need to see him reunited with Abbie asap.  By bringing the A story, the threat he and Abbie have to stop, up first in the story, the writers not only kept to traditional Sleepy structure, they also showed us quite believably why Ichabod would rescue Abbie first.  Artistically, intellectually, and emotionally, that was very satisfying.

Unfortunately, it came at a tremendous cost, but more on that below.

Every scene Jenny Mills (Lyndie Greenwood) graced worked, even when the scene had serious flaws. Exciting, emotional, but light enough not to take themselves too seriously, these scenes reminded me why I love Sleepy Hollow in the first place. The working and emotional relationship between Jenny and Crane was an absolute delight.  We need more scenes between these two. It's good to know Ichabod has someone to snark with/adore/raise hell with when Abbie's not around.

Katrina, Crane's wife, (Katia Winter) finally got to do something other than stand around and look pretty (which she could do in her sleep) and that is a huge, and long-needed, advancement for this show. She attacks the Horseman of Death first chance she gets, and attempts to free herself.  She doesn't do it very well, but, hey, major step in the right direction, writers.

Last season, everyone pretty much agrees and admits, Katrina wasn't a character as much as a plot device. She was monotone, singularly tragic, and never allowed to be funny. I'm told the writers realized they have to show us why Ichabod was mooning about her so much when he has the amazing Abbie Mills in front of him, and plan to do so. I can't wait. Katia Winter has a great sense of humor; let's hope that in addition to showing off her own badassery, Katrina gets a chance to be funny. Now if they would just get her out of that bloody corset.

Abraham came back, and let's face it: Headless is a far more interesting, not to mention better looking, villain with a head. I look forward to seeing more of Neil Jackson this season—and, no, I'm not talking about the creepy Headless Ken Doll we were exposed to in the premiere--because the relationship between him and Katrina could be a really interesting plot line.

The explanation of how Katrina would “phone home” from purgatory, complete with relevant flashbacks, was pretty cool (although I still don't understand how Katrina could phone home from anywhere she wanted, but Abbie had to be in Moloch's lair). And it was lovely seeing John Cho again. His two short scenes with Nicole Beharie were marvelous, though his presence felt more like a bone thrown to the fans—don't get me wrong; we like our bones—than an essential part of the story. But it worked because he played a vital role, giving Abbie a slew of necessary information. I'll roll with you on that one Sleepy because you understood that what we loved about Andy Brooks was the tormented goodness and love for Abbie he retained even after selling his soul.

There were a number of individual bits that were really well done. Tom Mison's first words of the script are heartbreaking and perfectly delivered. The reunion hug in purgatory between Abbie and Ichabod, which fans have pined for, lo, these last nine months, was appropriately passionate. Ichabod's driving was marvelous, and thank you for having him be sufficiently flummoxed in the moment that figuring out reverse was beyond him. Reuniting Henry with his beloved plants was brilliant. I absolutely adore the fact that the Horseman of War has a green thumb.

And our heroes are out of Purgatory, and out of the crypt, so that's good.

Now for what didn't work for this fan.

Act I was seriously problematic, for multiple reasons.  

For starters, you cannot promise your audience that you will pick up right where you left off with your characters and then pretend you're picking up a year later. Those of us who know what you promised won't believe the illusion you give us in Act I, in which case we're yanked out of the scene, thinking too much, impatient with the illusion, not identifying with our characters, and getting no pleasure from the twist.

Those of us who don't know, like Sleepy Virgin, still can't lose themselves in the story because the way the act is played out, the fourth wall is being continually, unintentionally, shattered.

Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison are really good actors, which means, unfortunately for this episode, that they do what their directors and producers tell them to do. For much of the show it seemed like their primary directorial injuctions were “play caricatures of your characters, while you clunkily exposit your heads off.”

The first few scenes were just bizarre.  The tone, the flow, the feel of them was all wrong.  Our beloved heroes are talking revenge, rather than justice; Crane is snapping at Abbie for remembering the past, his favorite stomping ground; the wind is opening Crane's door for no reason other than to break the tender moment between him and Abbie (not a Billy Joel fan, eh wind?).  

Having only seen the episode once (I'm intentionally writing this before seeing it a second time, because you only get one shot to win people over; if we're not already hard-core fans, and we don't like it, we're not coming back), I'm still scratching my head over the cupcake. So, we were celebrating Ichabod's birthday? Or the first anniversary of the killing of Katrina and Jenny? Okay, I'm a moron, because obviously you wouldn't celebrate the latter.  But the two anniversaries did get sort of mashed up together, and didn't Ichabod say something about celebrating “terror” with dessert, or have the writers finally succeeded in breaking our beloved Tom Mison's capacity for crystal clear elocution (or my mind)? And the whole cupcake bit just went on for way too long, while we're still suffering the emotional whiplash of having just heard our terrified Ichabod cry out for help, seemingly from his grave, before falling into his made-up surprise party.

(Also, and this is terribly petty, I know, but who does the math in your production offices? Ichabod couldn't possibly have been turning 251. He died in 1781, at approximately the same age, we can reasonably deduce, that Tom Mison was when he started playing him, 31. He was resurrected 232 years later. That makes him 263. It's totally fine for Ichabod to intone in the “previously-ons” that he awakes 250 years (or two and a half centuries) later in a world he no longer knows. He's allowed to round up in that context. But not at a birthday party. When you're celebrating someone's birthday, unless we've all agreed to forget the celebrant's age out of delicacy, one has to know how many candles to put on the cake).  (Oh, dear.  I think I just made it patently obvious why I'm a fan of Ichabod Crane.)

Perhaps because I couldn't lose myself in their characters from the very first scene, the whole bit at the historical society felt heavy-handed and silly. Ichabod and Abbie kept telling me (or shouting at me), “I'm acting like this because I'm so grievously angry.” Oh.  Really?  Did Ichabod Crane actually do the old floor roll Sigourney Weaver permanently discredited in Galaxy Quest, or did I imagine that? By the way, I don't care if they were in purgatory, how is it possible Abbie ran out of ammo so fast? I mean, sure, consecrated rounds, whatever those are, are probably hard to come by, but you've been training for a year and you haven't stockpiled more ammo? Meanwhile, Headless is winning the battle, so he's just going to leave now, okaythanksbye.

Was all that--the overblown acting, the clunky exposition, the plants, the wind, the absurdity of seeing Ichabod Crane saying “clear” and rolling around on the floor with a crossbow--supposed to be one long hint that we were in purgatory? Okay. Okay. I get it. No, wait. I don't get it. Why would you do that? If we as your audience were also supposed to be drawn in to the illusion, wouldn't it have been far better if we had had no idea about the twist until Ichabod starts to physically and mentally lose it, giving us only the most subtle of hints (as you did last season re: Jeremy) so that when we go back to rewatch it, only then do we realize you were warning us all along?

As for the much-touted Ben Franklin scenes, these were problematic on several levels, the primary one being that you needed to slow down.  Even Mison couldn't make all the dialogue attacking Franklin's character fully comprehensible on the first listen, and that's saying something. I know the old “Ichabod remembers something from the revolutionary era that helps him figure out our current puzzle” bit is integral to Sleepy's M.O., but if you're so obviously going to use that plot device, you have to do it well. I'll let you toss off a medieval French lantern Crane saw once that conveniently expels demons and happens to reside with Jenny's old comrades, but you can't just toss off Ben Franklin. And you can't give him and Ichabod a mentor-mentee relationship, fraught with antipathy, hire Timothy Busfield to play him, then race them through their scenes so fast almost nothing about their characters or relationship has a chance to land. It almost felt like, ex post facto, the director and producers realized the first act wasn't working and told the editor to get the audience through it as fast as humanly possible.

(As for the fact that every single thing Crane needed to know for the episode was handed out in one conversation with Ben Franklin, eh. I'm a Sleepy vet, so I'm used to it; Sleepy Virgin was appalled).

The awkwardness of Act I reached its nadir in the archives scene, with Abbie randomly pushing something off a table because she can't find the intel she wants (because that's something she'd do?!?!), and she and Crane expositing to each other like they both have terrible brain injuries. Then we go into question War, our first scene of the season between Jeremy and his Pops, which should be so pregnant with all this incredible relationship drama, but isn't and can't be because Pops is under the illusion he's already had a big, fraught reunion with his son.  (A reunion to which we, the audience, were not invited, thank you very much).

The Sin-Eater, Jeremy Crane/Henry Parrish/War (what do the writers call his character on the page this season?), played by the wonderful John Noble, spent the show eating scenery instead of sins. His villain was directed to be so over-the-top I was shocked he wasn't mustachioed and wondered if I shouldn't hiss whenever he came on screen. This is a travesty. War/Jeremy is an awesome character, played by an actor capable of conveying fantastically complex emotion with a single glance (see, for example, his reaction to seeing his mother for the first time in “Bad Blood”). To make him mono-dimensionally and melodramatically evil for even a second should be against the Geneva Conventions.

A major issue for both Sleepy Virgin and me was how did Moloch manage to create a spell in both Ichabod's and Abbie's brains, when only Abbie was in purgatory? I suggested that maybe a) it was actually War who did it, because he can apparently jump between worlds even though everyone else needs a key or soul to barter with, or b) maybe War worked on dear old dad while Moloch worked on Abbie, or c) maybe Ichabod was nearly dead, since that's one of three ways humans can get (at least spiritually) into purgatory. Sleepy Virgin was not impressed with my valiant attempts to make sense of this.

But overstuffed plot and overblown directing aside, there was a much, much bigger problem with Act I. Your audience has been waiting, above all else, for Abbie's and Ichabod's reunion. Be it loving, tense, both, neither, we've been waiting to see our captain and his beloved leftenant epically reunited after their epic separation. You can't just start the second season with them together, even if it is a ruse of War/Moloch. It's completely unfulfilling (which is why we didn't want you to take the easy way out and have time pass between the finale and the premiere in the first place). It makes their later grand reunion scene in Moloch's lair fall flat. The air has been let out of that balloon before it ever got a chance to fly. Thanks to Mison and Beharie, the later scene still has some power, but nowhere near what it could have, what it should have.

Speaking of reunions, about Katrina and Abraham's....The Headless Ken Doll was too far gone even for you guys. American Horror Story can get away with that, not Sleepy Hollow.  I know some people found it hot. I'm worried about them. For my part, it was damned creepy, and not in a good way. (More in a “what were the producers thinking?” kind of way). Was he supposed to be scary or sexy? Please say scary.  Because I'm right up there with Genevieve Valentine of io9 in finding a quasi-sexual relationship between Katrina and her captor, if things go all Stockholm-Syndromy, really disturbing. I could take Beauty and the Beast, if it weren't for the fact that Headless is a Mega-Stalker ex-boyfriend who sold his soul in exchange for the right to hold Katrina prisoner, and is hell-bent (pardon the pun) on killing her husband. Seriously, you'd better be going somewhere liberating for Katrina with this storyline, Sleepy writers.

I love the idea that Katrina can see Abraham because she's a witch, but not because he puts an enchanted necklace on her (how and when did he get it back from Ichabod?) and then “fades” into view (No, no, no. Necklace on, Neil Jackson's there; necklace off, Neil's not there). I get that she thinks the Headless Buffman (as Sleepy Virgin charmingly dubbed him) is trying to pull a fast one on her, convince her he's still human, that he's the one casting the spell, rather than Katrina using her own powers to see him. I get it, I just don't like it. After last season, to make reparation to Katia and your audience, every single chance you get to make Katrina powerful and active you need to take.

The audience's reunion with Big Bad Moloch in the scene between Abbie and Andy was underwhelming, to put it mildly. Sleepy Virgin wanted to know, “why is this guy walking around on his horse talking to himself supposed to be scary?” I would have answered him but I couldn't stop laughing, and I'm pretty sure that scene wasn't supposed to be funny.

How does Jenny know about whom Henry Parrish is speaking when he says “my father is gone?” All she knew at the end of last season was that Henry Parrish was not who he said he was, and was probably a member of Team Moloch. She wasn't in the Great Confessional Scene of 2014, wherein John Noble spends nine pages ripping our brains out of our heads. I'll buy that she's deduced he's War—Jenny's wicked smart—but why she would have the foggiest idea that Henry is Ichabod and Katrina's long-buried son, Jeremy, is beyond me. Nevertheless, when the-man-she-still-knows-as-Henry tells her his father is gone, she knows immediately that he's talking about Ichabod.

Who cleaned up Jenny? Even in the flashback used to remind us where we left her last season/five minutes ago, we can see she's pretty beaten up, bloody if not bruised. But just drag her into a warehouse with a children's desk (and an ambulance conveniently and inexplicably parked outside), give her a shot of adrenaline or something, and she's pretty as a peach again and raring to go, no blood, no scars.

(Ohhhhhh. I think I just figured it out. War and the Hessians kidnapped Jenny from the ambulance, didn't they? But you had to cut the scene for length. Is that what happened? You shouldn't have cut that.)

As he leaves the room, Henry tells Jenny that “war is hell.” C'mon, guys. You know the rules. If you're going to use a cliché, it has to be used in a way that is fresh and brilliant and necessary. All you did here was make possible more curtain-chewing on the part of John Noble.

Do I even need to comment on the fourth-wall-shattering incredulity of anybody putting Jenny Mills in plastic cuffs and then leaving a knife within arm's reach? Why was the knife even there in the first place? ('Cause someone told the props master to put it there). And if we're going to spend all that money putting random Hessians in the script, shouldn't we give them something to do besides die?

As for Ichabod's conveniently well-appointed coffin, okay, look, I accepted both the Andy Brooks and the Ben Franklin information dumps substituting for investigation and discovered clues, but even I can't cope with how thoughtful it was of Ichabod's son to bury him with a bit of flint and some gunpowder so he can get himself out of the grave.

Once Abbie and Crane are reunited for realsies, Crane ends their gorgeously passionate embrace by holding her firmly at arm's length while he talks to her. When they part, she keep pulling away from him before he's ready to let her go. Is purgatory really great for your hair (see Katrina, Abbie), but really bad for dental hygiene? More importantly, why was the scene so terribly overwrought? We've seen these two actors express sincere, heartfelt affection for one another very believably and dramatically (see “The Sin-Eater,” “The Indispensable Man,” “Bad Blood”). It worked in those episodes largely because our actors were allowed to exercise the necessary restraint such that the heavy bits really land, but also because the climactic emotions were built to, slowly, throughout the episode, throughout individual scenes. I know we left things at a very heightened pitch last season, and I love me my Ichabbie feels, but melodrama is a piss-poor substitute for drama.

After Ichabod returns from his trip through the looking glass, he gives us the act break that “[Abbie] doesn't have much time.” Nice act break but, um, since when? She's in purgatory. Moloch can't find her, even when she's in his crib. There's no clock in this episode, except the one implied by War beating them to the key, so isn't the issue really that none of us has much time? Also, if Moloch does manage to invade our realm with his demon army, wouldn't that make it possible for Abbie to kind of slip out with them, all Frodo-and-Sam-like, and come back to earth? I'm sure she saw Return of the King.

Ichabod convinces Jenny to stay behind and not come with him into purgatory because “You, me and your sister are...” or “Me, you and your sister are...” the only ones who know about all this. I don't remember which permutation Ichabod said, but I do know this: there is no way in purgatory that a British nobleman's son, born 250 years ago, a professor at Oxford University who prides himself on his intellect, would be caught dead, sleeping, or wide awake in a coffin on his cell phone uttering such a toothcurlingly ungrammatical sentence no matter how stressed out he is in the moment. No, no, no, no, no. To quote my mentor regarding a passage of my own, “you couldn't be more wrong.”

(see Mea Culpa re: the above paragraph)

Tonally, it's never been more obvious to me that scenes are filmed out of order and then stitched together later. Why is Abbie so totally freaked out and talking to herself in the scene when Fake Crane finds her? In her scene previous to this, in Moloch's lair, she was relatively calm considering Moloch could have come home at any moment and kill her.  In general, our Abbie's a pretty cool customer. She doesn't really freak out much.  Did you guys accidentally take out a necessary scene again?

Fake Crane was unnecessary. I can't believe I'm saying this, but two Ichabod Cranes are not better than one (although the subtle contrast in passions between the two Cranes, Fakey being more tender than Realy, was fun). If the old Fake Crane trick had to be used, please don't have Jenny remind the audience that eating and drinking in hell is bad immediately before we see Fake Crane trying to get Abbie to drink. As Sleepy Virgin beautifully pointed out, it completely ruins the twist. And did Abbie have to remind the audience that Crane pronounces “lieutenant” with an “f”? Are we really that clueless? Even the Sleepy Virgins?

This brings us to the climax. Abbie and Ichabod race away from Moloch as they speak the words we've all memorized by now, and find themselves confronted with a secondary gate blocking their path since this time No Witness Will Be Left Behind. Moloch's head whips around in surprise and he begins to come after them. He then starts raising his army of Walking Dead extras. Sleepy Virgin wondered aloud, aside from the series' leit motif of hands coming out of graves, why would souls in purgatory be buried in the ground? I didn't even try to justify that one.

More to the point, how and why was Moloch surprised that Abbie and Crane were racing for the gate? How did he not know where they were, what they were doing? Didn't Moloch just create/inhabit Fake Crane? (Never mind the more interesting question: how is it Moloch/Fake Crane can speak with such a gorgeous English accent, but can't remember that the Brits say “leftenant”? This guy was more scary when he was riding around talking to himself).

And speaking of that key, Moloch didn't seem to have much of a problem leaving purgatory without it ten years ago when he rescued Jeremy and scared the bejeezus out of the Mills sisters. Why now, all of a sudden, can he not leave without a key?  You guys have got to figure out the Rules of Purgatory, and the Limits of Moloch's power, and stop just making this shit up as you go. You are not Indiana Jones.

Back at the cabin, Crane suddenly remembers he has a wife to rescue, so we know what's coming in Episode 2, and poor Nicole Beharie is told to act her life out of her declaring the obvious (“We won't be fooled again!” “This is war!”).

Cut to War getting an avatar from his adopted dad for early Christmas. Now this really irritated me. First off, you did not have to explain why we sometimes see a dude with long curly black hair in a knight's armor as War. But if you were determined to do that, here's a novel idea: Put John Noble in a suit of armor. (The new avatar doesn't have the long hair anyway). I don't care if Henremy IS two-hundred and sumpen-sumpen years old--hell, Yoda was 900, and Darth was disabled--he's a warlock. And he's played by John “I-was-once-Denethor” Noble. If this character can bury his (possibly) younger, supposedly more virile, father with a gesture and a glance, can incapacitate his mother, a very powerful witch, with his will, what on earth does he need an avatar for?

(Because the 25-35 year old male demographic who buy all the cell phones and video games and cars and might actually join the Air Force will think it's cool, that's why).

I know, I know, I know: my job as an audience member is to willingly suspend my disbelief. Guys, I did that, for an entire season, about the most batshit crazy stuff, because you made the rest of the Sleepy World believable. You made me trust you. But if I can't trust you anymore, I can't go along for the wild ride, and I really, really want to.

In absolute truth, I probably would have gleefully overlooked most of these complaints, if only you'd given me a) a comprehensible and emotionally satisfying first act, and b) touching, believable performances from all the characters throughout.  As long as the heart is there, go ahead, take all the liberties with my mind you want. After all, it's Sleepy Hollow, where the impossible is the norm. But if the story isn't satisfying on an emotional level, if it doesn't make sense, if the performances are directed to be totally unbelievable, you can't get away with the rest of it.  And you cannot allow Tom Mison's eyebrows to dance the Macarena to convey distress. Besides, he knows better.

(Again, see Mea Culpa)

Having now seen the premiere a second time (with drastically lowered expectations), I must say I disliked it much less. I still don't think it was good, but I must grant that you did cross all your t's, and dot all your i's, and there were definitely some fun bits, and that is no small thing. It was an achievement, however disappointing, and I do thank you for that.

And thank God Crane, Abbie, Jenny and Jeremy are back. Now let's go free the rest of Team Apocalypse!  

Why is Sleepy Hollow on This Blog?

Reviews of a TV show may seem a strange addition to this blog, but to me it makes perfect sense. This blog is about the crashing of The System (and my system) and nothing on television deals better with trying to stop the apocalypse or at least save what's possible than Sleepy Hollow.

But more to the point for this blog, Sleepy Hollow saved my life last fall. I've been writing, seriously, for 20 years—never full time, because like most writers, I work for a living, and for much of my adult life I've worked an average of 80 hours per week.

Until last fall, my work centered on short stories, poetry, unfinished novels. But last fall, something extraordinary happened. Seriously burned out, feeling rather hopeless and directionless, with both my writing and my other work, I saw, from a distance of a few airplane seats, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) stumble onto asphalt pavement and nearly get hit by a car. And then I saw “Sleepy Hollow” on the screen and I thought, “what the hell IS that?!?!? (not to mention WHO the hell is that?!?!)"

When I got home my husband and I found Sleepy Hollow on Hulu (we live in a very rural area and can't pick up anything on our TV without satellite, which we can't afford). The show had me at “my name is Ichabod Crane.” I fell in love with TV again, for the first time since I was a child, and it's all thanks to Sleepy. Half a season later, I knew, “this is it. This is what I want to do, what I was born to do. I want to write for television.” And my spirit said, yessssssssssss. My dormant heart came back to life as suddenly and utterly as Ichabod climbed out of his (first) grave.

Now this isn't quite as batshit crazy a dream as something Ichabod would have. It so happens, I have a friend in the industry, a very talented and successful writer and producer I'll call “Joe” for the purposes of this blog. So I wrote to Joe and said, “I know this sounds ridiculous but I realize I have to write for TV. Will you help me?” To my enormous joy, he said, “yes.”

And so we began together a no-money-exchanged, no-degree-offered MFA in Writing for Television. He got me copies of Sleepy scripts and screeners, I studied the hell out of them, dissected them, broke them down, “broke” a story of my own, wrote 14 hours a day for two weeks at his LA house last January, proudly handed him my product when I was done...and he savaged it...in a good way. He told me I managed to make every single mistake a novice script-writer makes, and then spent an hour telling me in detail what I did wrong and how to make it better. I felt totally miserable and incredibly lucky.

Twenty drafts later I was feeling pretty darn good about my script. I showed him the new version. He said, “the first two scenes are good. They're professional.” As for the rest of the script...it was back to the drawing board.

So trust me when I say I have the utmost respect for the writers of Sleepy Hollow, even when they piss me off, for they manage to pull off each week a Herculean feat of entertainment and storytelling I have yet to achieve once. My feedback about the show is dedicated to them, everyone involved in the production show, and my sister-and-fellow fans, with love and gratitude, for what they're worth.   

Vignettes from A Suicidal Evening

The Friday night of Labor Day Weekend I wanted to die. It had been coming for weeks. Months really. Suicidal ideation, as the shrinks call it, strikes me a lot like the common cold and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Boy Who Cried Wolf. I can feel it coming on, but then it goes away, comes back, goes away, comes back stronger, goes away completely, and then knocks me on my ass with something that under normal circumstances—whatever those are for an anxious-depressive with Borderline Personality Disorder—wouldn't have stolen my feet out from under me.

The thing that got me was the thing that usually gets me: Shame. Shame is a BPD's worst enemy (or best friend, depending on how Buddhist and non-aggressive you want to be towards yourself). Shame is our calling card, our fingerprint, our fleur-de-lis.

My husband and I are tired. Chronically so. We're vegetable farmers who run a goat dairy, and it's September, the end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere of our lovely pale, blue dot. But it's not just the seasonal exhaustion that's gotten to me, the healthy exhaustion of working hard in the sun and rain. It's the emotional exhaustion of trying to so within the context of creating an intentional community. Please don't ask me what that last phrase means, because the longer I'm at this, the more I realize I haven't the foggiest idea. Here's what it looks like for us at the moment.

We receive interest from more than 200 potential interns each year; we review their applications, interview them and if their references pan out, schedule them to work with us for periods of time ranging from 2 weeks to a year. At our maximum we can host, mentor, and manage 6 people. Most of these are young folks in their 20s who are either interested in pursuing some variation of organic farming as a way of life, or, more often, are simply looking for some sort of out-of-the-box experience as they try to figure out their next step.

We spend months carefully scheduling and filling our placements. Every year is a little bit different, beautiful and challenging in its own way. Each year we learn more about managing and leading, especially about what doesn't work, our own flaws and failings, and what we can and cannot offer. This year's challenge has been wholly unique, in that woman after woman—usually the strong and reliable base of our intern pool—has decided to cut short, usually dramatically, her stay, with little to no warning. Their reasons have ranged from “I'm just not happy here,” to “I don't want to spend my summer working after all,” to “I can't handle any stress in my life right now,” to “you run a slave farm” (thankfully all the other interns maintain that the last perception is not shared).

Losing staff one counts on and has invested in suddenly is hard on any business, but when you live, eat and socialize with said folks, the loss becomes quite personal. For both my husband and me, a fundamental “issue” is abandonment. Now, obviously, an intern who barely knows us choosing to leave early is not remotely comparable, intellectually, to, say a parent abandoning a child. But “issues” don't live in the intellect; they live in the heart and the body, and in the section of the mind immune to reason. Issues are issues precisely because they can't be reasoned away. So, each time an intern would decide, suddenly, to leave, though we never acknowledged it or discussed it, my husband and I each experienced a reopening and agitation of an old and deep wound.

One experiences enough of these incidents in quick succession and it can encourage any latent tendencies towards neurosis in the most sane of centered of people. My neuroses have never been latent; they've always been wide awake, downing coffee after coffee, micromanaging the hell out of my life. So I was also exhausted from the season-long cumulative sense of feeling the ground was going to be pulled out from under me at any moment. I felt a tad bit like Katniss Everdeen trying to farm in the arena, never knowing what new nightmare the game-makers would throw at me, or when.

But there is a far stronger, more powerful exhaustion that has come over me from years of this life. It's a good life, but more on that later. For me, it has been the single most challenging and painful thing I've ever done, and the losses I've co-created and survived in pursuing this dream are among the most excruciating I pray ever to endure. To say that I've learned a lot may qualify as the understatement of the century. What doesn't kill you may, indeed, make you stronger, but if it nearly kills you, multiple times, it may be a while before you come to appreciate that benefit.

The transient nature of our community is responsible for one of the great ironies of our lifeway: that I am almost always lonely and almost never alone. In that respect, I guess we have much in common with the civilization whose interpersonal illnesses we'd hoped to leave behind and transcend. Also, as an artist—which I am first, a teacher second and farmer a distant third—I need solitude the way organic creatures need air. And it's almost impossible to come by in my life.

And so we come to that Friday night. At our staff meeting earlier in the day, we'd agreed to do a “pizza night,” an effort in the direction of “fun” suggested by my husband, already exhausted from a very long week, who volunteered to make the pizza dough and fire up our horno, the wood-fired adobe oven next to our outdoor summer kitchen. (This is no small task; it takes a lot of wood, and at least two hours, to get the oven to the requisite 800 degrees). The kids had worked hard all week, and we still had one more farmers' market to go before a day off, so it was good of him to offer this. Reluctantly, I volunteered to help chop vegetables and grate cheese.

Mind you, I wasn't necessary. Most of the gang had volunteered to help, and not all were needed. So, when I found myself in the late afternoon desperately needing solitude far more than socializing, I was completely unprepared for my husband's anger and disappointment when I informed him I planned to skip our little party in favor of an evening in bed.

An important aside about me, and our marriage: when you look up “codependent” in the dictionary you'll find an (unflattering) photo of me, next to my husband. If you ever want to know how I'm feeling don't ask me how I'm doing, ask him how he's doing. That's how I'm doing.

My husband immediately responded that he didn't want to be doing this either (“then why did you suggest it?” I stupidly didn't ask) but that we had all agreed at the staff meeting to this.

There are two things in this world that send my husband round the bend faster than any others: a person not keeping his or her word, and a person who was part of a consensed-upon decision backing away from said decision after the fact. These things drive me crazy too, but never as acutely or quickly.

He was completely right, I suppose, but in that moment I didn't care. When he said, “do whatever you want,” rather than feeling I'd been given permission from my self-created father figure to stay in bed, I felt I'd been exhorted to feel utterly ashamed of myself.

And ashamed I felt. And angry at the unfairness of feeling so ashamed. And hopeless and despairing that our lives would ever get easier, that I would ever not be perpetually exhausted, that the solitude I craved would ever be forthcoming, that our community would ever be able to support my being a writer the way I had tried to support us in becoming farmers.

I spiraled, down and down, and down. The thoughts drag each other down the drain of despair so quickly sometimes. I was a bad person for wanting solitude. But I desperately needed solitude. I could never have what I really wanted and needed and be a good person and keep the love of my husband so what was the point of any of it? It was never, ever, ever going to get any better (suicidal folks pretty much always think that a temporary problem is a permanent problem, hence requiring a permanent solution). I opened a bottle of wine. By that point I'd already decided it might be the last one I ever drink, so among my cheap Trader Joe's finds, I picked a Carmenere from Chile which I recalled having a nice body. At some point—I can't remember when—I took some clonazepam (generic for Klonipin). Now, my first suicide attempt involved OD'ing on this drug, and I found out the hard way that doesn't work. It might put you in a coma, but it won't kill you, unless you combine it with alcohol (I found out from my very angry shrink later when I informed her of the cocktail of substances I'd put in my body that night. After telling me that Jimi Hendrix died from combining benzodiazepines with alcohol, she promised me that if I ever drank alcohol while taking a bennie again she would never, ever, ever prescribe them me for again. I guess she's rather fond of her medical license. Go figure).

At any rate, I had no intention of trying to OD on clonazepam, with or without booze. I've treated the drug with a great deal more respect since 40 mg of it landed me a night in a Santa Fe Emergency Room back in '11. Now, I only take about a ¼ of a mg at a time, when sorely needed, to try to get what a previous shrink had called a “floor” beneath me when I'm falling hard and fast. If I use it when I first start to spiral, it's very effective at stopping the spiral by calming my central nervous system enough that I can think rationally. But I'd waited too long to take it that night. As it happened, it was a small enough amount that the combo of it and the wine didn't cause my brain to forget to breathe, and I avoided Jimi's fate.

But I didn't want to OD. Maybe it's the artist in me, or just the narcissist, but I felt a need to avoid repetition. I had a rather lovely way to go planned, and was about to execute it (or rather, me) when I remembered I had promised one of my two best friends that I would reach out to her if I wanted to die before taking steps to do so. She had told me I could call her anytime, day or night. So, I called her and got her voice mail. This was distressing but not surprising. She was on a plane, flying to her nephew's wedding; she had warned me of this in advance.

I left her an incomprehensible message involving some crying, my characteristic apologizing for bothering her, and then tried to call my other best friend. I also got his voicemail. I had good reason to suspect he'd eventually get the message and call me back, but in the meantime, the execution of my plan, pardon the pun, was seeming increasingly like a good idea.

I decided to try the National Suicide Hotline. I did not want to do this. I did not want to talk to some stranger about what I was feeling—how could he or she possibly help me? I was miserable, despondent, ready to let go even though I believed it the most profoundly selfish thing I could do. I didn't want to live; why bother this stranger with my blubbering? Why is everyone so goddamned determined to keep a person who doesn't want to live alive anyway? Don't we have more than enough people on the planet?

I called the number. An electronic voice told me to press 1 if I were a veteran or active duty military personnel, and press 2 if I was just a regular old depressed person. I pressed 2, whilst being grateful that at least someone wasn't in denial about the epidemic of PTSD, depression, substance abuse and suicidal/homocidal thoughts the government gifts back to the soldiers it sends into hell for corporate profit. I was then put on hold while I was re-routed, supposedly to my state--Colorado's--suicide hotline. I wasn't expecting this to go well because when I'd tried to call the suicide hotline in my nearest city, Pueblo, a few years ago, I had gotten voicemail. To this day no one has ever called me back.

Sure enough, once I got routed to Colorado an electronic voice put me on hold again to re-route me once more. When a human voice finally answered she sounded like a tired customer service representative for General Motors. “Boys' Town. Can I help you?” Perfunctory and seemingly annoyed, she certainly didn't inspire confidence from me in the whole hotline process. I felt ridiculous, stupid, thought I'd called the wrong number.

“I'm sorry. I was trying to call the suicide hotline.”

“Yeah, their calls get routed to Boys' Town when they can't take them,” she explained in a bored, I'm-so-ready-to-be-off-duty voice.

Hesitantly, I told her, “well...um...I just...I think I want to kill myself.”

She immediately moved from Professionally Bored Operator into Concerned Stranger mode.

“Is there something I can do?”

“I...um.. [at this point I started crying]...I don't really know. I don't know what to say.”

Very gently she told me she could barely hear me, that she was only getting every other word. We've been having trouble lately with our Skype phone service, with either people on the other end breaking up or us breaking up, because—I can't help but love this reason—too many wild sunflowers had grown up in front of our antenna. The volunteer said the connection was bad, asked me to call back. I thanked her and hung up, with no intention whatsoever of calling back.

And then I stopped crying and started laughing.

Because, really, this is funny shit. I mean, here I am planning my death from exposure in the little river that runs through our land, a good bottle of red wine in one hand and a glass in the other (because I may be a suicidal wino, but hey, I'm a classy suicidal wino), and I don't actually want to call anyone, reach out to anyone, be stopped or slowed in my grand plan, but I do so because I think that somehow that means I'll be remembered as less of a selfish bitch, and not only can I not get either of my best friends by phone, but the damned National Suicide Hotline puts me on hold, transfers me, transfers me again, and then again, to someone who probably couldn't have helped me even if she'd wanted to, who can't hear me because my phone connection is so shitty.

I keep laughing. Unfortunately, it's not the good kind of laughter that heals you, but the cynical laughter that is entirely too close to crying.

I go to the National Suicide Prevention's website and look under the section “helping your self” since obviously getting help from someone else isn't going well. One of the suggestions is to distract myself, possibly by socializing, taking my mind off things. So, against my better judgment and with far too keen an awareness of the irony, I pick up my bottle of wine and head out to the picnic table where my husband and our farm interns are making and eating homemade pizzas. It sounds like such an idyllic, bucolic little scene, doesn't it? I imagine it is when you don't have a demon army marching around in your head. The last thing I want to do is tell the interns I'm suicidal, but I'm fatally honest about certain things, so when Charles, the young teacher from the local school, who has become an honorary intern because there is no one else in the valley he can socialize with under the age of 40, asks me how I'm doing, I say, “I shouldn't have sat down opposite you, Charles, because you barely know me. But the short answer is, suicidal, thanks for asking.”

And then, in an effort to make light—which of course is what you should always do with your closest companions when you truly want to kill yourself--I tell them the story of my efforts to find someone to talk to, laughing the whole time, because it's funny. Morbidly, tragically funny, but funny never the less. The kids respond kindly, gently; I am grateful that they seemed surprisingly nonplussed and don't treat me at all like a crazy person. I offer the wine around—no takers—then go to the bathroom and start crying again. When I come back to the table my husband pauses in his pizza-baking to hug me and say, “everything's going to be okay,” to which I reply, annoyed and, again, fatally honest, “no it's not,” to which he replies, “yes it is,” at which point I pull away from him slightly and say, “no! No, it's not.”

He throws up his hands in frustration with me and heads back to his pizza. I pick up my wine bottle and head down to the river.

Fortunately, he followed me. He tried to take the bottle from me, but I held on like a 3 year old, insisting, “it's mine. I paid for it. It's MINE.” We sat on the bridge and tried to talk. He started out with the bedside manner of Attila the Hun, condemning my little pity party, and to this I could only laugh.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"You're really, really terrible at this," I replied.

“Well what am I supposed to say? What do you want from me?”

Marriage ain't rocket science—trust me; I've studied rocket science and it's a lot easier. Sometimes, I've learned the hard way, cue cards are an absolute necessity.

“Put your arms around me and tell me you love me.”

Grateful to finally be shown the right page in my owner's manual, he put his arms around me and told me he loved me.

We sat together for a while, me crying and laughing bitterly, and continuing to reach for the bottle. He told me he didn't want me self-medicating “that way,” meaning with wine, and moved my bottle away from me. I told him I was way beyond self-medication and was simply using that to help me be a little more comfortable whilst falling asleep in the river. He held on tighter.

Eventually, after crying and talking and laughing bitterly some more, I had a terrible headache. He lured me back to the house with promises of Advil and two weeks of rest at the home of one of the two best friends. I suspect the latter promise is why I'm still alive as it gave me something much desired to look forward to. Tenderly, he put me to bed, brought me some pizza so I would eat something, filled me full of water, let me curl up and go to sleep, came and lay down next to me, asked nothing of me. Both best friends had called back during my sojourn to the river, and the partner of one--also a dear friend--even made me laugh by asking, sotto voce, "is she less dead than we thought?"

We rose at 6 the next morning to bake bread for the farmers' market.

What Possesses Me to Write This Blog?

This blog exists for one reason and one reason only: to keep me from drowning myself in the river, or overdosing again.  Those of you looking for a more a noble purpose, please surf on. I have tried to kill myself twice, and I'd rather not try again.  So this is my attempt to not try again.  And that was my attempt to write a grammatically correct sentence in English.  Let's hope I do better with the first goal.

The name of the blog is the best piece of advice I ever received in my life.  It wasn't meant as advice, and it only barely squeaks by my college calculus professor's consistent admonition, "don't make a hard problem out of an easy problem,"  This particular piece of advice came from a fellow undergraduate--I never knew his name--who staffed the computer lab where I typed up my honors thesis on a computer which required two 5 1/4 inch floppies: one to run the operating system and the other to hold one's data.  The one to hold the data could only hold about 100 pages of text.  My thesis was 99.  So, when I wanted to save it, I first had to delete the original saved file in order to make room on my floppy (apparently it never occurred to me  that I was legally allowed to own more than one floppy disk at a time).  Naturally, I broke out in hives during the several seconds it took to delete the older file and save the new one. What if the power went out?  What if there was an earthquake?  What if, God forbid, the kid who manned the lab rounded the corner and said in his flattest, Marvin-the-Paranoid-Android impersonating monotone:

"The system is about the crash.  Save what you can."

Sadly, this was something he said often.  Happily, it never happened when I was in the midst of resaving my thesis, and miraculously I eventually (and when I say eventually, trust me, I mean e-ven-tu-al-ly) graduated.  And then I experienced far worse computer debacles, all of my own making, but that's for another blog.  Or not.  Not, I'm thinking.  

I have this thing about the world.  I'm rather fond of it.  And you may have noticed, it's a total fucking mess.  It's been mid-crash for quite a while now.  I no longer think the crash is something that's going to happen all of a sudden.  I've had my heart broken by too many of you apocalypse-promising-snake-oil-salesmen.  But I can see with crystal clarity now, the system is crashing.  We can try to stop it, or we can save what we can.  I've spent most of my adult life trying to do the former, in various acid-indigestion-producing, alcoholism-inspiring manners.  I'm now firmly in the camp of "save what you can," partly because I no longer think what us humans in the First World call "the world" is savable, but mostly because my liver can't handle the booze.

I'm sick of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  You want to get out your fiddle and serenade us with "Nearer My God to Thee," good on you!  I'll be over here throwing as many people as I can into life boats (and trying to locate at least ONE more door that Leonardo DiCaprio can climb on to).

(Just to clarify:  by "world," I do not mean "planet."  Earth is going to be fine.  She's a planet for Christ's sake.  We're the ones who are totally screwed).

About me:  I'm sort of what you might call pathologically empathetic.  I also seem capable of understanding man's inhumanity to wo/man about as well as a microbe from Mars would.   I find myself returning again and again to a line from a poem by the amazing Sherman Alexie:

"I am waiting for someone to tell the truth."

I intend to use this forum to tell my truth--no relation to The--as I understand it, in the given moment.  If and when it changes, I'll let you know.  As long as you're civil, I promise to listen to your truth and take it to heart, whether I respond or not.

I am also a depressed, anxious person with borderline personality disorder, or so the docs tell me.  So, there's that.  And I may or may not be struggling with alcohol addiction, depending on whom you ask and what day of the week it is.  So, when reading this, please do consider the source.

Because the other system I'm talking about is me.  I feel, most days, like I'm walking along a narrow bridge over a bay full of starving crocodiles.  Some days, the bridge feels wide enough, kinda, justa barely.  Some days, I feel like a tightrope walker.   On those days I probably won't post, because I'll be too busy not getting eaten.

Not that I claim to have remotely his skill in writing, but I'm rather a fan of Derrick Jensen, and in particular his book, A Language Older Than Words.  (You should read it.  Now.  Go ahead, I'll wait). Either Derrick or his editor did a masterful job on that book, weaving the personal and the political like a coherent, soul-punching dream.  I'm making no promises in terms of that kind of quality, but that's my inspiration.  Personal and political.  It may be a bit too navel-gazing and full of First World Problems at times.  I'll just make a blanket apology for that right now.  I'm a First Worlder; we're kind of addicted to our navels.  But I'll try--I will--to remember that this is a public document, and therefore should maybe have something of use to the public, or at least something to say about navels other than mine.

Thanks for reading.