'Bones'/'Sleepy Hollow' Crossover Review: Creepy Halloween Fun

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When I heard that the producers of Bones and Sleepy Hollow got their idea to cross their shows’ universes over from the Simpsons/Family Guy crossover, I thought, gee, they really don’t understand what real life is in Hollywood, do they?

But then I realized that Bones and Sleepy Hollow are populated with cartoon-like characters, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Bones’ Temperance Brennan and Seeley Booth are, by now, a comic couple, forever exasperating each other amusingly, in a show surrounded by other characters who roll their eyes and make wisecracks over dead bodies. By contrast, Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills are — well, Crane is a fictitious creation (by Washington Irving) whose existence in the “real” world of Sleepy Hollow is assumed to make some corporeal sense.

In Thursday night’s crossover event, it’s almost Halloween, and the Bones folks discover a headless corpse. Now, don’t quote me on this, because the plot gets both historically entangled with alternate readings of the Revolutionary War and the mythologies of both of these TV shows, but the key crossover mechanism is that the corpse the Bones cast was squinting over belongs to a General Howell who at a certain point gets reanimated by Sleepy Hollow villain Pandora.

No more details lest I accidentally spill spoilers. The writers enmeshed in the crossover do a clever job of pairing up Booth with Mills (they are both cops who are sometimes too passionately involved in their jobs) and Brennan with Crane (both relate eccentrically to the often-baffling worlds around them). If I liked the Hollow part of the crossover a bit more than the Bones part, it’s only because the General raises an army of undead soldiers, and, sorry, but musket-carrying zombies are more fun than the Bones lab rats. That said, the entire two hours move along with a sense of energetic fun that does both shows credit.

The Bones / Sleepy Hollow crossover airs on Fox tonight at 8 p.m.