Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Episodes: 13
Duration: 42 minutes (per episode)
Sleepy Hollow: Season 4 (DVD) – Series Review
After the unfortunate death of the second ‘witness’ and combatant of evil, Abbie Mills, Ichabod Crane was left to fend for himself in his role as a witness. With the third season concluding with government type figures approaching the 250 year old man, it seemed as if other agencies caught wind of what Ichabod and his compatriots were trying to do. Now, the fourth season takes us to a more familiar place, namely Washington D.C. where fresh beginnings seem to be ripe for the picking, with new characters, new foes, and of course new cases to tackle, in the fourth and final season of Sleepy Hollow.
After weeks of questioning, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) grows suspicious of the group that is holding him, clearly for the sole purpose of getting information from him. He soon finds a way to escape, and immediately after, he is confronted with the first monster roaming around in Washington D.C., a monster that just killed Diana Thomas’ (Janina Gavankar) partner. The latter is still weary as it’s her first encounter with the occult, but as expected, Ichabod and Diana soon after cross paths again, and find themselves a way to the ‘vault’, which is a government organization set up by none other than George Washington (Mark Campbell) himself. This now forgotten library of the occult is under control of Jake Wells (Jerry MacKinnon) and Alex Norwoord (Rachel Melvin), who do the best they can to keep the vault alive. While Jake truly believes in the occult, and is happy when he learns that all the tales are true, Alex is a bit more skeptic and would rather keep things a bit on the safer side.
Nonetheless, the season revolves around finding the second witness, as when one witness passes on, their ‘force’ is transferred to another, in this scenario to the young Molly Thomas (Oona Yaffe). Of course, the fourth and last season will also have its own villain, namely the eccentric billionaire Malcolm Dreyfuss (Jeremy Davies) and his demon lackey Jobe (Kamar de los Reyes). These two are set on finding a set of mystic artifacts to perform a ritual currently unknown to the party of demon hunters.
The flow is pretty much like the previous seasons, where each episode a new monster is introduced, with whom the newly found group has to deal. The new and bigger team allows for more character interaction however, and it makes the series a tad more versatile, as there is much more room for character evolution, more people to get attached to, and overall better chemistry onscreen. Nonetheless, the loss of Abbie is still felt, as she was a great character in the series, but the new team makes up for a lot. Throughout each episode there will be a red thread with the main villain of this season, and with this season only being thirteen episodes in length, the pacing is pretty much perfect, as you’ll get fun new monsters to deal with, but the main story progresses at a steady pace as well.
A lot has changed cast wise for the series, as only Tom Mison and Lyndie Greenwood seemed to remain from the previous seasons. A lot of new characters were introduced, with Janina Gavankar, who played Diana Thomas, being a subtle yet welcome replacement for the second witness, Abbie Mills. Other than that, the other vault members didn’t stand out all that much, but their small intertwining storylines added a lot to the season in terms of character evolution and they were all superbly portrayed by their respective cast members. Oona Yaffe, who plays the daughter of Diana is a great child actor, who brings forth an interesting, but sadly underused, character in this fourth season.
It’s sad to see that the DVD edition of the fourth and last season doesn’t come with any noteworthy extras, safe for some deleted scenes. It would have been nice to say our proper goodbyes to the cast, or to have some behind the scenes footage, rather than simple extra scenes that didn’t make the cut.
Conclusion
Sleepy Hollow: Season 4 might have been one of the strongest seasons of the series yet, as it involved a lot of new fun characters, a proper team to fight the forces of evil, and an interesting villain who got his power from an unholy pact with the devil. The pacing was perfect, the storyline interesting and the cases were fun to watch, and the shortened span of the season also worked in the series’ advantage. We would have loved to see more seasons follow after this one, with the same formula. Sadly, due to poor viewer numbers Sleepy Hollow was tossed back in the dark abyss whence it came.
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