Is it possible that the greatest danger faced by people in Sabrina’s life is Sabrina herself? Sure, they’ve got six more eldritch terrors to face down, and Ambrose says he can hear some apocalyptic drums beating… but Sabrina risked the collapse of reality because she was kind of bored and lonely. And now instead of, say, meeting some new people, she’s ready to wreak havoc again by Frankensteining together a new boyfriend out of her exes.
She’s also a very inconsiderate wedding guest, which is just rude, but the centerpiece wedding event of the episode suffers from unevenness generally. After a scene earlier in the episode where Hilda says Zelda is forcing her to have a wedding she doesn’t want, we don’t actually get to see it. Who are all those wedding guests? Did Zelda design the service herself? Why would Sabrina, a teenager, be a flower girl instead of Hilda’s maid of honor? We’re told there’s a conflict over this event, but then there’s no event. There’s a suggestion that the wedding is ostentatious and more than Hilda wants, but it’s an odd thing to shove entirely offstage. There is a cheesy looking reception, which serves the sole purpose of killing off a minor character to prove how dangerous the bad guy is.
That bad guy is the latest eldritch terror, whose title, “The Uninvited,” somehow leads to ZERO references to the Alanis Morissette song. Because he’s just one man, he ends up interacting with more people than the disembodied Dark did, which makes him seem a lot less menacing than a group of silent miners. It’s hard to be really spooky after we’ve seen you get a bath. And that bath would seem to counteract the entire point of his ritual—people don’t want to invite him in because of what he looks like. If he looks like a normal guy, then he’s just a rando showing up at a wedding, not a person who’s clearly down on his luck and in need of charity. But even that version of him is simplistic. It’s hard to blame a woman alone with a small child for not inviting a large, strange man into her home. Are these terrors all meant to be moralistic? The Dark was much more amorphous, a monster going bump in the night, but the Uninvited is penalizing people for their perceived lack of charity. Plus, the miners were targeting people experiencing homelessness, which would seem to put them at contrary aims to the Uninvited. And the upcoming Weird (getting strong Lovecraft vibes there) seems like a standard monster again. If these are just monsters of the week, then it doesn’t really matter what their vibe is. But these are all supposed to be united in one cause! Is their deal going after undeserving humans, or menacing all humans, deserving or otherwise?
The upside to this episode’s hijinks is that we get to spend a little time with Lilith again, whose tendency to roll her eyes at whatever nonsense Sabrina has gotten herself into always provides the show with a needed jolt of levity. Her allegiance with the Morningstars means she’s far less likely to be scheming, but she’s still one of the show’s funniest characters. If everyone actually listens to Lucifer and there’s no more back and forth with Hell, it would be a real shame. Sabrina responds to his verdict with much more seriousness than when Ambrose told her to stop hanging out with Sabrina Morningstar, but let’s hope that’s not the last of Lilith. Besides, Sabrina Morningstar is the queen of Hell now. It sure seems like she should be the one making rules about who can visit it and who can’t.
But alas, she doesn’t object, and after a fond farewell with Sabrina Spellman, the new best friends are split apart. Thus sending Spellman back to the drawing board for someone new to hang out with, or in this case, the candle board.
Stray observations
- I have mixed feelings about so much of Sabrina’s bad behavior coming from being single. For one thing, it sounds silly when a teenager calls herself a spinster. And it’s not exactly great strides for Sabrina as a character that she’s this mad because she briefly doesn’t have a boyfriend. But also…it is hard to be single as a teenager when all your friends are in relationships.
- Why are Sabrina and her friends all seated at different tables at the wedding? If you were inviting a bunch of mortal teens to your wedding, you’d seat them all together, wouldn’t you?
- Speaking of the mortals, Roz is spending the night at Harvey’s house?? Is this a thing that teenagers do now? It makes them seem like they’re 25.
- Hoping to see Prudence get a little more to do in the rest of the season. It’s a shame to see her sidelined as Nick’s girlfriend.
- I really thought they were doing a “what’s in the box??” thing with Caliban but then uhhh they showed us.
- The ultimate vanquishing of the Uninvited was kind of cruel! And also, is Sabrina still technically married?
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Somehow, I can’t help but continue to hate watch this show. I find a lot of it goofy and frustrating. Shame on me I guess.
It’s not as enjoyable to hatewatch as Riverdale, if only because Season 1 was damn good. Riverdale never showed much promise beyond “dumb shenanigans”.
I think a lot of the not-greatness stems from deciding to dump most of the plot points of the comic so the tone is bizarre. They started with the Ms. Wardwell possession, but apparently having her father only pretend to be summoning Satan to get ahead, putting a spell on her mother so she’d be sent to an insane asylum, having her aunts put her father in a tree, having the witches kill Harvey when he stumbles on her dark baptism, having her try to resurrect Harvey only to bring back her father in his body, etc was all too dark (and therefore interesting). The stuff they came up with the replace it like Theo’s aunt who was basically just trans has not been super interesting
I think this is the first show I’ve ever really considered a guilty pleasure. The plots and worldbuilding are so dumb, but I really like the actors, so I keep watching.
Kind of relieved if this is supposed to be the last season, though. I’d rather see the actors go on to something else.
I don’t think there’s meant to be a true unity in purpose to the cosmic horrors. They’re a ‘family’ but they have their own schticks. Left alone any of them will lead to the end of the world (not counting the Uninvited, as an adoptee he’s not the same threat level) but they’re not twirling their mustaches plotting it – it’s just what they are and the nature of their existence. (Unless the show proves this wrong later but that seems to be the feeling they’re aiming for).
Is Sabrina dressed as “Classic Sabrina” during the exchange of vows at the end of the episode?
I thought she was Janet from Rocky Horror Show (but not from Rocky Horror Picture Show).
I dunno, theater Janet is usually costumed in a pink dress with puffy short sleeves and a white headband…but the lighting was so dim in that CAOS scene I can’t be sure if Kiernan has the Classic Sabrina freckles pencilled in (even with the image brightened). But she’s definitely wearing a tight white sweater and a black headband:
[ignore]
I was thinking the Drew Barrymore character from Scream, since they had mentioned dressing as their favorite movie characters.
Definitely another contender
They were all briefed, including Dorian, about the existence of a cosmic being whose whole schtick is wanting to be invited into things. Why were they then so cavalier about turning strangers away at the wedding? It’s a witch wedding at an abandoned church on the outskirts of town, how many wedding crashers did they think they might have? I know they dropped a line about worrying about the infernus, but accidentally allowing an infernus into the wedding sounds better than accidentally turning away a being that will kill them all and wipe out existence as they know it. Forgive my rant. I enjoyed these first two episodes well enough, but ugh this bit felt so stupid.
The best two scenes were Radio Ga Ga & the exchanging of vows at what I assume was the actual real private ceremony – including Hildy’s meta joke about meeting her betrothed days – months – years (?) ago. (Sabrina has been 16 for three years, yo!)And yeah, on paper saying Sabrina Spellman has a dollhouse that contains an Eldritch Terror sounds like something she would totally just have – like a tossed off side detail – like she has a signed Taylor Swift life sized 2D standee or something … but yeah … like that dollhouse (containing her jilted husband!) is not going to bite her in the ass some day.
Hildy’s meta joke about meeting her betrothed days – months – years (?) ago. (Sabrina has been 16 for three years, yo!)Actually, the joke went in the opposite direction. She said “months… weeks?”, meta-referencing the fact that it’s been three years for us, but not a lot of time in their universe.
I was amused that the witch community seems *really* into Radio Ga Ga. Like Radio Ga Ga is to witches as Sweet Caroline is to people from Boston.
The plotting is so busy this year, and every character seems to be part of three storylines simultaneously from scene to scene (was the incubus subplot really necessary? It didn’t really amount to much). It’s a strange way to fill the (way too lengthy) screen time, especially when elsewhere there are logical leaps that feel like they would need more room. The most jarring of which is the devout Ms. Wardwell being immediately okay with joining an apocalyptic cult whose goal seems to be bringing about the end of reality. And I’m not even sure why Father Blackwood is into it, or why Agatha is helping him for that matter.
I thought they’d do more with Adam dying since that seems like the biggest loss from her possession by Lilith. But the show seems to have trouble acknowledging that what Lilith did was bad so having her actions have consequences seems difficult for them
best episode of sabrina ever? only being slightly facetious. watched this with my sister and we spent the whole episode making eye contact before bursting into laughs. idk — glad this show got to do it’s messy thing until the very end. definitely a remnant of a different netflix “era.”also, sabrina bringing an eldritch terror to a wedding as her date was kinda amazing…
I loved that nobody cared that Dorian died.
Atmospherically, this was a miss for me. The introduction of the Uninvited stressed me out (I have a small human who would have been like that little girl), but the apparent rules the Uninvited follows seem much less sympathetic.Showing up in buildings that aren’t dwellings and requesting entry then (presumably) massacring everyone inside is much less an inversion of a deadly sin than I expected from the first episode of the season. I don’t know why Nick (or anyone who doesn’t live in whatever building) has the power to doom everyone by refusing entry. I don’t know why he can recieve a makeover that carries through through the next attack. I definitely don’t understand why he can teleport sometimes but not when he’s in the room with Sabrina.Anyway, yeah, it had some spooky stuff I guess, but nothing felt propulsive.