On tonight’s new episode of Sleepy Hollow, “The Midnight Ride”, all your favorite elements return: the Horseman! John Cho! Action scenes! Shotguns! Crane bemoaning the state of American history classes! Protests over the concept of paying for bottled water! Arguments about that unseemly Sally Hemings story!

For those who missed out, my attempt to streamline the basic events follows after this courtesy spoiler alert for the sake of time-shifted viewers.

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As the title indicates, the story of this week’s MacGuffin began on April 18, 1775, the night of the famous “Midnight Ride” when — as the show tells it — Paul Revere and three other riders were ordered by their superiors to warn the colonists, “The regulars are coming!” (That old chestnut about “The British are coming”? Hogwash, yells Crane to a modern tour guide who clearly wasn’t there. After all, at this point the colonists were still officially British themselves…and so on.) Revere himself had an additional mission, however — orders from Samuel Adams to deliver a most peculiar manuscript that would spell trouble for a certain paranormal assassin allied with the King’s men. Said manuscript was packaged in a heavy bag sealed with a special heptagram called a “Devil’s Trap”, which would surely signal to anyone who saw it that the contents were uniquely valuable and/or dangerous.

Along their route, the Horseman intercepted them — killed two, wounded one, but didn’t quite catch Revere. Somehow the manuscript eluded his grasp, reached its intended destination and was put away for safekeeping for over two centuries, hopefully never to be needed. And they all lived happily ever after.

Fast-forward to the present: after the Sin-Eater severed Crane’s ties to the Horseman last week, Abbie and Crane realize they’ll need to find some other way to stop the Horseman, since killing Crane would no longer result in the Horseman’s own voodoo-doll-style death. A planned rendezvous with the Masons goes awry when Our Heroes arrive to find all of them killed and their heads missing. They interpret this as a nonverbal message from the Horseman: he wants his own head back, and he means to take the heads of others till they hand it over. If he doesn’t get to have a head, no one gets to. Adding insult and ickiness to injury, the Horseman converts their heads into makeshift decorative lanterns. Bleah.

Captain Irving continues his uneven track record of refusing to believe Our Heroes while giving them what they need anyway, and tries to cover up the Masons’ deaths with the media by framing it as a “cult ritual suicide”, which is a pretty impressive trick for any cult to pull off, if only the last guy alive can figure out how to finish his own beheading and complete the set. Because he’s such a swell guy, Cool Captain Irving also agrees to go pick up the Horseman’s head from the crime lab where he sent it for testing. Giving this vital mission to the biggest skeptic on the team seems an odd choice, but he outranks them and apparently wasn’t content with just giving them directions to the lab.

Irving arrives in just enough time to learn that all the mortal tests administered to the head — basically just a skull with the eye sockets curiously sealed over — have turned up no usable results. Exposition is interrupted when the Horseman arrives with guns a-blazing, turns the lab into so many fragments and shards, and does what Abbie and Crane never could do: he makes a full-on believer out of Irving. Our man survives his first full-on action sequence and narrowly escapes with Death’s head.

What follows is a Looney Tunes montage of Abbie and Crane taking turns trying to destroy the head in order to foil the Horseman’s plan to summon the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse back to Earth. Nothing they try works, possibly because Sleepy Hollow orders all its weapons and destructive implements from Acme. At this point Crane recalls that fateful manuscript delivery job from 200+ years ago and figures perhaps now its information might be useful. After one side trip to the Tarrytown Museum of Colonial History, where Crane’s head explodes at the “apocryphal” tales woven by the tour guides to a gaggle of unsuspecting students, Abbie learns the manuscript is on loan to London, but has been helpfully been scanned and posted online in its entirety for all to see. So now anyone with internet access can defeat Death if someone shares the right link with them.

Back at their crimefighting den across the street from Police HQ, Abbie introduces Crane to the concepts of the “internet” and the “laptop computer” so he can retrieve whatever he needs from those virtual pages. Despite interference from pop-up ads, easy-to-click redirect links, and a brief bout with a porn portal, Crane prints out several copies of the pages and sets to work cracking the Vigenère cipher that was used to encode it. Fortunately for him, Paul Revere was thoughtful enough to carve the keyword on the back of six of Death’s teeth, because mystery reasons: “CICERO”. I suspect Revere had intended this bizarre, clueless puzzle to remain unsolved until National Treasure 3.

Also aiding in their quest is a surprise appearance from dead deputy Andy Brooks (John Cho returns!), who’s still in Death’s servitude but retaining just enough free will to help Abbie out because he’s still crushing on her, even though his chances of scoring her while he’s dead and employed by Evil are zero. As we pretty much already figured out before Abbie and Crane did, you can’t just kill Death. But, Brooks suggests, you can trap him. Hence the manuscript. Brooks also helpfully scares away Abbie’s ex-boyfriend, fellow officer Luke Morales (Nicholas Gonzalez also returns!), foiling his dreams of reconnecting with Abbie. At this rate Abbie will die alone and unloved by the series’ end.

As luck would have it, Abbie and Crane later chat while they’re scheming, and reach this same conclusion. As long as she remains Sleepy Hollow’s only hope against the forces of Evil, dating without discussing her job would be rather hard. Crane likewise confesses that he and his wife Katrina, still in shadowy purgatory, have their own long-distance relationship issues. The conversation walks the ambiguous line between either two best friends comparing hard-luck stories, or two crazy kids having trouble seeing that they’re in love. Fans of either scenario are free to argue for one or the other, though I’m not remotely wild about seeing any future episode in which Crane hires a superpowered divorce attorney who can send a summons across dimensions just to please Abbie/Crane ‘shippers. (I haven’t kept up with Sleepy Hollow fandom: do they have a cute couple nickname yet, like “Ichabbie”?)

The showdown is arranged in the usual cemetery that evening. Brooks sends word to the Horseman, who shows up ready to pick up his head and slaughter anyone who says no. Crane and Abbie lead him on a merry chase through the town’s underground tunnels using a series of cheap fake skulls, which keep fooling him surprisingly well. Apparently Death’s many powers don’t include the ability to detect his own head.

He also can’t tell when he’s being suckered. They lure him into one final room in the catacombs and blast him with his one weakness: UV rays! As we learned in the pilot, the Horseman hates the sun. Thus, Our Heroes theorize, it’s not the Sun’s metaphysical symbolism that renders him powerless (though this is where most magic-based TV shows would end their train of thought), but the sun’s own ultraviolet light…which humanity luckily figured out how to harness in lightbulb form in the centuries that followed the manuscript’s final draft approval.

Thus is Death himself laid low by several thousand watts’ worth of tanning salon equipment. Immobilized and unarmed, Death falls to his knees, whereupon Crane slaps on a heavy pair of ankle cuffs and stands proud at the success of their simple little Deathtrap.

And the episode ends before anyone begins reading Death his Miranda rights. To be continued!

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If you missed a previous episode of Sleepy Hollow, the last few episodes can be watched online at Fox’s official site, or MCC recaps are listed below for handy reference. Enjoy!

9/16/2013: “Pilot”
9/23/2013: “Blood Moon”
9/30/2013: “For the Triumph of Evil”
10/7/2013: “The Lesser Key of Solomon”
10/14/2013: “John Doe”
11/4/2013: “The Sin-Eater“