A memory wipe leaves the gang on Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina fighting monsters and each other
TV Reviews Recap
For a show like Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, once the initial novelty of a fantastical world becomes the norm, the constant introduction of new creatures provides the best way to keep challenging your characters. And there’s few methods more effective than the creature that causes the memory wipe.
That’s what the Imp of the Perverse ends up doing to all of Greendale once Faustus decides to use it to make himself Emperor…of Greendale. Sure, ruling over one town may seem like small potatoes for a guy who used to be a high priest of the devil, but he’s ultimately using it to get to Sabrina, which works really well for him right up to the point when Prudence cuts off his head.
But before she gets to that point, the show takes Sabrina and Roz on a tour of Greendale for the perverse, where Harvey is part of the secret police, and none of the other Spellmans recognize Sabrina. Instead, the duo has to try and piece together what’s happening while various of their friends are endangered by Blackwood’s tendency to accuse everyone of being a witch. Both Sabrina and Roz try different methods of snapping people out of it—Sabrina gets through to Zelda briefly with a spell, while Roz gambles on Harvey being basically the same decent person he’s always been, just one without memories. They meet with mixed results, and it’s eventually Ambrose who comes up with a method of breaking free that works. Blackwood may have wiped his memory, but even he can’t suppress Ambrose’s native tendency to get paranoid and frantic when things get bad, which they clearly are. He bolts for the border, where he immediately gets his memory back, only to learn he’s going to lose it again if he goes back into Greendale.
That’s courtesy of the peddler selling trinkets, played somewhat surprisingly by James Urbaniak. The peddler is a confusing entity in the show’s current universe, frankly. The other terrors have come to Greendale of their own accord, and the peddler doesn’t seem to be the personification of the Imp or anything. In fact, he does what he can to prevent the Imp from falling into Blackwood’s hands, and then once it does, he gives Ambrose the solution to his problems for free. Did he come upon the Imp and get sent to Greendale because of whatever mystical force is sending the other terrors to Greendale? He seems to know what’s going on, and he acts to subvert what’s going on, but who is he?
The show’s general looseness around its own mythology can often be a distraction, and the events around the Imp are particularly prone to this issue. Sabrina and Roz are immune from the effects because they’ve interacted with other terrors, but Ambrose spent the last episode interacting pretty closely with the Weird and gets memory-wiped nonetheless. And once people start to get their memories back, it’s hard to tell who actually remembers real life–when Sabrina asks what happened to Roz, Hilda says she was taken by “that little monster Harvey Kinkle,” which doesn’t really sound like something she would say if she had her memory back. But why wouldn’t she have her memory back at that point? By the end of the episode, it’s also not very clear who even remembers what happened. Roz and Sabrina do, clearly, but it’s hard to tell who else does. Nick confesses he still has feelings for Sabrina, but is that because that’s been true for a while, or because he remembers flirting with her when he was memory-wiped? By the same token, Harvey also seems to be changing his behavior…but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what’s happened.
Ultimately, none of this exactly affects the outcome of the episode. What you need to know is that Roz and Sabrina and the gang were able to save the day and stop the latest eldritch terror. But it’s frustrating to keep pulling at these threads while the show moves on. Any show with a mythology this deep encourages obsessing. Why can Sabrina do what she does? What are the rules of magic in this universe? Part of the fun of watching a show like this is diving into the particulars, and every now and then, it would be nice if the show slowed down a bit to give the viewer more to chew on.
Stray observations
- Was Father Blackwood writing with a twig?
- For those of you who aren’t musical theater fans, that was “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a song sung by Nazis in the musical Cabaret. That makes two episodes with musical theater references, and also two songs sung by Nazis, which is a weird coincidence. Let’s get some Music Man in there or something.
- What was with all the rustling and thumping when everyone was trying to hide from Harvey and Billy at the bookstore? At first I thought it was intentional, to draw Harvey back there and dose him with the stone soup, but no, they’re all just extremely bad at hiding. Also, there are like 14 people back there. They couldn’t overpower two teenagers?
- For the most part, CAOS stays away from markers of the modern world, and then every now and then the veil gets lifted briefly and it always sounds awkward, like Nick declaring that he and Sabrina are “end game.” Does Nick spend a lot of time on Tumblr or something? It felt like the show putting its thumb on the scales to confirm to fans that Sabrina would still have an epic romance this season and that this one was the meaningful one.
- It was nice to see Sabrina and Roz team up on an escapade, although it would be good to see Theo be more than a background character this season.
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Roz Walker is the low key MVP by being insightful, level-headed, & loyal.
Blackwood makes it so he’s always been Emperor Of Everything, yet spends his
birthdays at the podunk local high school. It’s every “What if the Nazis
won?” altverse episode but dumbed down. His regime’s fascist uniforms
look very much like those worn in Motherland: Fort Salem.
James Urbaniak, better known to aficionados of prematurely cancelled television as the fake clairvoyant on Lodge 49
& Dr. Rusty Venture, is a delightful peddler of mystical trinkets.
While displaying his wondrous wares, he’s robbed & kicked into the
street. So that sadly mirrors how the better shows he’s been on have
been treated.
Blackwood explicitly wished to be “the Emperor of Greendale”, which is weird, but he got his wishes (I thought they would recall that Hecate sealed Greendale to prevent the terrors to escape into the world, so they’re all contained there, I guess). (Speaking of which, is Hecate real? She has to be, since the witches worshiping her get powers from some place, but then how does she relate to Lucifer and the Biblical stuff in general?)One thing I found baffling is that in this incarnation, Blackwood was a prude. Like, why would he want to be that? He never was before, he was a Satanic priest for god’s sake. And he also suddenly discovered a fetish for Nazi aesthetic?
The writers don’t seem to understand any of the concepts they are writing about. It reminds me of the pseudo-progressive-intelectuals that used to populate coffee shops (pre-plague) that know patriarchy = bad, but can’t explain why; that know fascism = bad, but can’t explain why; that their christian parents don’t understand them so all religion is bad except the ones that reinforce what they already believe or that piss off their parents.There was some great potential in S1 going into S2 to show the women of the coven (and to a greater extend Greendale) starting to take agency, for better or wore, and finding their footing as they live with the consequences, both good and bad, of their actions. But they chose to depict women’s empowerment as women can do no wrong (even when clearly fucking up big time) and let Sabrina and co. get off relatively scot-free and having things just so happen to work out. I also get the impression the writers play a lot of D&D and are incorporating ideas from their shitty homebrew campaigns. Like making familiars, like Salem, a spirit (like in 5e) instead of a mortal turned into a familiar (like in the CAOS comic) and the cheap eldritch horrors that seem like they came out of the monster manual instead of from the pages of a Lovecraft tale.
Sabrina questioning and rebelling against her father the way he rebelled against his father and suffering the consequences for it could have been a far more interesting story with the opportunity to add a lot of nuance and dimension to all the characters.
Like a lot of shows, they spent their time before making the show creating an interesting setup and characters and hinting at interesting plots… and have spent all their time since the first episode trying to eliminate everything they created, and reduce it to a completely generic series, to the point of episodes like this one that could, if you change the names, have been set in literally any supernatural show.[one random gripe: when it began, it was about being powerless – in the grip of Lillith, Blackwood, Satan, the institutional Church of Night outside Greendale, etc. Now, the coven are so powerful that literally nothing in the universe can challenge them even briefly – the kings of hell, eldritch terrors, nothing. So all of that original atmosphere has been dropped, but for no real story reasons – it’s just that they declared they were powerful, and the world changed to accomodate this. But at the same time, the show hasn’t changed to accomodate it: it hasn’t become a show about what it’s like to be powerful (see how odiously irresponsible Sabrina still is all the time). It’s still about being powerless… until the point in the episode where the characters remember ‘oh yeah, we can do anything we want!’]
Yeah I don’t know why Blackwood was a prude. Eldritch horrors aren’t any more prudish than witches. Also yes Blackwood being emperor of Greendale was very funny every time they said it. Why not the world? Why not “mayor”? He’s the King of Town!
Later in the season, they kind of had fun with the idea that Greendale is all that exists for these characters. There always was some running gag about that, what with Riverdale being the only non-fantastic external place they ever referenced.
I mean Harvey managed to have that internship, but that’s about it. This episode really did make me wish Motherland: Fort Salem would come back soon. They did scale pretty well on that show and the tone is everything CAS promised in the first episode
Hecate begs to be cast as a real-person cameo for one episode. I hope they do it. It would be the perfect time to bring in a wacko guest star from the TGIF Sabrina … or my secret wish guest cameo as Hecate: January Jones.Something that might have happened in a theoretical S5, perhaps.
You mean, Season 3, since this is Season 2 somehow. :)In this show, even the division in blocks of episodes is unnecessarily confusing.
Wait, is Agatha still mad in the regular reality? We saw her act as Blackwood’s assistant all season and she seemed completely sane (though one could argue following Blackwood speaks of madness, but in a different way than “semi-catatonic, spirited eyes, sings quietly to herself in a nightgown” mad).Parts of these episodes seem to have been written out of order (see also Caliban not remembering the coven is now worshipping Hecate).
I was confused by this.
She seems sane (but evil) acting as Blackwood’s assistant.Then in Blackwood’s reality, she’s clearly insane, to the point where she can’t be taken to the school because she’ll disturb the students.Then it turns out that actually she is sane now.But then back in reality, we see her being a semicatatonic lunatic again.I have no idea what’s going on with her. It’s not even a Drusillaesque ‘moving in and out of sanity unpredictably’ thing, it’s just… as though different scenes were written by different writers, who hadn’t seen the script for the rest of the episode?
I’ve had a hard time getting into this season (Sabrina(s) shrugging at the possibility of her selfish bullshit causing a cataclysm irked me on enough levels to be fed up with the series from the outset). I actually really enjoyed this one tho, hopefully the rest continue at the same standard.
I mean, what were we even fucking doing with this episode. Why is the purveyor of trinkets not the fucking terror itself. Why is the terror a fucking statue that looks generally satanic (but remember the terrors are NOT linked to Satan/hell, they are BEYOND even though they’re, like, easily fucking dispatched every goddamn episode).
This isn’t even the stupidest episode of the fucking season and that’s saying something.
And the gang’s respect for terrors is now so low that they seriously expect that they can destroy one by… what, the magical equivalent of flicking an elastic band at it!?
Headcanon: The trinket man/peddler’s name is MacGuffin. Change my mind.
I didn’t put my finger on why the memory wiped didn’t okay right, but I think you nailed it. Retroactively making blackwood the emperor (of that town) but not undoing the effects of Sabrina’s past years is illogical, but whatever, magic. Not sticking to the rules the episode established is untenable.