When last we left Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) on a light cliffhanger at the end of season one of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, she had gone to the dark side. Signed the devil’s Book of the Beast against all of her better judgment and in the face of a surrender Dorothy mentality. This also meant giving up her one true love, Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch). Of course, this only after she meddled just a little bit too much by raising Harvey’s brother, Tommy (Justin Dobies), from the dead after he was fatally wounded in the mines thanks to Sabrina’s expectedly cruel classmates, Prudence (Tati Gabrielle), Agatha (Adeline Rudolph) and Dorcas (Abigail Cowen). Obviously, Tommy wasn’t quite the same (read: zombie) upon returning back to the realm of the living.
Causing Harvey more emotional trauma than relief, the information of Sabrina’s witchery combined for the perfect one-two punch of irrevocable non-forgiveness. So it is that, among these tense raw feelings between the two, we find ourselves in prime holiday season for Sabrina and her aunts, Zelda (Miranda Otto) and Hilda (Lucy Davis), which means far more reverence for the December 21st Winter Solstice than actual Christmas itself. After all, it’s one of the few times of the year when the portal between the living and the dead is at its most vulnerable, most easily penetrable. And naturally, Sabrina isn’t going to pass up such an opportunity to further toy naively with the dark forces of her magical capabilities.
After encountering her in limbo, Sabrina is determined to contact her mother, Diana (Annette Reilly), for advice on how to deal with Harvey–her mother herself likely having reacted similarly freaked out to news of her husband’s supernatural powers, though let’s be honest, no one could be as much of a bitch about it as Harvey. This contact, quelle surprise, must be made via a seance. And while her mortal friends, Susie (Lachlan Watson) and Roz (Jaz Sinclair), have been more open to accepting Sabrina’s witch side than Harvey, they aren’t exactly jumping at the chance to help Sabrina with this task. Ergo, she turns to her old frenemies, the abovementioned “Weird Sisters,” to aid her in her objective. Well, not to mention, Madame Satan/Mrs. Wardwell (Michelle Gomez), who is seemingly suffering from a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder spurred by Satan’s lack of reward for her good deed of getting Sabrina to sign the book (and clearly, the snack of Principal Hawthorne [Bronson Pinchot] hasn’t satiated her).
While Hilda tries to keep things semi-normal by baking, a slew of impish spirits fucking with her kitchen make it something of a challenge, and soon we find that a depraved former mother with a fetish for being one, Gryla (Heather Doerkson), is the only witch who can call her ominously pranking Yule Lads (Hilda compares the task of getting rid of them to the same difficulty as expelling bed bugs) and eject them from the house. Their entrance into the Spellman home occurs when Diana manages to cross over to commune with Sabrina, enabling the ghost children to knock away the protective Yule Log in the fireplace (unlike mortals, the Spellman witches don’t want anyone coming down their chimney, creepy old white guy or otherwise).
As havoc spreads, it’s only natural that Susie, too, must suffer the consequences of fulfilling her long-time dream of being Jingles the Christmas elf for a Santa named Mr. Bartel (Brian Markinson), later revealed to be a Yule demon that entraps children in wax and keeps them as his personal figurines (it has a decidedly Are You Afraid of the Dark? feel to it, and one kind of has to admire all the bold cruelty to children in this episode). Thanks to Roz’s increasingly useful “cunning” abilities, she has a vision of Susie in danger and gets Sabrina and her aunts to help–though not without interrupting their own set of troubles with Gryla wanting to capture Letitia, the “extra” baby Zelda stole from Lord Blackwood (Richard Coyle) at the end of season one.
The overall theme of “mother-daughter relations” in “A Midwinter’s Tale” is what makes it rife with the Christmas special spirit. For isn’t Xmas all about families coming together (regardless of whether it is in any dark way possible)? Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) would seem to be of that mindset, even if the closest thing he has to family is some harebrained witches and a boyfriend to whet his pansexual appetite. It is he who is tasked with putting a bookend on the episode in his reading of A Christmas Carol, specifically the part, “Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three-quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one.”
As he reads, three demon kings portending Hilda’s earlier mentioning of the Witches’ Epiphany emerge from the mines holding mysterious boxes, and we get a sense of just how eerie the Christmas season can be apart from merely having to reconnect with family members and high school friends.
Noticeably missing from most of the “festivities” save for a few purrs is Salem, who is already lesser than for his inability to talk as his predecessor did in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. May he please take on a more important role in the second season, witch will hopefully address more of the unacknowledged narrative threads in this Christmas special, though, while much scarier and therefore unique than your average one, still serves ultimately as “filler content” for the show.
