Relationship Spotlight: Jenny & Abbie Mills (Sleepy Hollow)

Oh, how I love the Mills sisters.  The Crane-Abbie partnership is probably the show’s best-known quality, and rightfully so, but there’s so much great material to dig into where Abbie and Jenny are concerned.  It’s been fantastic to watch how their relationship has grown and deepened over the series, and I’m eager to see where they go in the future.

Any discussion of Abbie and Jenny has to start with their childhoods.  The fissure that’s colored their relationship formed on the day the two girls saw a demon in the woods.  When the missing sisters were brought to the police and asked to explain their unaccounted hours, Abbie was adamant that they keep mum.  Separated from their mother, bounced around the system, and finally in a decent foster home, she was afraid that two disadvantaged black girls spouting stories about demons would be wanted even less than they currently were, and she didn’t want them to lose their living situation or, worse yet, get split up.  Jenny, however, couldn’t tell anything but the truth, and her bid for Abbie to back up her claims went unanswered.

This is the moment they veered off.  While Abbie has some reckless years before being taken under the wing of a caring mentor and getting her act together, Jenny has a much harder time coming back from their experiences.  She presses against the bounds of the law, the bounds the society’s definition of sanity, the bounds of what most people would call reality.  Her time between incarcerations (criminal, mental health, or both) is spent dangerously while Abbie slowly gains respect as a police lieutenant.

Even though the actions of both sisters in that moment were understandable – impulsive, earnest Jenny doesn’t want to lie, and shrewd, protective Abbie is looking at the big-picture implications – it leads to such a divide, such hurt, between them.  Jenny blames Abbie for leaving her to be branded a liar and lunatic, for turning her back as Jenny gets lost in her precarious life.  Meanwhile, there’s a part of Abbie that wants to reach out to her sister, but she feels so responsible for the way Jenny’s life has turned out that her guilt overwhelms her.  Of course, any attempts to help on her part are met by Jenny’s resistance anyway, a square-shouldered dismissal that Abbie’s never cared about Jenny’s well-being before, so why should she start now?

That’s the messy backdrop against which the two women are brought back into each other’s lives.  Much of Jenny’s violent or illegal activities in the intervening years have been embroiled in the good vs. evil battle that Abbie and Crane now fight, and they need allies where they can find them.  Jenny’s skills, knowledge, and fortitude are vital, but bringing her back into the fold isn’t easy.  Aside from all the massive issues mentioned above, there’s Abbie’s status as a prophesied witness and Jenny’s belief that it’s undeserved.  Why not her, the sister who told the truth and took a stand against evil from the start?  The one who didn’t abandon those she cares about or deny the evidence before her eyes?  It’s so complicated and tangled, and though they’ve come a long way, it’s definitely been a two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation.  I lovewatching them work through all this baggage – the genuine hurt, the guilt, the misperceptions – and slowly coming together on the same path again.  For so long, they’ve been the good one and the bad one, the officer and the criminal, the cynic and the believer, the mentee and the loner, the stable one and the crazy one, and it’s incredible to see both women start to throw off these labels and recognize one another as their true, more in-between selves.