By: Kh Ishrar
Alex Kurtzman Reviews First Season Of Sleepy Hollow
Some things need no introduction but they certainly need some explanation. There are a a few scenes, we don’t just want to remember and love for a long long time, but also, we want to hear the other side of the story. Let us hear from the Executive Producer of Sleepy Hollow, Alex Kurtzman, who explained the scenes of the show in Entertainment Weekly.
The scene, where John Noble (Henry Parish/Jeremy Crane) was revealed as the Crane baby, was a nine minute monologue by Noble. Kurtzamn admitted that they were constantly scared that their biggest cat in the bag would be anticipated by the proactive fans of Sleepy Hollow and provided that the scene was at the core of the surprise elements of the first season, they were almost praying so the fans would not make the assumption.
And luckily for them the audiences did not have a clue, kudos to the producers for that! Kurtzman said, “We knew from the beginning of the season that it was going to be a monologue from John. And I think we were dreading for the season, “Oh my God, how are we going to sustain this incredibly long monologue for what could ultimately be more than an act of television? How are we going to keep the people interested in it? And how is it not going to feel like just the biggest exposition dump in the history of TV?” So we were quite nervous about that, but I think because we were so nervous about it, we’d given a lot of time to how we were going to construct it. One of the things that started to emerge as we got closer to the end of the season was the idea that the information was going to be divided between all the different characters, not just John. Given the fact that the story fractures into a bunch of different pieces by the time you’re in the last act of the show, each piece is going to start speaking to the next as an intercut. It was ultimately going to build in information, and that was the way to keep the audience interested in it.”
Kurtzman discusses another epic scene from before, the scene where Ichabod is about to devour poison and Abbie wouldn’t leave his side, even when she is asked to. The EP appr3eciates his actors in the process and says, “Having an actor of Tom’s caliber who just intuitively understands where the joke is, when to pull it back, when to play the drama — our cast across the board, they’re all right in it with their characters, but Tom really understood that. And so not only is he a man out of time, he’s really a man who is looking for connection, and he finds it in a woman who has been denying her past for so long, denying a trauma that happened to her since childhood. And his emergence into her life is something that forces her to confront it again. Suddenly he becomes the thing that validates an experience that everyone had dismissed in her life as being something that was just crazy. We were a little bit worried that the [poison] death scene was going to be too far too fast because it’s a very, very intense scene between the two of them. But I think that when we wrote it, what became clear was that it was in some ways the moment they realized how desperately they needed each other, and it was really nice to work outward from there.”
Last but not the least, the Golem episode. It was moving to see the creature from the past, the only connection that Ichabod had with his (then assumed) long lost son, was at the verge of being extinct. Ichabod puts up a final effort to relate with the Golem but has no luck there. He eventually has to be the one ot terminate the last remaining connection with his only child. Kurtzman goes on to talk about that scene, “Then the golem episode was another one of those episodes that was very tricky because, again, there were many things happening in that episode. First of all, you have a monster that is representative of his son’s pain. And so right off the bat, you’ve got a monster that is an extremely charged emotional entity. And in confronting that monster, Crane is confronting not only his son’s pain, but his son’s pain as a result of him not being a father to his child. That made it groundwork for a really intense story. In order to deflect the audience’s attention or suspicion away from the possibility that Henry was Jeremy, we needed to bring up the son story and then put it to bed so that hopefully people would think, “Okay, I guess in killing the golem, he ended his son’s pain and that story is over.” Then when you got to the end of the season, you would understand what the golem story was really setting you up for. It had to be emotionally very honest, and it was, because if you watch John’s performance in that scene when Crane has to kill the golem, he’s actually very sad about it. He’s just containing it. That was a key for us: always making sure that our context was wildly emotional and very charged but also hiding the ball enough so that you would get to play the big reveal at the end of the season.”