Sleepy Hollow 1x03 For the Triumph of Evil...

[oyceter]

Huh. I am getting a little more emotionally invested in this. This was not the plan! This is supposed to be my fun, cracktastic fling of a show that occasionally shows up with heads in jars!

... anyway, mostly trying to keep expectations low.

Spoilers have creepier imagery than I would like

The good:

• Abbie backstory! Jenny! Jenny meeting Ichabod! Pretty much anything that had to do with Abbie and Jenny! I think if I shipped the show, it would be Jenny/anyone she talks to.


• I'm still holding off to see how the overall treatment of mental illness is, as well as the possible stereotype of Crazy Black Woman. Obviously, like Sarah Connor, Jenny is not crazy, and it's interesting that the episode focuses on all the people who basically abandoned her to that label despite knowing the truth.


• Yay, the captain is falling more into the gruff-but-mostly-fair supervisor type. I love that he lets Abbie and Ichabod take over that random room, and that he doesn't actually care about the explanation for the case, as long as it's been fixed. I also really liked his confronting Abbie's ex over the headless traffic sign.

The bad:

• It would be nice if it weren't always the white guy making points about slavery or Native American government. I am glad at least that the points weren't about how close to the land and innocent and unspoiled the Native Americans were, but rather how the US government was basically based on the governing structures of Indian federations.


• Really wish Abbie had not framed it so that it sounded like Native Americans were basically relics of the past.


• I also don't know much about the Mohawk nation, but I was confused re: the "no pow wows" line. And googling "Mohawk pow wow" brings up stuff. So...??


• I roll my eyes SO MUCH at the whole shaman/scorpion/dream tea/monster thing. Oh Sleepy Hollow, no. Does anyone know how accurate any of it was? Ditto with the clothing/hair/etc. of the Mohawk guys in Ichabod's flashback. At least I think the actor they cast as the shaman is Native?
  
  ... it is so sad that casting a Native actor is a plus instead of a given. Oh Hollywood...-_-;;

Comments

[seraphcelene]

Yeah, the "no pow wows" thing was a what for me. I still enjoy pow wows and they are held all over the place. The entire Native Shamanism thing was kind of a pass for me. In many ways this episode was a pass for me.

What I did find interesting besides Abbie's speech of I did a shitty thing (and I think the level to which she accepted how wrong she was and the way that she articulated the things that were wrong was awesome) was the visual language used to identify and separate Abbie and Jenny. I'm sure that I'm reading way to much into it, but even if it's incidental, I think it's telling that Abbie has processed hair and her sister doesn't. Beyond the economics of one being free and with a job, law enforcement no less, it touches on definitions of social acceptability. Everything about Jenny is unacceptable and marginalized.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I appreciated what they were trying to do with the "no more teepees and stuff" quote, but it was offputting to include something that is still being held in various places!

Ohhhh, I did not pick up on the hair thing. I think you're right; it's probably not conscious, but it goes with Abbie's professional presentation (suits, nice clothes, makeup), versus Jenny in her sweats.

[aimedatthestars]

I'm also really interested in seeing how they handle mental illness. Especially since, as you mentioned, it's tapping into the way mental illness has so often not been rooted in science but in having a different world view. Really hoping they address this with a race/gender standpoint. IDK what the history of black women has been with insane asylums, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was horrifying considering what the medical institution as a whole has done.

(Also, I looooved Jenny doing all the pull-ups and being a general awesome person prepared for the coming apocalypse. I so want her to be a regular)

Have you read Orlando Bloom's, the guy who plays the police chief, twitter? There's some pretty great stuff.

It would be nice if it weren't always the white guy making points about slavery or Native American government.
Agreed. Although I guess it's to be expected since with Ichabod being the mouthpiece for it, it can be dismissed as lulzy time travel culture shock or the ravings of a madman. :p

And LOL forever at the shaman bit. It was so weird that the show went out of its way to have the Native guy say, "Are you seriously asking me if I'm a shaman, shall I call you kemosabe?", critiquing that stereotype... and then going right ahead and having him be a shaman.

[willow]

Orlando Jones.

Bloom is Legolas.

__

[aimedatthestars]

Oh my gosh, that was a terrible mistake on my part.

Thank you!

[oyceter]

Re: mental illness... on the one hand, I like having Abbie and Jenny's views validated by the reality of the show. On the other hand, the whole "this would actually be 'crazy' if it weren't in the Sleepy Hollow universe" thing is a little offputting... it reminds me a little of how various supernatural and/or alien creatures are used instead of actual POC for metaphors about racism and discrimination.

I haven't been following Orlando Jones' twitter, but I did see the one he posted about the real-life Abbie Mills!

Sigh. I am glad in that "wow that is such a low bar" kind of way that the writers even acknowledged the whole shaman stereotype, but writers, it doesn't work that well when you go right on into replicating it!

[willow]

As much as I too rolled my eyes at some very 'tv' things; like where did the other two guys come from? And who has scorpians just chillin' in jars?

From a non-native pov? I enjoyed Ichobod's 'shock' at 'But... they were just here. What do you mean you can't throw a rock and find one'. It was a kind of almost Captain America 'But what do you mean ppl don't trust the govt anymore'?

I also appreciated that whatever scuttlebutt Abbie knew about the Car Dealer being a traditional practitioner (cause it didn't seem like she just went to ANY ole NDN) - that his traditional stuff? Was way HELL out away from the town. There was this clear delineation of who he was among one group - a kind of code switching I don't often see on television.

I also liked his; 'listen, that 'friend of the people schtick' is old.

I didn't read it as 'we don't have anymore' - but as a 'we don't open our arms and just invite / have ish necessarily in the open anymore - don't think this means you can roll in like you know us'. But I appreciate, stepping back, to see there was context making First Nations seem 'gone gone - into the West like elves - bullshit'.

[oyceter]

The scorpions! The florescent-colored herbal tea! The absolute necessity of taking off their shirts!

but as a 'we don't open our arms and just invite / have ish necessarily in the open anymore - don't think this means you can roll in like you know us'

For me some of it is that it doesn't seem as though pow wows are really very hush-hush events (?). That said, I can also see someone just not wanting to let Abbie and Ichabod in on things. Sigh. It's irritating because just the acknowledgement that there is the dead Indian stereotype and the "all Native people are ~magic!~" is more than I expect from TV, but I so wish they hadn't just turned around and gone with the shaman!

[(Anonymous)]

If the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrytown,_New_York) about Tarrytown, NY (which claims that nearby Sleepy Hollow was formerly known as "North Tarrytown") is to be trusted, the local Native Americans were not the Mohawks, but the Weckquaesgeek tribe, who are related to the Mohegans (or Mohicans). Judging by what some fairly authoritative-sounding person said in response to the Google Answers query "Are the Mohawks and Mohicans the same tribe?", they definitely aren't. So presumably the Mohegan/Mohican-related Weckquaesgeeks wouldn't be considered Mohawks either.

Unfortunately for the show's purposes of demonstrating Ichabod's enlightened-white-guy qualities, the Mohawks, not the Mohegans, are the ones who are members of the Iroquois Confederacy, a confederacy of five tribes whose form of government supposedly did provide inspiration for certain aspects of early American political organization. (Whether the Iroquois Confederacy influence would actually have been evident in anything the colonial rebels had actually done yet at the point in the still-ongoing Revolutionary War when Ichabod had his temporarily-fatal encounter with the Headless Horseman is another matter.) So whether the show's writing staff just did inadequate research or deliberately mentioned the wrong tribe in order to get the bit about Iroquois influence on the Constitution in there somehow, it doesn't seem as if in real life the Native Americans Ichabod would have encountered in the Sleepy Hollow area in the eighteenth century would have been Mohawks.

This obviously casts considerable doubt on the accuracy of all the allegedly Mohawk mythology, ceremonies, and other details featured in the episode. Not that I was expecting any of that to have much relation to reality, since an allegedly traditional Native American ritual in which scorpions are a key ingredient strikes me as rather geographically improbable for a tribe whose ancestral home is located in what is now known as Westchester County, New York.

Wikipedia does claim that scorpions are now found on every land mass except Antarctica, in some cases due to being inadvertently smuggled in with loads of stuff imported from elsewhere. But even if there are somehow now scorpions living in the wild in modern day Sleepy Hollow, would they really have been roaming free in slightly-upstate New York (as opposed to what later became known as the American Southwest) to be incorporated into traditional shamanic remedies back when the dream demon was originally bothering Ichabod's Native American friends back in the eighteenth century?

Marfisa

[oyceter]

Thanks! The other thing that confused me upon a quick glance at Wiki (which, obvs, doesn't stand in for any sort of in depth knowledge) is that the Mohawk nation was one of the four nations in the Iroquois federation to ally themselves with the British. So I guess Ichabod's friends were spies like him? In which case, I really want to know why they decided to switch sides. Or maybe they were part of the group that didn't ally themselves with the British and got in as spies via the Mohawks who did? WHO KNOWS.

... I mean, I realize I am trying to make historical sense out of a show that has George Washington's Magical Bible and the American Revolution Saving the World from Evil, but given the overall lack of historical accuracy and terrible misrepresentation Native people have had to deal with, this seems much more important to get right!