Sleepy Hollow EP Teases Henry's Role in Finale, Crane's 'Ultimate Challenge'
Will the real Henry Parrish please stand up?
John Noble made his heralded (second) return to Sleepy Hollow Friday, but not quite as his usual alter ego, Henry Parrish. Instead, the Fringe vet showed up as an amalgam of Ichabod’s memories of him — preserved in the glass jar at The Vault since the despair demon incident — mixed with the blood of the Horseman of War.
Who happened to be Ichabod at the time. (Don’t worry: The Revolutionary War captain was back to his normal self by the end of the episode.)
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Henry managed to convince Jenny & Co. that, because he was composed of Ichabod’s good memories, he had only good intentions. But in the hour’s final moments, Jobe brought the sin eater to meet Malcolm, and that’s when it became clear: Henry was playing Team Witness, and he very much wants to be the Horseman of War once more.
Are Henry’s intentions completely nefarious? And what does his reappearance mean for next week’s season finale? We asked co-showrunner Albert Kim for some insight.
TVLINE | How did you come to the decision that this was how you were going to bring Henry back into the fray?
There’s two parts to that question. One is the simple, logical mechanics of how you bring back a character who’s died on the show. We knew we wanted John Noble back; it was something we’ve been thinking about since the beginning of the season. And especially as we got closer to the end of this season, and we saw where our story and thematic threads were leading, they all have to do with family. This show has always been about family, and Henry is an important part of that, obviously.
So we had to figure out, from a purely mechanical standpoint: How do we bring Henry back from the dead? Luckily, we’re a show that deals in magic and lots of out-there phenomenon and concepts, so we had a little more leeway there… We came up with, well, what if the jar of goo mingles with the blood of War, which are all the essential components of Henry? …Now, whether this is the actual, flesh-and-blood Henry that we knew from before? We leave that a little open to interpretation.
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…By the end of the episode, you realize he’s much more the holistic version of Henry that you know and that Crane has always known: He’s both Good Henry and Bad Henry and all the complexities that Henry represents. And then in the next episode, we have a couple of amazing scenes between Tom Mison and John Noble where Crane, who knows Henry better than almost anyone, senses who this character is, who this person is and tries to reach out to the person he knows in his heart is there. The dramatic question we pose in the episode is: Will that work? Is this the Henry that’s going to respond to that, or is this some purely evil spirit incarnation of Henry?
The basic answer is that he’s Henry, but there could be something more in there. We don’t know that yet.
TVLINE | Henry prides himself on being a few moves ahead of everyone else. How will he do, working alongside Malcolm, who is very similar?
That’s a really good point, and it forms quite an important part of [Episode] 13, because Henry, as we’ve seen in the past, doesn’t do well responding to authority. In a way, he’s a lot like Crane.
TVLINE | Tell me something good about the finale.
It’s the first time we see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in action in the real world. They are actually, for the first time, galloping on Earth. We see how powerful they are and what they can do. That represents, essentially, the ultimate challenge for our team. It’s something that, not even back in Seasons 1 and 2, that Crane and Abbie had faced. They had one or two of the horsemen, but this is the full team riding, and under Dreyfuss’ control. So that’s a big thing, just in terms of action and plot… [Also], you’ll learn why the motto of our country is “E pluribus unum.”
What did you think of Henry’s return? Hit the comments!
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