The Indispensable Man, episode 13, closes the first season of Sleepy Hollow as the third of three related episodes of a program that could generate new sig lines as Jennie utters: “I have more than faith - I’m a mental patient with a gun”
James Thomas Flexner was an American historian and biographer best known for the four-volume biography of George Washington that earned him a National Book Award in Biography and a special Pulitzer Prize. His one-volume abridgment, Washington: the Indispensable Man (1974) was the basis of two television miniseries broadcast in the mid-1980s starring Barry Bostwick as Washington.
Reagan's Washington, much like Grover Norquist's Mt. Rushmore proposal to add Reagan's head, is a GOP myth. Much like the
Cahiers Du Cinema "Young Mr Lincoln"
film analysis, the
1984 TV miniseries of Washington focused on a narrow, yet instrumental feature of the subject, and as ironic as Reagan's own heroic military service making military training films Norquist's hagiography of St Ronnie gives us the heroic Zombie meme which Sleepy Hollow applies to George Washington to advance the narrative.
The textual intersection of biblical hermeneutics, the annotation of the "Founding Father", plus freemasonry feature in the closing episodes for the seasons as Deputy Andy is perhaps finally destroyed after being converted via chrysalis to a demon. The sign of a Saint figures literally and figuratively as Henry Parish, the Sin Eater is in reality the Second Horseman, War and Crane's son. The cliffhanger is Abbie being trapped in Purgatory in exchange for Katrina, Crane's wife. The usual cultural mash-up continue with snappy patter between Ichabod and his cell phone's Siri. The narrative continuity problem emerges with the Crane and the audience misreading a pre-colonial war reenactment, but not using the cellphone's camera function and relying on Crane's eidetic memory to negotiate the trust represented by possession of Washington's map to the gateway to Purgatory. As a parallel component of narrative, Captain Irving confesses to killing the victims in a prior episode to save his wife and daughter. The date cited in the prior chapters is 13 years to the day of the encounter with Moloch in the forest and we revisit meetings between Sheriff Corbin and Reverend Knapp that lead us to a variety of alternative reality sequences involving a shared dollhouse where Jennie expresses fear of losing Abbie. The closing episode 13 ends as Parish is revealed to be the second horseman – the actual son, Jeremy of Katrina and Ichabod that was murdered by the witches in the 18th Century. So many questions remain to be solved in the second season as the hiatus may yet provide the writers a bit time to improve on more than the conventional genre elements perhaps in terms of the switches among alternative realities.