[Ed. Note: Carmen Petaccio is a writer from New York City. He blogs regularly at bpofd.com and loves Sleepy Hollow.]

“Listen, my monsters, and you shall hear, of dental arts of Paul Revere, on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five; only one handsome man is now alive, who remembers that famous day and year.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So, Paul Revere is on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, not being a dentist at all. He’s stopping by all of his friends’ houses, whispering, “The Regulars are coming.” Just like you remember, from history! All his friends promise to play whatever-the-colonial-version-of-Telephone-was (mouth?), and Paul Revere rides uneventfully on to the next town. Or at least he thinks is…until The Pre-Headless Headless Horseman joins his Midnight Ride! And impales one of Paul’s pals in the back with his battle axe? And decapitates another of Paul’s pals in vivid slo-mo, producing the first of this week’s many neck-stumps, and bears down on our beloved not-dentist Paul Revere…and…and…

Ichabod is perplexed by Costco. He and Abbie are in the Sheriff’s getaway cabin, staring at a minor mountain of Costco products. “With stores of Top Ramen such as these,” he says, “we could have taken Lexington in a day!” As they begin to unpack, Abbie receives the first of this week’s many preposterous fake iPhone alarms. According to Abbie’s preposterous fake iPhone alarm, they only have one hour until sundown, when the Horseman will ride/violently kill people in graphic detail on network TV. Way to procrastinate, heroes! “This Costco unpacking is pressing,” Ichabod says, “but I guess I’d better reconvene with my Freemason bros before someone DIES.” Ichabod heads to do that, and Abbie heads to do nothing, because the Freemasons are “boys only,” because “boys rule,” and because “girlz drool.” The Costco will have to wait.

While Ichabod does that, Abbie returns to the station where that jerk Luke is all about “buying her a coffee.” Ugh. After a half hour of (justifiably) calloused denial, Abbie agrees to the coffee date, and Luke (also justifiably) hits the Sleepy Hollow nightlife scene to get wasted and celebrate. At some point during his drunken bacchanal, he runs into our long, lost zombie friend, Zombie John Cho. ZJC is like, “Luke, you goddamn jerk, stay away from Abbie. Spend the rest of the episode sweating profusely at your desk and ignoring her calls!” “Yes, ZJC,” Luke says, and he is, for the moment, redeemed.

Ichabod arrives at The Freemason Mansion where all of the Freemasons’ heads have been reduced to neck-stumps. (Headless is obvi Team Gurlz.) Abbie rolls up and they put their beautiful heads together and decide that it’s probably best to destroy The Headless Horseman’s Head before he institutes the apocalypse. (At least set a fake iPhone alarm, Abbie.) They request the haunted head from Captain Orlando Jones, but he is like, “I’m still not believing any of this, I refuse, I don’t care how much inexplicable spookiness I encounter, I’m a SKEPTIC. But, sure, I’ll get that haunted head back for you.”

Well, joke’s on you, Captain Orlando Jones! All your re: spookiness skepticism was all for re: everything nothing. The Headless Horseman drops by the haunted head storage facility/taxidermy outlet, kills OJ’s metalhead scientist friend, and almost kills Captain Orlando Jones, but he escapes to his town car. OJ returns the haunted head to Abs and Icks, and probably makes this face for the rest of his life.

What follows is a perfect montage of Abbie and Ichabod attempting to destroy the Horseman’s haunted head. Ichabod sledgehammers it. Abbie Walter-Whites it in a tub of acid. Ichabod re-slegehammers, Abbie re-Walters. Nothing works! Distraught, they cross the street to where the Horseman has craftily transformed the Freemasons’ heads into Chinese lanterns (for his Pinterest board). This sparks Ichabod’s memory (duh) about a secret document given by John Adams (mmhm) to Paul Revere (yuh-huh), and something about an inscription on the inside of the haunted skull’s teeth (right), since Paul Revere WAS a dentist (as you guessed), which definitely contains the secret of how to defeat the Headless Horseman, which we already known (from the entire season) is sunlight. See also: Abbie in a hazmat suit.

This leads our heroes to the Tarrytown Museum of Colonial History, where, wonderfully and of course, Ichabod mocks the tour guide’s faulty claims of Paul Revere’s dental practices. Abbie brings Ichabod some bad news. “The manuscript is on loan to a museum in London,” she says. “But that’s a three month voyage by sea!” Ichabod says. “Oh,” Abbie says. “Is it?” (Side bar: This episode really turned the Ichabod-out-of-water gags up to 11, and was all the better for it.) They return to the Handsome Cave. Abbie introduces Ichabod to PDFs, and Ichabod interacts with her computer with the grace and subtlety of a refrigerator descending a flight of stairs. It’s perfect.

Now I’ll just write this and move on: hotchixxx.com.

Moving on, Abbie and Ichabod have no idea what to do, until they run into our long, lost zombie friend, Zombie John Cho in the secret under-town tunnels. “You can’t kill the Headless Horseman,” ZJC says, “but you can trap The Headless Horseman using tanning bed lights.” How this is the one deduction our heroes couldn’t make, I’ll never know. Abs and Icks invite Captain Orlando Jones over for craft time, and they manufacture one thousand artificial haunted skulls. They lure the Horseman into the underground tunnels, send him on a wild and infuriating fake haunted head hunt, and finally capture him in an invisible cage of tanning bed lights. All better! Your move, apocalypse!

Tune in next week, where we’ll interrogate a ghost monster without a mouth!