A new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina finds Sabrina up to some new antics with her friend, Sabrina
TV Reviews Recap
For a girl who’s spent a lot of time tangling with actual Lucifer, Sabrina starts part four of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina stuck in an all-too-familiar quandary: She’s growing apart from her high school friends. After three seasons of hopscotching back and forth between her Hell-based life and her mortal one, some distance has sprung up between them. Worse, they’re all in relationships now, which makes her even more of the odd one out.
Of course, the difference between this happening to a normal girl and this happening to Sabrina is that she has superpowers. Just imagine how much more chaotic your own teenage years would have been if you had cosmic powers at your fingertips to twist reality to your liking. The first of her efforts to fix her life goes well and then awry, since her friends are excited to help her banish a ghost, but then Roz figures out what she did and rather brutally tells her to cut it out because their friendship has changed. Not a problem—Sabrina can just bend reality and hang out with the one person who would never leave her: herself.
It’s a comically out-of-proportion response to her issue, but one that is understandable as a far better solution than the usual advice to lonely teenagers, which in my recollection is something tedious like “join a new club.” Sabrina has always had a self-centered side, and an interest in finding easy answers to complicated problems, like when she magicked away the complicated feelings she and Harvey had for each other. And who wouldn’t be tempted to resolve issues that way? And for all the challenges she’s faced, she’s consistently come out on top, giving her some earned if unwise confidence that whatever happens with Sabrina Morningstar, they’ll be able to handle it, even though, per Ambrose, the danger is the literal collapse of reality.
Overall, it’s one of the more relatable dilemmas she’s faced on the show, which serves as a nice balance to the latest Big Bad she’s facing, and which Father Blackwood seems super into. The upside is that after a long stretch of these adventures, Sabrina and Co. are far better resourced to face challenges. Despite their differences, she and Ambrose quickly wrangle up a posse to deal with the encroaching Eldritch Dark, with Nick even volunteering to work with her mortal friends to take on one part of the problem, and Prudence leading the coven in another. Inevitably, it all starts to go wrong before they manage to set things right, but with the promise that more eldritch terrors are on their way.
As we embark on this final batch of CAOS episodes, the premiere is a good setup to what’s to come: a battle against Father Blackwood (again), a dangerous and selfish secret for Sabrina, and a mysterious nemesis. Plus, to go along with our dual Sabrinas, we now have two Mary Wardwells, which should cause nothing but good vibes for the Spellman family. Frankly, if the real Mary decides to burn the whole thing down at this point, it’s going to be hard to blame her, all things considered.
Stray observations
- There are some odd editing choices in the episode, like when Sabrina is suddenly in the library with Nick and Ambrose, or when the intro to the discussion of the death of “old Gus” is Theo saying it is “super weird,” which is an uncharacteristically insensitive thing for him to say about a person dying.
- I am hardly a supernatural villain but it just seems to me that busting each lamp individually is not an effective way to take all the lights out. And now there’s broken glass everywhere!
- Haven’t heard a line that was so obviously written pre-pandemic as “Why is it that bullies always hide behind masks” in a while.
- One twist I really enjoyed: Once Sabrina asked out both guys, I guessed that Morningstar was staying on Earth, but it turns out Spellman asked out both of them. Have fun, Spellman.
- Although why does she only want to watch movie marathons with these dudes? That is a LOT of time to book with someone on a first date. I did write down “OK what is wrong with Carl” after he first popped up, though.
- Lilith immediately seems to notice that something is up with Sabrina at their 900th consecutive Prom night, but since she always wants to rule Hell anyway, maybe it won’t matter?
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I initially assumed the miners were just looking for their parents.
YES. 100 Points for deep cut reference.
where’s that from?
The Doctor Who 2 parter “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances”.
I told my wife “And now we’re in a Dr. Who episode…”
For Christmas I received a happy holidays video from Gavin/Nick. It was the best thing ever. But now every time I see his face during Part Four I’m going to be disappointed he’s not saying my name and sending me his love.
Looking forward to the new season! Is it wrong that I like Sabrina Morningstar more than Spellman, and Lilith significantly more than Mrs Wardwell
If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right. Villain lover for life right here.
But Sabrina Morningstar is not any more of a villain than the other Sabrina (they’re essentially the same, not one the bizarro version of the other). Which, maybe she is a little bit of a villain sometimes, I guess.
I mean, Queen of Hell does seem to imply villain as part of the job description.
And yet, Sabrina Morningstar has tried to reform Hell to reduce suffering, whereas Sabrina Spellman mostly just tried to get a boyfriend, everything else be (sometimes literally) damned.
Honestly, I much prefer Sabrina the manipulative sociopath over Sabrina the idiot. In the first two seasons, she was a normally intelligent person with a dark side, which made Satan’s temptations have genuine stakes. Then in season 3, she just seemed like a glorified dumb blonde, making wrong choices for the hell of it. I haven’t watched the rest of this season yet, but I’m hoping they’ll stick to selfish over stupid.
Two Shipkas dancing…
*boiiiing*
Kiernan Shipka turned 21 two months ago, and her Instagram post of Sally Draper smoking and drinking is just so precious.
The two Sabrinas having a dance party to Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” and professing their love for each other was justification enough for this episode
One thing I’ve always liked about this show is their chants and incantations are all lyrical and well constructed. The Magicians has their hand motions and the Potterverse has their faux Latin mish-mash, but ChAOS has their sing-song almost Dr Seussian spell-casting verbiage locked down and it’s always very enjoyable.
Why do the writers feel they have to fill an hour? These episodes need some trimming.
And yet – I’ve only seen this first episode so far – it simultaneously feels rushed.Honestly, I think maybe Sabrina needs more filler. It’s hard to have emotional stakes when nobody ever has any conversations not directly related to the plot (except arguably that Double Sabrina conversation, but even that was pretty setupy (sidenote: what, we can’t do superscripts on kinja?)). I know this hasn’t exactly turned into the high school show it initially looked like, but a big reason why shows like Buffy or Veronica Mars worked is that we spent time enjoying the company of the characters, even if it was only a scene here or there, so felt more strongly about the threats and changes they faced. Do I particularly care that Sabrina is growing apart from Roz? Well no, I barely remember Roz’s name, because Roz’s character arc has just been ‘plot-saving clairvoyance, token chemistryless love-polygon romance, occasional mild activism when it’s convenient’. I doubt I could remember a single line Roz has said – and if you gave me lists of random lines from each character, chances are if they weren’t plot-related I’d struggle to know which was said by whom.
Or put another way: if they don’t have enough time to meaningfully service all the characters, and feel they instead need to constantly be off doing Plot Mechanics, then they shouldn’t have so many main characters to begin with. Sabrina’s now up to eight or nine helpful flunkies, and that’s just the ones who are highly-enough billed that they need to be involved in every episode, not counting the background characters. It’s difficult to find excuses for eight or nine people to be meaningfully involved in every hour, particularly when so much of the show is determined to focus tightly on the protagonist! No wonder there’s a lot of running around…
That’s an incredibly generous grade, in m opinion. It was as good as we can expect from this show, I suppose. Maybe C+?I mentioned to my partner that where we would have liked maybe another 20+ minutes per episode of The Mandalorian, Sabrina could easily lose that much to make it more focused.
Is this show headed to a finale with some closure or did they cancel it after production so it’ll be a forever cliffhanger? I’m on the fence whether to catch up on the last season and watch this if it’s not going to have a proper ending.
There is a definitive ending with closure.
Did I mishear, by the way – did she say the date was the Alien franchise!?What, all six film!? Or eight, if they count the Alien vs Predators? Ye gods! Is this a date, or trial by ordeal?I don’t think anyone has ever thought “you know what would make Prometheus better? First, being reminded of much better films in the same franchise; second, being made to sit in a cheap seat for eight hours before the film starts; and third, having to sit through Alien Resurrection immediately beforehand.” Are we sure that that wasn’t the Queen of Hell who suggested that!?
This final season is bad yet in a dull way.
Ambrose, Madam Satan, & Lucifer tell Sabrinas Spellman (black
headband on Earth) & Morningstar (red headband in Hell) not to hang
out lest they destroy the universe in a temporal paradox. So naturally
the two Sabrinas cavalierly hang out all the time.
Each Eldritch Terror gets defeated within the span of an episode, which further undermines their apocalyptic might. Good thing each Eldritch waited its turn instead of striking simultaneously. For a show with such high stakes, everything is written with such low energy this season.
I remain confused as to the theological logistics of witches switching Divine benefactors.
The aged up Judas & Judith Blackwood continue to take up space without contributing anything. Why are they here?
What’s up with Miss Wardwell? Is she to be ever tormented by ghost memories?
So, there are four Alien movies, not counting Prometheus and Covenant or the Predator crossovers. That’s more than eight hours of movies, starting at 7 p.m.
And then, at midnight, Sabrina is also going to be dating — in costume and at the same theater — another boy at midnight.
If Sabrina Morningstar isn’t in the mix here, this is going to be some wacky Melissa Joan Hart shenanigans.
(And seriously, an eight-hour first date? That feels like some sort of statement, even if it’s just “no one on the writing staff double-checked how many Alien movies there are.”)
My favorite conceit: the ease with which everyone can chant spells simultaneously and without practice. My least favorite: what are the mortal parents/adults of Greendale doing? This bothered me a lot in part 3, but a power outage in the entire town and Wardwell is still grading papers (with a stamped “F” no less). (I’m a few days behind in my binge.) This feels more like Buffy than some of season/part 1 did, but I really expected the eldritch horror to be a multi-episode threat.