Violet recaps Episode 4 of Sleepy Hollow, titled The Lesser Key of Solomon, where Abbie and Crane track down Abbie’s sister, Jenny, who has escaped from the mental institution. Following the episode recap, both Josh and Violet provide their thoughts on the episode.
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Sleepy Hollow Episode 4: The Lesser Key of Solomon Recap Overview
Need a quick Sleepy Hollow episode recap of Episode 4 titled The Lesser Key of Solomon? Here is a summary of events for the episode. Each event is linked to the more detailed Sleepy Hollow episode recap for The Lesser Key of Solomon if you need more information!
- Jenny escapes from the mental institution. Abbie convinces Captain Irving to give her a 12 hour head start to look for her sister.
- Abbie and Crane track Jenny down to Corbin‘s cabin, where Jenny is hiding. We learn that Jenny and Corbin were close, and he had sent her traveling around the world to obtain objects and find answers for him.
- The night before Corbin died, he could feel death coming, and asked Jenny to retrieve a hidden object from his cabin — a sextant.
- Crane recognizes the markings on the cloth in which the object is wrapped, and tells a tale about having implemented the Boston Tea Party as a diversion while he was trying to retrieve a powerful weapon from the British, which was inside of a chest with those same markings.
- The sextant is actually a projector, which displays a survey map of Sleepy Hollow in Crane‘s era, and points to the location of the hidden chest.
- Hessians attack the cabin with gunfire and take the sextant. One Hessian is left behind, so they question him.
- The Hessian reveals that inside the chest is a book that will open a doorway to hell and free 72 demons, and that the head of the Hessian sleeper cell is a demon named Moloch, the same demon that Abbie encountered before. The Hessian kills himself with a suicide pill.
- Crane draws the map from memory, and they track the chest to a nearby church, where the Hessians have already begun to open the doorway to hell to free the demons.
- After some fighting, Crane pushes a Hessian into the fire, Jenny shoots the other and pushes him in, and Abbie throws the book in the fire, thus trapping the demons back in hell.
- Abbie wants to become Jenny‘s conservator
Sleepy Hollow Episode Recap: The Lesser Key of Solomon, the Details
The episode starts off in 1773 in the middle of the Boston Tea Party, which was apparently a distraction so that Crane could obtain a certain crate. Suddenly, there is an explosion.
Flash forward to the present. Crane is sitting in the car having a conversation with a tearful “Northstar” rep about his wife Katrina, and gives her advice on her love life. A white van screeches away, and Abbie comes outside the mental institution to tell him that Jenny escaped. Abbie asks the Captain to call off the search so that she can have a head start looking for her. He is reluctant, but finally agrees to give her 12 hours.
Jenny stops at a bar to pick up some things she left in the safe there. The bartender, who seems to be her friend, asks for an explanation, and she replies, “You remember when I told you one day this town was gonna go straight to hell? I hate being right.”
A piano teacher is in the middle of giving a lesson, when he gets a phone call informing him that Jennifer Mills has escaped and that they have reason to believe that she knows where “item 37” is. His orders are to find her and retrieve item 37, with the help of a clean up crew.
The piano teacher and his associates question the bartender about Jenny’s whereabouts. He plays dumb at first, then tries pulling a gun on the piano teacher. However, the bartender is overpowered, and the men begin to torture information out of him.
Abbie is on the phone with another police department for information on carjack reports, while Crane peruses Jenny’s criminal file. We learn that Jenny traveled the world. Crane asks where their parents were, and she reluctantly reveals that their dad left when they were little, their mom had a nervous breakdown, and she and Jenny got dumped into foster care. Crane points out that after the age of 12, Abbie had one foster home, but “Miss Jenny” had 7. He suggests they visit her most recent foster home for information.
Meanwhile, Jenny is in a truck stop bathroom loading up a couple of guns.
At the bar, we see that the bartender was beheaded. When the Captain investigates, he notices that the bartender’s beheading was not cauterized like Corbin and the Reverend, and that the man was tortured. He wants this kept off of the radio.
When Abbie and Crane visit the foster home, Abbie calls out the foster mother on abusing the foster care payments for her current foster child. Abbie threatens to report her if she doesn’t give her useful information to find Jenny. The woman tells her about a nearby cabin Jenny used to go to.
When Crane and Abbie arrive at the cabin, it’s locked, so Abbie breaks in. They realize that it’s Corbin’s cabin, and see a picture that suggests Jenny and Corbin were close. Jenny comes out with her gun drawn, and Abbie draws her gun as well. They argue as they have their guns pointed at each other, but Crane breaks up the fight, and they drop their weapons.
Jenny didn’t know that Corbin never told Abbie about her. She reveals that she helped him obtain rare objects and find answers. Jenny says that Corbin came to visit her the night before he died, and he felt something was coming for him that felt like death. He asked her to go to his cabin to get something that he needed her to keep safe. She opens up a secret compartment and pulls out a sextant, which is for mapping sea travel.
Crane looks at the piece of cloth the sextant was wrapped in and recognizes the symbol as one he saw during the Boston Tea Party. They had received word that the Redcoats had obtained a weapon that could turn the tide of the war, which Washington sent him to steal. Abbie is in disbelief that Crane invented the Boston Tea Party to steal something from the British. The soldier guarding the object was a Hessian, like the Horseman. The Hessian caused an explosion, thereby taking his own life to protect the weapon. Crane was the only survivor. He recovered the chest containing the weapon, and sent it to General Washington, without ever seeing what was inside.
Crane explains that Hessians were Germans loyal to the British crown, known for their ruthlessness in combat. He then reveals that the sextant is actually a projector that displays a survey map of Sleepy Hollow from Crane’s era. He believes it pinpoints the whereabouts of the mystery chest.
Suddenly, they are attacked by gunfire. It’s the piano teacher and his guys. While they are distracted, the guys take the sextant and drive off with it, leaving the piano teacher behind.
They tie the piano teacher to a chair and question him. He is unresponsive, until Crane begins to speak to him in German. He recognizes the mark of Reinhessen and realizes this guy is a Hessian. When Crane asks him what’s in the box, the piano teacher reveals that it’s a doorway to the 7th circle of hell where 72 condemned souls wait upon a shore of flaming sand. Jenny recognizes this as the legend of “The Lesser Key of Solomon” which is about a book of black magic written by King Solomon, filled with rituals to conjure 72 demons trapped in hell. The book itself is a key capable of unleashing the demons into our world. The piano teacher reveals that he is part of a sleeper cell, of which he has no idea how many others belong, and that the head of the sleeper cell is the demon that Abbie and Jenny encountered in the woods, and that Abbie and Crane saw in the mirror. When Abbie demands to know the demon’s name, the man says a phrase in German, then bites down on a suicide pill and dies. Crane translates that the guy said “Moloch shall rise.”
Abbie begins to call Captain Irving, but Jenny stops her, saying that they can’t trust anyone. Crane is able to use his photographic memory to draw the map the sextant had projected, and they determine that the key is located at a nearby church.
When they arrive at the church, the Hessians are already calling forth the demons, which they did by spilling their blood into the book. A pentagram of fire begins to expand, and we see the demons trying to make their way through the doorway from hell. When the Hessians see that they have company, they attack. Abbie gets knocked out by one, and the other nearly throws Jenny into the fire, but Crane saves her. Abbie wakes up and throws the book into the fire. Crane pushes one of the men into the fire, and Jenny shoots the other and pushes him into the fire as well. Then the doorway to hell disappears, trapping the demons once more.
Later, Abbie visits Jenny, and tries to make up with her. Abbie proposes that she let her be her conservator. That way, she’ll be able to get Jenny out in less than 6 months.
In the final scene, Crane finds evidence that Moloch is indeed the name of the demon that Abbie saw in the woods, who controls the Horseman, and who is guarding Katrina.
Violet’s Thoughts: Sleepy Hollow, Season 1 Episode 4: The Lesser Key of Solomon
I’m still enjoying Sleepy Hollow overall, but I wasn’t too excited by this episode. Maybe because I had gotten used to the supernatural elements of the show, whereas we were dealing with humans for the majority of this episode, I don’t know. Then when we finally got to the demons, the effects looked a little too fake. I think that was the first time on this show that the effects bothered me.
In any case, we did get an interesting revelation about Jenny and Corbin having had a close relationship, which I did not see coming. It turns out that Corbin met Jenny in the same way that he met Abbie, because she was being a juvenile delinquent. However, it seems a little odd that if Corbin and Abbie were so close that he would have kept his relationship with Jenny a secret from Abbie. Is it possible that Jenny and Corbin were even closer than we think? Either way, if Jenny had Corbin in her life, why wasn’t he able to keep her out of the mental institution?
I liked how Crane was given credit for the Boston Tea Party, and how the show continues to bring in historical elements. Additionally, I am still amused by the subtle humor that is placed into each episode, such as the “Northstar” representative that Crane was talking to in this episode. So far, the combination of supernatural, historical, and humorous elements is working for me, and I like how we get to know the characters a little better each episode.
I’m really looking forward to the next episode, because the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic subgenre is my all-time favorite, especially where the apocalypse is caused a plague! (As in Stephen King’s The Stand.) Okay, obviously Abbie and Crane will stop the plague before it spreads too far, but still! Of course, this would tie right in as the work of the Pestilence Horseman of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. We already know that the Headless Horseman is Death, and this episode would suggest that a second Horseman has arrived.
Josh’s Thoughts on Sleepy Hollow, Season 1 Episode 4: The Lesser Key of Solomon
This episode of Sleepy Hollow took an interesting twist, stepping away from the demons being the “bad guy” and having some plain old humans being the problem. Although, despite them being human, they did try to perform some crazy summoning ritual, so the supernatural part of the show was not completely eliminated.
For me, it was kind of weird that Abbie had no idea Jenny was visiting Corbin regularly. Why wouldn’t he try to bring Abbie into the fold? I would have thought that Abbie would eventually come around if her boss believed what happened to them when Jenny and Abbie were children. One question I had, is how was Jenny was able to go on her “missions” Corbin sent her on without alerting her foster families as being missing?
So far, I am still digging the show. The supernatural element has been pretty good, and downright creepy at times. I am still hoping we get deeper into the story rather than doing these “one-off” episodes that loosely tie the overarching story together.
Overall, I am enjoying Sleepy Hollow, despite my few complaints. All of the actors are relatively enjoyable to watch, unlike some of the people on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and that I have already complained about. So far, I think Sleepy Hollow and The Blacklist have been my favorite new shows of the fall.
Scenes from Sleepy Hollow, Season 1 Episode 5: John Doe
Here are scenes from the next episode of Sleepy Hollow, titled John Doe:
