Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina faces Cosmic terrors, bad breakups, and even more alternate dimensions
TV Reviews Recap
And just like that, the world is back down to one Sabrina. After a series of options that include merging souls or dying, the Sabrinas settle matters with a game of rock, paper, scissors that sends Sabrina Morningstar to a parallel dimension where she faces the greatest peril of all: a laugh track.
This terrifying turn of events comes about after the infernal, mortal, and celestial realms land on a collision course with each other. While some of the effects of this menace don’t seem that bad—everyone is getting some nice new statues!—some of it is more concerning, like when a table of Greendale students ends up in Hell. The resulting chaos results in everyone gathering together to figure out how to resolve the issue, which is impacting both realms. At first, the problem is played for some comedy, because frankly it is pretty ridiculous that Sabrina thought she could get away with not telling the aunts that she left a duplicate in charge of Hell. Aunt Zelda is often annoyed at what’s going on around her, whether you sympathize with her reasoning or not. She’s a fan of order, and has the misfortune of being surrounded by people who like to color outside the lines all the time. But this time, it’s pretty easy to see her side of things. And her sarcastic interrogation of Ambrose, who definitely should have known better, leads to what might be the funniest line of the season, when she asks him bitingly if Sabrina has bullied him, and that’s why he didn’t say anything. Because he’s over a century old, and she’s 16. It’s always easy to understand why Ambrose and Sabrina keep things from Zelda, but that doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying to watch her tear into them for lying. And while Sabrina is only a teenager, she does in fact seem to bulldoze over Ambrose’s plans and suggestions with some frequency.
Lucifer, once the show’s greatest menace, is here an annoyed dad whose line of succession gets messier by the day. In one episode, he loses both of his heirs. But also he’s immortal, so it does seem like he’ll have time to get some new ones. It’s not terribly surprising that he and Lilith have drastically different ideas for what will happen to baby Adam, but it is a little confusing that the issue doesn’t boil over until Caliban threatens Lilith’s life. If there’s one thing that’s been remarkably consistent about Lucifer’s character, though, it’s that he’s pretty misogynistic, despite his apparent support for his daughter’s rule of Hell. He’s indifferent to Caliban’s efforts to murder Lilith, and scornful of the concept of worshiping Hecate. Even his punishment of Lilith bears more than a whiff of misogyny–he dooms her to age and weaken in the mortal realm. It’s hard not to wonder if he would have fought her in battle if she’d been a male adversary.
Meanwhile, Theo finally gets a plotline of his own, but it’s unfortunately one that keeps him away from the main action. Now that Roz has been pulled into the magical world, it’s having the unfortunate effect of keeping Theo separated from the main action. Facing the breakup of his first relationship, he doesn’t even end up confiding in his close friends about the dilemma that he and Robin are facing. It’s unfortunate, because a friend might have talked him through either the decision they have to make, or the heartbreak he’s getting into because of it. Instead the whole thing is wrapped up without Roz or Harvey even finding out about it, let alone either Sabrina. The conflict is introduced, expanded, and then resolved without ever touching the action happening in the rest of the episode. It’s separate in a way Prudence and Roz’s hijinks aren’t—they may not be involved with the dual Sabrina issue, but they’re still part of the core effort to defeat the eldritch terrors. Even when Lilith’s problems don’t involve the others, they still overlap with the other characters. It’s not a huge deal—obviously, everything doesn’t have to blend together into a perfect mosaic about the terrors all the time—but it is frustrating for a character that already has been fairly sidelined this season.
Speaking of Prudence’s hijinks, her quest to turn her father into a pincushion may finally pay some dividends. Not so smug now, are you, Faustus.
Stray observations
- The tone of the average Prudence scene and the average Roz scene is so drastically different that it is kind of fascinating to watch them interact. Those two acting performances are really different, as well, in ways that work for the types of things they normally do (both of them play well off of Sabrina, since Kiernan Shipka always has to act against both mortals and very dramatic witches), but which gives their brief work together here a weird, chaotic energy. There aren’t too many episodes left, but I hope they get more to do together.
- OK, it seems pretty obvious to me that Hilda is talking about the Hayley Mills version of The Parent Trap, but I would like Zelda to confirm whether she’s seen that one (did she watch it with Hilda?) or the Lindsay Lohan one.
- Additionally, I would watch an episode that was just Zelda providing color commentary while watching The Parent Trap.
- Sabrina bullying Ambrose was the funniest line, but honorable mention goes to Hilda’s response to the two teens disappearing and reappearing: “Oh, there you are. Where’d you go? Doesn’t matter. Don’t question it.”
- I thought expelling one Sabrina stopped the Cosmic terror? But then Prudence is still interrogating Blackwood about it.
- It is actually a crime to bring back the aunties from the original Sabrina show and NOT bring back animatronic, joke-slinging Salem.
- Some strong Parks And Recreation energy to that scene of Roz and Sabrina trying to settle on a potato option for their classmates.
16 Comments
The Theo breakup is made even worse by it clearly being them having no idea what else to do with him and Robin in the season but not wanting to just ignore them completely. But, because of that, it ends up not mattering in the least.
Seriously, Theo was basically useless this whole season. He had this breakup and he got to try to act tough in a few scenes which… was not very convincing as he’s not only 90 lbs wet he’s also never been in a scene where he was convincingly good at fighting. Like Sarah Michelle Gellar was ridiculously small and skinny but she still managed to look pretty tough and her character had superpowers. Maybe they could have had him like… be the one to announce that Sabrina and Roz won the election? I’ve never seen a high school election won with so little fanfare
It feels like another season might have gotten the gang into the Fey Realm with Theo’s plot line being the impetus.
In one episode, he loses both of his heirs. But also he’s immortal, so it does seem like he’ll have time to get some new ones. But also also, he’s immortal, so he doesn’t need a heir at all?
The merging of the realms felt like a metaphor for the show’s core structure, because these episodes feel like they’re the result of mashing two or three episodes together. Like, they reach the climax, and you think, “All right, that’s about the end of the episode”, but then you watch the time and there’s still a full act left! Usually composed by a series of epilogues to stories that might have been the A-story in a 40-minute episode.
Particularly when the plot of most episodes this season have followed the same exact formula: new terror shows up at Blackwood’s church, something bad happens at the school/academy/town, Sabrina goes to Ambrose for help (“don’t be stupid, cousin!”), Sabrina does something stupid, cut to Hell where there’s nothing important to the larger story, terror gets trapped, Sabrina is sad about being lonely.
The seasonal arc was literally “Monster of the Week”!
Finally we get a fucking eldritch terror that seems to be, you know, eldritch and insanely powerful. Of course not powerful enough to apparently affect anything outside of fuckin’ Greendale, The Center of the World, even though the fucking worlds are colliding.
Also not powerful enough that both Sabrinas can fuck off for 6 hours and do their own thing, uninterrupted, even though characters literally minutes before were saying “It’s getting worse.” Oh, was it? Could’ve fooled me since all fucking momentum came to a standstill.
I know I’m just tilting at windmills here but what a waste of a show. That first season had semi-interesting ideas and actually made things spooky and strange. Remember when Lucifer wasn’t just some handsome idiot? Those were the fuckin’ days.
Earth, Hell, & Heaven start to mash into each other. At first it’s
believed this is the bill for there being two Brinas finally coming due.
It turns out this is the fault of The Cosmos, which is some alternate
Earth, Hell, & Heaven pushing the regular ones out of their
alignment? How is this a primordial fear? It sounds more like a recent
sci-fi concept like Earth being replaced by Bizarro-World or all
existence being erased if our universe touches an anti-matter universe.
Maybe it’d seem less random if it was called The Imposter?
The Metatron is killed easily because being a top tier Angel counts for diddly squat on
this series. Heaven & Hell look like chumps for not being able to
directly avert this celestial annihilation. The Cosmos is defeated once
Sabrina Morningstar teleports herself into it. This show feels like it
written with Mad Libs but not in a fun way. How much acid do I need to
drop before any of that computes?
This season kept teasing that having double Sabrinas would be
calamitous. It turns out that was a red herring. There is no paradox.So it retroactively makes the adults (as proxies for the audience) look
like unreasonable meanies for being concerned about the fabric of the
space-time continuum when that was never in jeopardy. Why mislead
viewers into thinking the lead was still monstrously irresponsible in
the first place though?
Everyone was just so unconcerned about killing an archangel. Truly just went about the rest of their day.
God apparently had no fucks to give about the murder of his favourite either. Remember in season 1 when killing an angel was a big deal?
I honest to God don’t remember that at all, no, but I believe you. I can’t remember most of the plot.
So not spoiling anything here, but knowing what I know about the finale, I find the choices made in this episode…even worse.
(Still slowly winding my way through the show weeks later)I did not care for this. The juxtaposition of hell and Greendale meant, yes, we got to see infernal powers come to town for a confrontation with the Coven (I still don’t know why there are no other student parents), but somehow all the adults are powerless in the face of the mystical apocalypse?What was the point of Harvey drawing all of the representations of the eldritch terrors if we have to have a scene of the witches saying “what terror is this? If only we had some clue?” every single episode. Lucifer’s instincts to threaten Lilith (again) immediately at least demonstrate his fragility and weakness. It seems less unbelievable that this dolt didn’t get beaten by Sabrina repeatedly up to this point.
Is nobody going to mention that we have a mother that (apparently) kills and cooks his baby, and then proceeds to serve it to the father? I know this may end up being a red herring and some kind of plan from Lilith’s part, but one of the many problems of this series is its tone seems to be all over the place at times.