Episode 2.9: "Mama," the Original Ms. BAMF

All the Mills women are fighters.

With Episode 2.9 “Mama,” directed by Wendey Stanzler, we're treated to a beautiful love story between a mother and her daughters, a powerful theme exploring Abbie's need to understand why she was chosen to be a witness, a well-developed plot, and, best of all, quality time with Jenny, Abbie, Irving and Mama Mills.

The more I watch this show, the more I realize Sleepy Hollow demands a great deal of its writers. By the end of Act One, writers must introduce this week's case, the B story/love story/heart, the theme of the episode, the villain/s and the motivation of at least one of the villains, a clock or other barrier our heroes are up against trying to defeat said villain, a bit of detective work, mortal stakes--preferably for our heroes--and a real hook, or teaser, for the act break. This all has to be achieved in roughly nine pages of excellent story-telling. I've described this structure to successful, accomplished television writers and seen their jaws hit the floor. “All of that? In the first act?!?”

Pretty much.

Given what writer Damian Kindler was up against he did a more than adequate job of setting us up for very satisfying Acts Two and Three (or as they're known in Sleepy land, Acts Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). That said, Act One was, for me, the least satisfying part of an emotionally very satisfying episode.

We open with a rather bland nightmare of Abbie's, with her mama in one of the Nazgul's old robes wandering amidst ruins furnished with lots of dry ice and a few fires. Mama doesn't want to give away too much of the plot so all she tells her daughter is “Abbie, demons!”

Yeah, well, we knew that, Mama. We've been watching the show.

We transition to the present and once again find police lieutenant Abbie Mills playing nurse. Now, I understand that police are trained as First Responders, and the tenderness of the moment between her and Crane is really quite lovely. But this makes at least the fifth time this season Abbie has played a significant nursing role (with Hawley in “Go Where I Send Thee” and “Heartless,” with Katrina in “Deliverance” and “Heartless,” and now with Crane). It's nice to see other sides of Abbie, including her nurturing side, but please be careful with this. Nursing has traditionally been a very socially conservative feminine profession, and not exactly the most empowering to women. Abbie's a police detective, not a nurse.

No one should be able to look that good sick.
No one.  

If Tom Mison wasn't really sick when this episode was being filmed he deserves an Emmy for Best Performance of a Time-Traveler With a Cold. Hell, if he was sick, he probably deserves it even more. The tiny bit of Ichabod we get in this episode is mostly a delight. Cranky Ichabod insists that he can continue working despite his illness: “I fought at Saratoga with dysentery.” I love the call-back to Episode 2.5 and the re-enactors' intention to replay the Battle of Saratoga. You can just picture Ichabod wandering around the field saying, “No, no. You were over here.  You were over there.  You were dead.  Excuse me a moment, I need to find a tree.” Mison also continues his successful run of making props into interesting supporting characters. Ichabod-meets-child-proof-lids was wonderful.

When Abbie's dream startles her awake, she shares the dream with Ichabod who, adorably, in his blocked sinus voice, calls Moloch something that sounds a great deal more like “bollocks.” Beharie then very naturally takes us through the exposition setting up our story, telling us she's been dreaming of her mom every night for the past week. Alas the Irritating Recap gets a bit clunkier as we explain Abbie's—and her mother's—connection to Tarrytown Psych, the location of a spate of recent suicides.

When Jenny goes with her sister to begin the investigation at Tarrytown, absolutely no one with a brain larger than a walnut needs her presence explained with Abbie's “no one knows Tarrytown better than you.” But, really, who cares? Jenny's back from Series Siberia!! YEA!!!!!

After a speechless patient tries to tell Abbie and Jenny something, subtly enough so we're not quite sure if this might be relevant to the case, a very friendly nurse with a fashion sense stuck in the 50s welcomes Abbie to the hospital. This scene was handled so deftly by writer, director and actors. Happily, the first patient on Jenny and Abbie's visitation list is Irving. Having these three back in the same room together, doing detective work together, is a long-overdue and welcome treat, made even more poignant by Jenny's memories and pain, the PTSD she's obviously experiencing at Tarrytown even as a guest. And it was heartbreakingly lovely to hear Abbie still refer to her former captain as “Sir” when asking if he had anything to do with the suicides, seeing as he's signed his soul over to the Horseman of War.

Irving reminds us "I did all this for my daughter."  What sounds like Irving sharing more of the Irritating Recap actually serves as a rather subtle introduction of this episode's theme, parents sacrificing themselves for their children. Abbie is typically indefatigable, self-assured and optimistic when she assures Irving they're not only going to get him out of Tarrytown but also undo whatever Henry did to his soul. This was a powerful scene, well-written, well-directed, and well-played by all three actors. 

I am a bit worried about the new Sleepy Hollow writers, though, given that Mr. Kindler named the first suicide at Tarrytown Psych after one of the scribes of  Episode 2.7.  He then goes on to give the new writers one hell of a pep-talk about life in the writers' room through Jenny. “You learn to deal with the abuse and being surrounded by misery.” Do you guys need a care package? Matzo ball soup and scotch?

We are treated to some very fine backstory for the Sisters' Mills in Act One, and it's a completely believable payoff from two seasons of getting to know her to hear Abbie admit fear that she would end up in an asylum like her mother and sister. The fact that this fear has “tainted everything she's done since” is a potent window into her character. And, now that she knows her mother wasn't crazy but literally wrestling with demons, we find out her deeper motivation for figuring out what happened to her mother at Tarrytown Psych. She wants to know “why am I a Witness? Why was I chosen for this?” Setting up this week's theme as a question to be answered was very brave, but also very dangerous, because it leaves us, the audience, rather expecting an answer by episode's end.

Abbie and Jenny seeing their mother's ghost in the corner of late patient Nelson Greave's room makes for a powerful act break. Thank you, guys, for understanding that the emotional weight of this episode is such that we didn't need a mortal scare for our heroes at this point. I do wonder, though, how Abbie didn't connect her mother visiting her in her dreams every night for the previous week with the suicides at Tarrytown. Abbie's a pretty smart woman, and this is at least the second time this season your audience has had to wait for the detectives to catch up with them regarding the case.

When we flash back to Mama Mills and little Jenny and Abbie we meet both the marvelous young actresses playing our heroines, Haley Walker and Melannie Sanchez, and the amazing Aunjunue Ellis. Ms. Ellis' ability to take a character as high-pitched as Lori Mills and not only make her consistently believable but painfully empathetic, is remarkable. I must confess, I do wish she could have been written/directed with a lighter hand but I get that we're meant to see a woman who has been almost completely broken trying to protect her children.

Our tone lightens up back at the archives, a bit too much for my taste. Crane's resentment of Hawley feels cartoonish and overplayed given that the two men just killed a succubus together in the previous episode. His fierce defensiveness of Katrina when Abbie casually points out that Mrs, Crane hasn't managed to kill Moloch yet is curious given his own doubts about his wife. The discovery of matzo ball soup, and the suspicious eyes when he starts falling over in his chair from Hawley drugging him were, as ever, played spot on by Mison. Still, I profoundly miss the subtlety of Crane's humor from the first season.

We get a bit of shading to Hawley's character in a call-back to Mr. Kindler's “Go Where I Send Thee,” learning that our resident charming rogue is a Jane Austin fan.   However, finding this out actually kind of irritated me vis-a-vis the earlier episode.  I was going to comment in my critique of that episode, “why doesn't Hawley just call Crane 'Darcy' instead of 'Pride and Prejudice'?” But then I thought, oh, because he's never read the book. (Or if he did, it was at gunpoint in a tenth grade English class). But his inexactitude makes no sense in light of him being an Austin fan, now calling Crane “Mr. Woodhouse.”

As Crane dozes off and Hawley and Abbie bond over literature, we drop into the middle of a scene between Henry and his mother. Henry quoting Hamlet to Katrina is all well and good--those of us who will never be able to afford to see John Noble perform Shakespeare on the stage very much appreciate the Bard bones--but narratively, where the hell are we?  When last we left Katrina, she was playing the newly resolved Bride of Headless and cooing over Baby Moloch. Now she's telling her son she won't cooperate in whatever his latest diabolical plan is.  Is Katrina really so enchanted by the sight of a human baby she can't deduce who the child is, or is she pretending not to know so she can be alone with the baby long enough to kill it?

You have to admire Katia Winter' sense of humor about all this.

The mother-and-child tension between Katrina and Henry is good. The absolute best part of the scene, it's heart, are the emotions flitting across John Noble's face as he watches Katrina nurturing Moloch enviously.

Back at Tarrytown, Third Wheel Hawley helps the Mills' sisters subdue the mental patient, Walter, whom we portentously met earlier in the episode, and Abbie gets sucked into some vortex, presumably by her mother's ghost. Once she lands, in an old wing of the hospital, Abbie runs into both her Mama's ghost, trying to warn her, and Nurse Lambert, looking suspiciously like a refugee from American Horror Story: Asylum. After these two disturbing visits, Abbie leaves the wing to look for Jenny and Hawley. Jenny and Hawley, meanwhile, go looking for Abbie, splitting up, as you do in a haunted psych hospital, and Jenny ends up getting a few moments alone with her mama as well.

Fortunately, Mama Mills understands this is a detective show, and so she obligingly gives her daughters an obscure, written clue instead of just telling them flat out what they need to know (in fairness, Kindler did address this, making it clear from the start that Jenny fears her mother, and having her shout at her mother's ghost to stay away from her). But how the hell does Abbie know that the message is an alpha numeric code used by mental hospitals to designate patient video sessions, specifically one of her mother's? (Oh, right. Because it's Abbie's week to Just Know Shit).

Meanwhile, back at Fredericks' Manor, finally alone with Baby Moloch, it takes Katrina noticing she's been poisoned by his nursing (on her shoulder) before she suddenly remembers, “there was something I was supposed to do...now what was it again? Oh, right. Kill Moloch.”

Honest to God, Katrina, it was literally the the only thing on your to-do list.

And, naturally, she's too late, since Baby Moloch grows almost as fast as Fetus Moloch, and already he's talking which of course means he's now too powerful to kill (because...reasons?). Moloch is apparently also trying to delude Katrina into thinking the blond child is somehow her son, calling her “Mother” in a lovely English accent (even though Moloch thinks the English say “lieutenant”). This entire plot line is just SO. BEYOND. WEIRD. Because having one's son be the Horseman of War, one's ex-fiance be the Horseman of Death, an apocalypse to stop and a husband who doesn't trust you is just Not. Enough. Drama???

No caption required. 

In a gorgeous scene back at the archives we are reminded why the fandom keeps begging for more Lyndie Greenwood as Jenny confesses that, while she loved her mother, she was also terrified of her, and as a result doesn't really want to see a videotape of her mom with a shrink. The loving moments between Abbie and Jenny are written, acted, and directed beautifully, and feel so real. Good older sister Abbie says, “we do this together,” and the Mills sisters' unity and strength is enough to make you want to cheer.

While they watch, we're treated to tension-building intercutting between Abbie and Jenny learning from Mama Mills that, while she was a patient at Tarrytown, the same Nurse Lambert was poisoning her mind and convincing her to commit suicide, and Lambert in the present persuading Frank to take his life. While the weight of this scene was handled beautifully by all, I have to admit I was bit thrown by Abbie beginning this section of the scene already quite emotional. I would have expected to see her tamping down her emotions, trying to watch the video like a professional detective and then crumbling the more she watches her mom.

The next act is just gorgeous from start to finish. Because he just hasn't suffered enough this season, Frank Irving tries to kill himself. How creepy am I to be appreciating Orlando Jones' magnificent torso as he's playing, so beautifully, Irving's suicidal torment? Discuss. (Do not discuss). On the subject of suicidal torment, could someone please donate money to Tarrytown Psych to replace all their flourescent bulbs? And maybe take up a collection for some new bathtubs too? Nurse Lambert or no Nurse Lambert, they'd be enough to make me pack it in if I were a patient there. Bless Nick Hawley's heart, he thought to bring a knife to a ghost fight, so when the A-Team rushes in to save Irving, they're successful. My bad, Mr. Hawley; I guess you do have a purpose in this episode after all.

Abbie and Irving's post-not-mortum was gorgeously restrained, tender; its power really came from what wasn't said. Back at the archives, Abbie and Jenny figure out that the Nurse Lambert they've encountered is the ghost of a nurse executed in the 50s for her role in numerous mental patient suicides.  In a well-paced, well-played scene, Jenny asks Abbie, “You really think Mama knows how to stop her?” so we know we're heading back to the asylum for a final showdown.

Thinking they'll find answers there, the sisters and Hawley head to mama's old room in an abandoned wing, and in a fantastically real, gorgeous bit of visual poetry, the women (with a little help from Nick) pull off the remains of the peeling plaster, literally unearthing their mother's true heart, to see a mural of themselves, painted by Mama Mills. It's a beautiful moment, followed magnificently by Jenny freaking out remembering her mother tried to kill her in a suicide attempt. “Even when she was trying to protect us, we weren't safe.”

Cue Mama warning everyone that they're not safe.  Mama explains that there's a journal packed away in the hospital with her things. The journal has an ancient hex that can stop Lambert. Mama's been trying to use it to stop folks from killing themselves, hence her presence in Mr. Greaves' cell on the video, but she couldn't remember the words, which makes perfect sense in light of all she's been through. It was great getting to see Mama being something other than Totally Crazy with a capital Cray. After Abbie is sucked by Lambert through another vortex, Mama shows us where her elder daughter's general-like organizational skills and capacity to pull it together quickly when the shit hits the proverbial fan come from. Fortunately, Jenny knows exactly where this journal would be—on a shelf in the hospitals' archives, right between the French nuns' demon-expelling lantern and the consecrated stained glass that voids the Tyrian shekel's power.

In another abandoned wing of the hospital (couldn't they rent these out for parties or something?  Earn a little cash to get the patients better Jello?), Abbie goes into her default self-defense mode—shoot the supernatural thing, just in case that helps—but no one comes running in the asylum from the sound of a gun shot because Gina Lambert wisely interrupts Abbie before she can fire by strapping her to a wheelchair.  Abbie—being Abigail Mills--fights so much harder in that wheelchair, strapped down, than Katrina has EVER fought for ANYTHING. Not to beat a dead horse, but why can't Katrina take some lessons from Abbie in 21^st century Ms. BAMFness?

Back in the hospital archives, we learn that Jenny too, apparently, got the family skills in the witch department—who knew?—as she finds and begins to chant the ancient hex. A good, quick flashback makes sure we all remember who Grace Dixon is without slowing the tempo or action.

Lambert reveals her motivation for killing all these people in a monologue which nicely convinces us she's a somewhat complex villain. Another noose comes into frame, like in “Go Where I Send Thee”; I'm noticing a pattern here, Mr. Kindler.

Nurse Lambert takes her sweet time getting sodium pentathol into Abbie Mills' mouth, just to make absolutely sure Mama Lori has time to show up and rescue her girl, even though Lori's a ghost which must mean she can take shorter routes than us humans, right?  “And. Now. We. Take. Our. Pills.”

I've been waiting 400 years for this. 

Our climactic fight is a very rewarding battle between two dead women, the sort of thing only Sleepy Hollow could pull off. We're treated to more magnificent visual poetry as Mama Mills wraps a chain around Nurse Lambert's neck.

Jenny's hex and Mama's fierce strength and determination defeat Lambert; both the villain and Mama disappear by the time Jenny and Hawley find Abbie. The rapid emotional shift here between Abbie's seemingly very cool—too cool—demeanor as she tells Jenny Mama “fought for me” and then losing it after she's cut free didn't work for me. I feel like there was a step in that emotional process we didn't get to see, one that was important.

In our B story's powerful, tear-jerking climax newly-minted witch Jenny raises Mama Mills from the dead for a reunion and proper farewell to her daughters.  Head-explodingly, Abbie acknowledges her partner's contribution to the ceremony with “thanks for bringing all this stuff, Crane.” Another thing to add to the business card?

Ichabod Crane, Esq.

History Professor, Revolutionary Officer, Witness to the Apocalypse,

and Procurer of Witchy, Ghost-Raising Materials

I love the looks Crane and Abbie give Jenny when she slips on her sorceress robes. “Did you take a Learning Annex course we don't know about? Where the hell did you get all this stuff? Since when do you know how to conjure the dead?  Don't you think that might have been a useful skill to list on your resume when applying for a job with Team-Stop-The-Apocalypse, Inc.?”

Crane's sneering reluctance to take Hawley's hand feels sillier and in poorer taste even than Yitzhak Rabin's antipathy for taking Yasser Arafat's at the signing of the Oslo Accords. Even Hawley gets that it's time to make peace. In fact, it appears that his time spent pinch-hitting for Crane (like anyone could) seems to have inured Hawley to the insanity of life on the A-Team. While the Witnesses seem a bit uncomfortable with this ceremony, Hawley's just rolling with it.

The scene among Ellis, Beharie and Greenwood is deeply moving, really perfect.  It turns out, like Katrina with Ichabod, Mama knew all along her beloved Abbie was a witness (but also never told her). When Abbie asks her point blank to answer this week's emotional puzzle, “why was I chosen?” Mama demures with “so many things you don't get to choose, Abbie.”

Aw, c'mon guys. Seriously? Don't get me wrong. This was a great scene, particularly with the flashback showing us the actual end of Jenny's earlier story, how Mama saved Jenny from demons.  All three actors held the scene together beautifully, and again, it was lovely to see the women handle everything while the men supported them. And the scene's ending--“I forgot how beautiful she was”--felt so real.

"Don't give me that 'aiding and abetting' look, Mills."

But Mama's answer was in no way satisfying to this fan. I appreciate your not making it easy, but given that this was the damned thesis statement, it's more than a bit irritating to wind up here at the end.

The final scene was a delight: Frank, the victim of demons, has agency and uses it to escape Tarrytown Psych. YEA!!!!!!