If you copy somebody else’s work and you tell everybody you did—or they know it anyway—it’s called homage. If you do it and don’t tell anyone, it’s called plagiarism. Sometimes plagiarism is entirely unintentional—either you got the same idea as someone else and didn’t know they did it first, or something stuck in the back of your mind, consciously forgotten, then it floats back up. The people involved with Sleepy Hollow (Mondays, 9 PM ET, Fox) have been involved with enough genre material to be aware of the difference (Fringe, the Underworld films), but… Well, you be the judge.
In 1781, Ichabod Crane, on direct orders from George Washington, shoots a fearsome redcoat (wearing a mask that looks like the beta test version of Bane’s) know for beheading his opponents. Shooting him just makes him mad and he slashes Crane a mortal blow with his axe. But before he passes out, Crane beheads the redcoat—
—and wakes up buried in a cave. He stumbles through the woods and finds himself on the centerline of a two-lane highway. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
Crane is not alone with awaking from a long winter’s nap; the now Headless Horseman is back, too, up to his old tricks. At first Crane is blamed but Abbie Mills—a police lieutenant who has also had a brush with the unexplained—believes he’s innocent. It turns out the horseman is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and once he is reunited with his head, the band will be back together again and all Hell will really break loose.
And that’s pretty much the set-up for Sleepy Hollow, which tries to be Lost and Supernatural with a dash of The X-Files thrown in (except this time, neither Mulder or Scully want to believe). But more than anything else, it seems to be a mash-up of Scandal and Elementary.
Crane (Tom Mison) bears more than a passing resemblance to Johnny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes in mannerism and speech, while Nicole Beharie’s Lt. Mills reminds you of nothing more than Olivia Pope’s kid sister. (She even has that Pope Perpetual Pout.) Even the musical cues, meant to evoke Crane’s Revolutionary War period, would not be out of place on Elementary.
`The acting is good and the stories move briskly, but the question is, will viewers stay around through the dueling covens/bound by blood/visited by ghosts plotlines until the Apocalypse?
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