Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina fights a monster from the watery deeps in a Lovecraftian homage
TV Reviews Recap
Pour one out for the wax guy: We’re never going to get to learn what a candle boyfriend looks like now.
Yes, after yet another effort to expand her dating prospects, Sabrina announces she’s ready to get to know herself instead, an incredibly important thing to tell people when you want them to stop asking you things like “when are you going to get back out there again” or encouraging you to date your lab partner, Roz. It’s an understandable choice after her latest date gets entangled in the gang’s efforts to defeat the eldritch terrors. This episode’s beastie? A squid thingy. This one’s big plan is to use Sabrina’s body and therefore powers to bend everyone to its will. The show even pulls off a bit of a bait and switch about this particular menace. For one thing, Lucas seems like he’s going to be the method by which the Weird gets transmitted to Sabrina, but then he’s actually just a regular if extremely unlucky boy who wisely gets the heck out of town by the end of the episode. But also, it seems at first like Sabrina and Ambrose have successfully sucked the Weird out of her, which would make it an unusually easy to defeat eldritch terror. It’s almost a relief when it pops up again in biology class, firmly attached to Sabrina’s brain. As it turns out, a somewhat similar method can be used to detach it from there—it just involves asking another of the coven’s weirder members to step in and help out to suck it out of her brain, which Sabrina does with the aid of the worst song from the Sound of Music. There is no song more condescending than “16 going on 17.” Rolf should have been dumped on the spot.
But the Weird is ultimately dispatched relatively easily, and without even involving most of the coven. Three episodes into this, and it’s getting complicated to take this group of monsters more seriously than previous ones, as they’re all defeated with relative ease, at least as compared to prior nemeses. When Ambrose never even has to send up the auntie SOS, it hardly seems like this is an apocalyptic terror.
It’s also not totally clear what Father Blackwood hopes to accomplish here. Granted, it’s early in the season to understand his full motivations, but if the Weird was going to mind control everyone in town, what does that get him? Why is he making a very half-assed effort to start a church, right next to where Hilda hangs out all the time? If he’s trying to fly under the radar, he’s not doing a very good job of it. The show certainly can’t spend all its time with him, but it’s starting to feel like we check in with him for two minutes every episode just for him to smile menacingly. It’s not moving a narrative forward about what he’s trying to do, or why his limited followers stick with him.
But at least his former allies are moving up in the world. After Caliban abruptly proves that in fact he’s still evil, Lilith escapes to the mortal realm and joins up with Zelda and the gang, which frankly seems like a better place to be. And it ensures that we’ll get plenty of Lilith side eye about things, although it’s getting harder to figure out what Mary is doing. If she was freaked out by demonic presences in her life, why is she joining a terrifying church? Why does Blackwood need her?
Stay observations
- Didn’t Caliban already learn all about the witches’ interest in Hecate in the prior episode when Sabrina Spellman explained her family religion to him? Why does it seem to be news to him that the coven was protected by Hecate?
- Also, does Hell really not have a single midwife? All those Hell critters were born somehow, no? One of Sabrina Morningstar’s reforms should be better healthcare for everyone.
- Could the show give us a bit more context for what “weird” means in their universe? This episode has both a hideous tentacled monster called that and a group of witches.
- I do not watch Riverdale but I hope that actor does pop up on it now.
16 Comments
Hell may have several midwives, but Lilith doesn’t feel safe there; Caliban is gunning for both her and the baby and once the baby is born she is afraid that Lucifer will deem her expendable.
Based on the POV close up of wax fragments going down the bath drain, I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of Candle Boy.
“16 going on 17” definitely seems like it should be sung by the creature taking over your brain not the one trying to stop it….
It was creepy that her older, somewhat controlling ex-boyfriend was singing to her “You need someone older and wiser telling you what to do”.
it’s getting harder to figure out what Mary is doingEspecially since at the beginning of the episode, Mary said they would need a trojan horse, and then there isn’t a trojan horse, and she did nothing all episode.
The trojan horse was the body of the drowned guy the Weird was in, which ended up on Ambrose’s table. Not sure why Mary had to be the one thinking of this.
….yes there was. The corpse in the mortuary was the trojan horse.
That’s 3/3 “unspeakable powers from beyond all comprehension, more powerful than hell itself” being neatly taken care of and trapped somewhere.
Sabrina: You know the stakes are high because we TELL you the stakes are high!
They’ve mostly been kind of boring creatures too considering they’re supposed to be lovecraftian. This one was probably the most interesting with the scene where they thought they got rid of it and it almost kills the biology class, but generally they don’t have a clear enough theme or sense of one being even worse than the last. I hope they get to the next episode soon- I’m usually a sucker for “bad alternate universe” type episodes but this one was so boring I couldn’t even finish it
If they thought “The Weird” was legit a name Lovecraft could have used for one of his creations, they don’t just haven’t read anything by him, they don’t even vaguely heard what his stories are about.This show works better when it keeps its references to stuff like the Pushing Daisies homage from this season’s first episode (which sadly wasn’t noted in the review).
I think they could have taken a pass on the name if the tone was right- the Archie comics thing of Cthulu was more on the nose when they covered it, but you can call Cthulu whatever you want as long as you nail the “increasingly dread with the threat of insanity” sort of tone of his work. Look at In the Mouth of Madness. But Sabrina seems to have had an increasing problem with tone and having actions have consequences. I swear at this point the Melissa Joan Hart version had episodes with more consequences for the characters than the ‘Chilling Adventures’. Of course that version of Sabrina was also more likeable so I cared what happened to her
We just binged through the finale. It’s all shit.
Is Ambrose supposed to be cajun for some reason? That pronunciation of “evil” was pretty baffling.
Hey, they at least got Roz in the coven … a thing the show was off-and-on kinda-sorta building to over the past 3 seasons. 16 going on 17 sung with black blood leaking out Sabrina’s nose is definitely an improvement upon the original.
HellthcareHahahahaha did someone do this already? That’s ok I’m not going to check
I’m very behind on my “binge.”The compressed nature of all these boss fights shows that they really don’t trust the audience to remember anything for more than five minutes, which is kind of wild.I did expect the swim team boy to be evil, so that was a minor but okay subversion. I don’t know why you would still expect to still be lab partners with a boy, even a suggestible teenage boy, after giving him mollusk tongue. (I also didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just wait for her perfect boyfriend to finish growing if that was really her plan, but whatever.)I didn’t care for the idea that we keep trying to solve all these problems without involving adults. This isn’t Harry Potter where the adults don’t believe anything bad is happening. [Why can supreme, world ending threats only take over a town of like 500 people by starting at one of the two high schools? Why don’t they start at the elementary school and work their way up?]