“Your attempts to conciliate your duality will only bring you suffering and pain,” Zelda Spellman (Miranda Otto) cautions her niece, Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka), as she toys with the notion of not fulfilling her expected obligation of offering herself to the Dark Lord with the advent of her sixteenth birthday. And yes, in case you were wondering, Dark Lord means Satan (some way creepier, heavier shit than anything Melissa Joan Hart ever endured in the 90s iteration of Sabrina the Teenage Witch). That she has been prepared and forewarned her entire life of her anticipated “conversion” to full-fledged witch as opposed to mere half-breed (as the harrowers at the Academy of the Unseen Arts like to call her derisively) makes it all the more scandalous when she goes against this unspoken promise to commit herself fully to the devil, that part of herself that stems from her father, Edward, who was an important and revered (in addition to controversial) high priest in the “field,” a position that afforded him the rare “pass” of marrying Sabrina’s mortal mother, Diana.
Refusing to go along with the plan as a means to rebuff that old platitude about great power coming with great responsibility (a.k.a. a lack of true freedom despite having said power), Sabrina backs out of the very creepy, overtly satanic ritual in the woods with her two aunts, Hilda (Lucy Davis–likely not quite as desirable to Tim Canterbury in this role) and Zelda, watching in shocked embarrassment as Sabrina flees, the first to turn down signing the Book of the Beast as her mortal side overpowers her witch one. And it isn’t just Sabrina who must struggle with attempting to marry two sides; her best friends, Roz (Jaz Sinclair) and Susie (Lachlan Watson), must also contend with two different aspects of themselves throughout the season as Roz comes to terms with her gift for foresight and vision (called “the cunning”) at the cost of losing actual vision and Susie grapples with her masculine aesthetic tendencies.
Developed from Archie Comics’ original comic, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa imbues the narrative with far more horrifying elements than the much more “girl next door” iteration we saw Melissa Joan Hart portray in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, as she, unlike the Sabrina played by Kiernan Shipka and the one in the comic, has no prior knowledge of her magical capabilities coming to roost on her sixteenth birthday. What’s more, it doesn’t appear that this Sabrina listens much to Britney Spears or No Doubt. She might toy with Lana Del Rey though (at least before she sold out by censoring herself at Apple), for the gothic baroque vibe pervades the entire season as Sabrina must come to terms with the heavy realization that her Aunt Zelda is right: duality is a killer, and few, if any, have ever reconciled two sides into one (except for Madonna with the Italian side when portraying a casalinga in a Dolce and Gabbana ad campaign).
But Sabrina is still too young and naive to surrender Dorothy, to admit that her frailties are just as glaring as anyone else’s despite how “special” she is–much to the dismay of Weird Sisters and fellow classmates, Prudence (Tati Gabrielle), Dorcas (Abigail Cowen) and Agatha (Adeline Rudolph). In fact, so vexed are they by the thought of anyone even partially mortal entering their school grounds that they harrow Sabrina mercilessly, forcing her into torturous nighttime activities that test all of her mental and physical strength. But again, this is Sabrina Spellman, daughter of the talented and inimitable Edward Spellman–there’s no test of stamina she can’t withstand. Or so she would believe, despite being daily toyed with by Ms. Wardwell (Michelle Gomez), a teacher at Sabrina’s high school and self-confessed witch, though, in actuality, it is merely Madame Satan who has taken possession of Wardwell’s body so as to keep a close watch on Sabrina and guide her back to the Dark Lord’s “light”–specifically to signing his Book of the Beasts in her blood.
Blithely unaware of this dangerous fact, Sabrina confides in her about essentially everything after an initial period of distrust, ultimately manipulated into doing each “little task” that Madame Satan wants, including performing an exorcism and resurrection–the latter of which goes horribly awry. Most especially because she performs said resurrection on her boyfriend Harvey Kinkle’s (Ross Lynch–who can hopefully help us re-associate the name Harvey with a non-predatory monster) brother, Tommy (Justin Dobies), after her own “sistren” performs some voodoo magic on the mines where Harvey occasionally and reluctantly works as retaliation against the Kinkle family for descending from a long line of witch hunters (a tidbit Harvey learns after Madame Satan urges him to find out more about his lineage as part of a Thanksgiving-themed assignment–crafty, to be sure, for she knows it will drive the wedge between Sabrina and Harvey, the only thing truly tying her with such force to the mortal world).
Convinced that she can outwit death as no one else has, Sabrina gets the Weird Sisters in on her plan, offering up Agatha as the sacrifice to exchange for Tommy (after all, she was the one who initiated the mine fall). Confessing her plan only to occasional crush, Nick Scratch (Gavin Leatherwood), and Ambrose (Chance Perdomo), her pansexual British cousin who has been placed under house arrest at the Spellmans for attempting to blow up the Vatican (though one can’t help but think Lenny Belardo would be warmed by this), Sabrina is genuinely blind-sided when things don’t go her way. But as Ambrose puts it, “Why do you think the universe owes you special treatment?” The answer, by the end, is that she doesn’t, at last giving in to just one part of herself–the part that is always dominant in both humans and witches: “bad.”
Even so, for as disturbing and chilling indeed as Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is, it certainly does not seem to impress true worshippers of the Dark Lord all that much. But then, maybe they’ve never been faced with such a cut and dried choice between inherent good and inherent evil, choosing the latter with ease as Sabrina could not–and all as a means to function in a society that has offered us Satan himself as Monsieur President of the United States.
