Sleepy Hollow recap: Dead Men Tell No Tales

We’ve arrived at part two of the Bones/Sleepy Hollow crossover (read our recap of part one here), otherwise known as the event that would definitely be my Ascension if I were the Mayor of Sunnydale. But would the Mayor ever ascend on Halloween? Buffy would argue no; supernatural creatures do hate to be commercialized. Sleepy Hollow takes a different approach. What better time to roam the streets undetected and prey upon citizens who are all out too late?

Pandora kicks off the celebration by raising General William Howe from the dead. She interrupts his transport into town to throw a stone on his remains, illuminating a Nordic emblem and reanimating his corpse. Even alive, Howe was never a peach — he did conjure up a whispering wraith that one time — but he and Crane still have a complicated past. During the invasion of Manhattan, Washington sent Crane to kill his former commander: no small ask, since Crane takes the bond of a “lef-tenant” seriously. Crane offered Howe a way out, promising to let the general live if he’d order his men off the island, but Howe refused to retreat. Crane was ready to kill him, only to be cut short when soldiers burst through the door.

He should have known that Howe wouldn’t let death stop him. The general swore the oath of the draugour, signing up to be a soldier even beyond the grave, and now that he’s back, he’s bringing his old army back with him. Howe takes the party to Sleepy Hollow’s mausoleum, where he raises a group of draugour who kill a kid out for an early Halloween adventure. Don’t they know not to interrupt the Witnesses’ bowling night?

Abbie and Crane get a call that Howe’s corpse never arrived from the Jeffersonian, and since Temperance Brennan isn’t one to mess up paperwork, they suspect foul play. “Foul play” and “Pandora” are pretty much synonyms. The car that Pandora ran off the road isn’t far from the mausoleum, which is how the Witnesses find themselves in an old cemetery on Halloween morning, a dead body on one side and a whole army of the undead coming at them on the other. Even bullets can’t stop the draugour (“Isn’t that great?”), but sunlight can — the soldiers disappear beneath the dirt at the first sign of daylight.

Hitting the archives for research, Crane and Abbie find a note about the draugour written in Washington’s handwriting. The answer to defeat the soldiers lies in Howe’s “primal tomb,” which suggests that his body wasn’t always in the church where the college kids found it. There is one way to find his original resting place — Abbie shot off a bone in Howe’s hand, and who better to trace the history of a bone than Dr. Brennan? “Now might be a good time for her and Agent Booth to throw down,” says Crane. Now is always a good time for that.

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The Witnesses take a road trip back to D.C. to issue a challenge to their “new friends at the Jeffersonian.” (What a phrase.) While Brennan reads the bones, Booth reads Abbie. He knows that she’s working something off the books, and he trusts her judgment — and Corbin’s — enough to know that he still has her back. He’ll have to, since Brennan just volunteered him for duty. She found particles on the bones from two separate quarries, and only the United States Capitol was built with stone from them both. There’s no way an anthropologist like Brennan is letting Crane re-enact National Treasure without her.

Going full-on National Treasure is Sleepy Hollow’s common ground with Bones — it’s where Booth’s rogue, leather jacket-wearing patriotism and Brennan’s love of historical artifacts meet Crane and Abbie’s vigilantism in underground tunnels. “A basement is never just a basement with the Masons,” Abbie sighs, world weary already, as Crane slides his ring into a notch on the wall and turns it. A door opens to a hidden tomb with runes matching those on Howe’s mortsafe in the church.

But before Abbie and Crane can find what they’re looking for, Booth steps on a lever. A wall drops in the middle of the room, locking Brennan and Crane in with the coffin — and a hot blue flame, which drops from pipes in the ceiling. Crane thinks it’s Greek fire, legendary for being inextinguishable; Brennan thinks it’s napalm; Booth just thinks he needs to get his wife out of there. Rather than solve the lock’s alchemical puzzle, he just shoots it, and the partners are reunited. Brennan, who never minds a near-death experience if it’s archaeologically significant, practically drags Booth out of the room. They shouldn’t even be here to disturb this kind of find.

NEXT: So it’s gonna be forever, and it’s gonna go down in flames

Alone at last, the Witnesses debrief: The draugour’s weakness must be fire. That should be pretty straightforward, but Greek fire can’t be extinguished — if they take down the draugour, the town goes down with them. It’s happened before, as Crane recalls in this week’s Obligatory Betsy Ross Tie-In: Betsy led Patriot refugees out of Manhattan through a system of hidden tunnels, then returned to burn Howe’s original troops. What I’m getting out of this is that the Great Fire of New York never would have happened if Betsy didn’t have such a lone wolf complex.

Crane and Abbie have what Betsy didn’t: backup. Back in Sleepy Hollow, Jenny and Joe prepare some Greek fire, and the Witnesses hit the streets, interrupting the soldiers’ demonstration before it can turn deadly. Crane lures Howe down to the tunnels, where the blaze can be contained, and he and Abbie let loose. They burn all of the draugour except for Howe, who surrenders to the flame on his own rather than give Crane the “satisfaction” of finally killing him. Cool motive; still death.

Crane and Abbie catch up with Booth and Brennan over video chat, because that’s just where they are in their friendship — though they leave out the undead soldiers burning beneath their town. That’s third-date stuff. The Jeffersonian is taking Washington’s tomb under its jurisdiction, and Brennan wants Crane to help with the excavation, but he’s a bit busy fighting for his archives at the moment. He’s also busy flirting with Zoe, which Booth and Brennan would probably not approve of. Abbie, on the other hand, is for it, maybe because she just wants to help her partner move on from Katrina. She hands him his phone and tells him to ask Zoe on a proper night out.

Abbie has enough to deal with from the FBI anyway. Daniel is taking down a local crime ring buying items stolen from terrorists, and he wants Abbie to coordinate the task force — until he sees Jenny and Joe dealing with one of their top operatives. As it turns out, Daniel is after Atticus Nevins, the same man who directed Sophie Foster to steal the Shard. Joe is so desperate to find out Nevins’ connection to his father that he offers Foster the Shard in exchange for a meeting with the man himself, which doesn’t look good to Daniel. Here’s hoping the Mills sisters can weather this one.

Doughnut Holes

• “All up in your faces.”
• I wish Hodgins could have seen all of this.
• Abbie is Beyoncé, always.
• Brennan’s 5-year-old daughter is going as Jane Goodall. She gives me hope for our future.
• We have a tiny Cookie Lyon on our hands! One Show to Rule Them All
• “Instant-gram.”
• “This is astonishing.” “Oh, and yet only this morning it was questionable.”
• “Their skepticism is interminable. She’d dismiss Moloch as a tall man with a skin condition.”