As Ariana Grande once said, “The light is coming to give back everything the darkness stole.” But this mantra is the precise antithesis of what the ultimate eldritch terror, The Void, seeks to achieve by the end of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s fourth and final season (or season two, part four, if you’d prefer). In true Sabrina fashion, we start out slowly enough with a “tamer terror,” spectral miners. Or rather spectral miners being inhabited and used by the Eldritch Dark. Which sort of plays into the massive void by the end. The opening scene rejoins us with that nefarious knave, Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle), as he chants in Eldritch, looks at us and says, “And the prophet said, ‘Let there be darkness across the land.’”
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s adaptation has brought us to many dark places since the series first began in 2018, but none so dark (at even the literal level) as what we see here. And it seems an all too appropriate time for eldritch terrors threatening total annihilation by way of darkness to appear on the show’s storyline. After all, as “Mad Agatha” (Adeline Rudolph), puts it to the old Ms. Wardwell (Michelle Gomez), “These are frightening times aren’t they? There’s a pervading dread in the air.” Indeed. While Agatha might not be talking about COVID-19 or unceasing political upheaval, she is talking about the Church of Night, now being run as its own fringe offshoot by Faustus. It is he who tells Ms. Wardwell (vulnerable little bird that she is), who is cajoled into showing up by Agatha, that darkness is the true light. She takes the bait as Faustus, giving his “sermon,” contradicts Wardwell for saying the light can save them. He informs her, “When darkness blankets the Earth and all you can hear are the souls of the tormented begging for mercy, remember these words: do not fight the darkness.” Wish someone would tell that to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, things are still carefree enough in Mortal Realm Sabrina’s land. That is, until she realizes everyone else seems to have gone and gotten a life without her. Finding Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) alone as well, she tells him there’s an Evil Dead trilogy playing at The Paramount and asks if he wants to go. He replies while reading “the existentialists” (Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard), “No. Far too many people. And as Sartre wrote, ‘Hell is other people.’” Sabrina, in her distinct loneliness, would beg to differ. It’s only at this point that she starts to wonder if Sabrina Morningstar is having more fun than she. It’s a thought pushed aside when the spectral miners start wiping out the light in Greendale.
This after the unexplained death of a trio of homeless men. When Nick (Gavin Leatherwood) and Ambrose resurrect them to question who was responsible for their demise, they all reply in unison, “In the beginning, all was darkness. At the end, there will only be darkness.” As it is also said, “There is no stopping it, there is no reasoning with it.” It is a great, black nothing. Seeking only to consume everything in its path. Sounds a lot like humanity. Or rather, the Earth’s climate change wrath when it’s finally had its fill of humanity.
It’s all just too metaphorical when Chance starts going on about how “planet-threatening” the eldritch terrors are as he paints the portrait, “Imagine no more light ever again. Perpetual darkness.” Still, Sabrina and co. manage to stave off this first terror, making way for the second, The Uninvited. And what better place for an Uninvited than a wedding, where the apex of the episode, “The Uninvited,” occurs. Zelda (Miranda Otto) cannot be deterred from ensuring Hilda’s (Lucy Davis) wedding goes off without a hitch, speaking like a wedding planner in denial when COVID first hit as she insists, “This wedding is happening!” Sure it will, but not without a necessary dose of Spellman drama complete with Sabrina giving a drunken toast while feeling particularly low about being the only person not in a couple. It’s all very Steve Buscemi meets Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer. And also because it’s a wedding reception, of course “Love Shack” must play as Sabrina is poured too much “Mother’s Ruin” a.k.a. gin.
Elsewhere, The Uninvited is instructed by Faustus on how and when to strike the Order of Hecate. “I will help you bring about the final tearing down of reality,” Faustus tells The Uninvited as though he’s one of Trump’s advisors. Naturally, tearing down reality isn’t all that easy without the eldritch terror that appears in episode three, “The Imp of the Perverse.”
After Sabrina Morningstar, who has been hanging out with Sabrina Spellman in secret, tells the latter she should try to find her own happiness, she pulls a bit of a Practical Magic maneuver in crafting the “ideal” man for herself. Sabrina puts forth her desires: “May he be sweet and sensitive, like Harvey. But powerful, with a dash of danger. Like Nick. May you be the best of both Nick and Harvey. Love, come to me.” She then blows out the candle and wields her Freemasons phrase, “So mote it be.”
Waiting for her witch-made perfect man to form in the bathtub, a new kid named Lucas (Ben Ahlhers) enrolls in the school just in time to become Sabrina’s lab partner for a squid dissection. Cephalopods are, evidently, a key part of biological study. It bears noting that as Sabrina is turning into an octopus, Ambrose remarks that octopi have three hearts. Just as Sabrina seems to. One for her other self, one for Harvey (Ross Lynch) and one for Nick. At some point, she can only give her heart to one without being a three-hearted underwater creature.
As one of the most chilling episodes indeed, yet more foreshadowing regarding Sabrina and The Void occurs when The Weird is able to imprint itself inside of Sabrina’s body and mind. Eerily (and aptly), the mantra she sings as The Weird is being extracted is, “I am sixteen going on seventeen”–as in the lyrics to “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” from The Sound of Music.
In episode four, “The Imp of the Perverse,” with The Weird having accused Sabrina of being an empty vessel that was easy to fill because of her own lack of certainty regarding her identity (making her simultaneously “weak and strong” to The Weird), she decides to run for co-president of the student body with Roz, mentioning, somewhat surprisingly, that the extracurricular will help with her aim of wanting to go to Vassar. Bros for Brotherhood is the antithetical campaign to the “Empathy and Inclusivity” angle Sabrina and Roz are going for (and, honestly, Bros for Brotherhood is actually a “cleverer” campaign mantra than what Trump went for). Still, Aunt Zelda isn’t buying Sabrina’s speech as she practices it on her family, saying that Sabrina still doesn’t sound all that genuine or sure of herself.
Roz (Jaz Sinclair), once endlessly sure of herself and her relationship with Harvey, is suddenly forced to call her own identity into question when Mambo Marie (Skye Marshall) tells her she’s a witch herself, that her “cunning” is, in fact, witchery and that she was destined to be a great Seer. Terrified of telling Harvey considering how well he took that info with Sabrina, she’s hurt to find her fears of informing him were warranted as he’s not exactly the most supportive boyfriend afterward. At one point he asks, “Seriously Theo, why does every girl I fall in love with turn out to be a witch?” Theo shrugs, “Maybe you’ve got a type.”
In the background of it all, a trinket salesman has showed up to Greendale. He is played, naturally, by the guy you best remember as Charlotte’s foot fetishist on Sex and the City a.k.a. James Urbaniak. This “trinket” is capable of warping time and reality so that Father Blackwood can request, “Make me emperor. Make it as though I’ve always been emperor.” So it is that Sabrina and co. now live in their new Soviet-esque existence, with only Sabrina and Roz seeming to understand the shift that’s taken place.
Positing that contact with the eldritch terrors immunized them (how very COVID-relevant), Sabrina realizes she and Roz are the only ones who can see this reality is warped. Yet she still has faith that Ambrose might be able to help them. Returning to her house, Sabrina finds it looks condemned, complete with graffiti that reads, “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.” It is at that moment that Ambrose runs out of it, declaring he has no idea who she is and that he’s planning to get out of town as quickly as possible after Blackwood’s army has branded his door with a “W” for Witch.
The Academy of Unseen Arts is much changed as well, with Zelda operating it like some sort of “normal arts” school. Alas, in keeping with the repression of any regime, Blackwood demands of Zelda, “Are you in possession of any art or literature that would be in violation of state decency laws?” This after he shows up on his birthday to watch the students perform a song for him. While Nick tries to rebel by not singing, Sabrina–Public Enemy No. 1–watches from the wings and forces him to sing so that he won’t be taken by Blackwood and tortured. Of course, this happens anyway.
Ambrose escapes the boundaries of Greendale to find the Trinket Man there offering him the Stone of Omphalos. In other words, a cold, hard dose of reality that Sabrina can use to make everyone remember the truth. She takes it to Dr. Cerberus’ where Hilda has formed an underground resistance of witches, including Agatha. Agatha, who, in this warped reality, has a healthy mind, reminds, “Blackwood bears the mark of Cain. He can’t be destroyed.” Therefore, the Imp must be destroyed.
So now, how does one make people ingest a stone when they’re not a Greek god? Hilda decides it would make a fine soup. “You’re about to get served a steaming hot cup of reality,” Sabrina says as she rolls up to the Academy with her stone soup. Can someone please bring some to the Orange psycho still currently holed up in the White House?
Cornering Blackwood and, after a couple false decoys, Sabrina finally gets to the real Imp. Somewhere, along the way, in addition to rekindling her flame with alternate reality Nick, she discovers a bit more about who she is, prompting her to give a more authentic campaign speech than she did for practice at the beginning of the episode: “We are powerful, disruptive women. Champions of the oppressed, supporters of the othered. Unapologetic feminists. Allies to all those who live in the shadow of the patriarchy.” And so their platform is running as witches–out in the open in a way Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina never was (and yeah an allusion to Melissa Joan Hart’s version of Sabrina is going to be very relevant soon). Though it seems by episode five, the student body must think they’re “The Craft” (before Manon imbued the quartet with real power) kind of witches that can’t really do anything. That witch is just another word for “all-inclusive.”
In “Deus Ex Machina,” like the rest of us, we’re a bit wary of Nick suddenly expressing his interest after everything he did, including gallivanting around with Prudence (Tati Gabrielle). “Just because you’re ready to get back together doesn’t mean I am,” Sabrina claps back at his advances, in a manner finally befitting a more evolved trope. For just because a guy wants you doesn’t mean you have to reciprocate to be “polite.” But apparently the stalker trope is still alive and well as Nick decides to enroll at Baxter High to be closer to Sabrina.
The fresh eldritch terror hell is less “containable” this time around, for it is the very cosmos themselves. Enter Metatron “born Enoch” to bring “order” to the cosmos. She offers only two options to the Sabrinas to fix the disorder they’ve caused in there being two of them–and not only that, constantly fraternizing with one another (illuminated quite cutely during a scene when they dance to Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” together). Either one must die or the two must “merge.” A “merge” of course does not guarantee that any semblance of either Sabrina will remain. But Metatron has obviously made her own backhanded deal with the twin trio of realms (Celestial, Earthly, Infernal) that have resulted from two Sabrinas existing. And so those close to the Sabrinas stop them from going through with the merge, and it is decided that one of them must go to the other cosmos to see what’s happening. With Underworld Sabrina getting scissors and Mortal Realm Sabrina getting rock, the former is forced into the alternate realm (again sort of an extension of the warped one that was begat from the Imp of Perversion). In this one, the writers (specifically Eleanor Jean) see fit to get ultra meta by bringing in the aunts from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, played by Caroline Rhea and Beth Broderick, to further accentuate how much darker and grittier Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is as an adaptation of the original 1960s comics. Sabrina is obviously disturbed by the laugh track.
Veering away from this narrative thread for episode six, “The Returned,” Mortal Realm Sabrina is given another eldritch battle when all the dead come back, including her own father, Edward. Hilda is dealt perhaps the worst hand when Dr. Cerberus’ mother returns, freely admitting none of Dr. Cee’s girlfriends had ever been good enough for her son so that’s why she had to kill them all. The subplot is a Battle of the Bands narrative, kicked off by an argument over who gets the practice space between Stoned Philosophers and Fright Club. Satanic Panic emerges from the underworld to compete, having already done so in Harvey’s dad’s time.
Sabrina’s daddy issues reach a new peak when her mortal patriarch calls her an abomination whose real father is Satan. Afterward, she tries to seek comfort in that by asking the Dark Lord for a favor, only for him to call her False Daughter now that the other Sabrina is in the parallel cosmos. So much for fatherly affection. Perhaps the happiest moment in the entire season, however, is the fact that Zelda is able to reunite with her longtime familiar, a beagle named Vinegar Tom. Given to Zelda as a parting gift from Mambo Marie, who had to lie to her about being a shepherd for the dead (and kind of looking like Noel Fielding’s “Green Cockney” in The Mighty Boosh by the end of the episode), Vinegar Tom is a much needed dose of joy for what’s to come.
Picking back up where episode five left off, “The Endless” finds Underworld Sabrina being very jarred by her new world: the set of a sitcom starring a talking cat that looks like a bad taxidermy job (yes, they keep letting ‘er rip on the digs at the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch). Subverting the genre, the writers, Donna Thorland and Matthew Barry, play with the idea of how anything in a sitcom can be contorted to get canned laughs, like Theo “joking” about being bullied and saying, “It’s like I came out of one closet and now they keep putting me in another one.” Thorland and Barry take it to the next level when Sabrina makes Faustus (yes, obviously he would be the director of such schlock) cut because Harvey gave her tongue in the scene. When she points out that Harvey’s dating Roz, she laughs, “I wish. The writers would never give me a boyfriend.” It’s such a lovely way to point out how Black characters are always stuck playing second fiddle to the white lead. Harvey adds, “Babe, we’re Harvey and Sabrina. #Habrina. We’re always dating. It’s canon.”
When Sabrina expresses her concerns about the eldritch terror to just about everyone, they all placate her and tell her to just accept it. “This is the longest running show ever in history,” 90s sitcom Hilda assures her, making it dawn on Sabrina that she’s now in the Endless eldritch terror. What’s more, there’s clearly a reason Salem has been more prominent in this season than we’ve ever seen him. It was all leading up to him being the talking cat version of himself (Salem Saberhagen) pulling all the strings in this alternate realm. Starting to surrender to being stuck perpetually on a set (kind of like living in New York), Sabrina capitulates to Harvey’s offer to come over to his “house”–a set itself that’s twenty feet away. When they start rehearsing lines together that Sabrina knows they’ve said already (back in season one, to be exact), she understandably starts getting very sketched out. Harvey asks if she wants to see the pilot to which she says, “Heaven yes.” Having a The Truman Show moment, Sabrina feels ickier knowing that what she thought was “real life” was being recorded by some unseen entity. “Just the crew,” Harvey assures.
When she finally tracks down Ambrose in what’s referred to as The Green Room (where people go if they don’t follow the script), she has the epiphany, based on Ambrose’s intel, “The Endless is Salem? Salem is the Endless?” That’s right. Cats are as diabolical as they seem.
The real Hilda and Zelda of Sabrina Spellman’s realm are also there as “stand-ins,” like Nick. At the craft service table, they inform Sabrina Morningstar they used to play her aunties. When she asks why they don’t anymore, Zelda replies, seeming to shade all “suits” in general and specifically the ones who wouldn’t give the show another season (hence a very “tacked on”-feeling final episode after the wondrous meta beauty that is episode seven), “We’re at the mercy of some nameless, faceless monolith, probably male, who uses us willy-nilly. Decides what we do, where to put us. Discards us when we’re no longer useful in his eyes.” In many ways, this reminds one of the fate that happened to another Netflix gem, GLOW, not even given the luxury of a concluding season.
Like another seminal witch show, Charmed (specifically the finale of season three), we can’t really believe what is being built up to so obviously at this juncture. Assuming that the usual “magic” solution will save both Sabrinas by the culmination of it all. “At the Mountains of Madness” begins with Ms. Wardwell preaching, “In the beginning, before there was God and the devil, there was a great and terrible nothingness. A void.” It’s a bit of an odd plot device to wield Wardwell in this way, but then, everything about this episode seems to indicate a slapdash nature, and a sudden lack of budget (why else would The Void or “The Sweet Hereafter” be nothing more than white rooms with these words written across it like they were bought from the Target decor section?). Picking up where episode seven ended, it doesn’t take long for Underworld Sabrina to crash through the mirror as Mortal World Sabrina and Nick are going at it in her bed. It’s just enough time to warn her about the impending Void that will overtake Greendale. Refusing to accept it, Sabrina looks to one of the other eldritches she’s captured, believing the Imp of the Perverse might be able to aid her in her battle. It’s then that the Trinket Man shows up to trade her for Pandora’s box, which once contained all the evils and horrors of the world, so surely it can handle a little Void. The caveat, to be sure, is that Sabrina herself must go inside the Void to suck it into the box, risking that she will be sucked in as well. It’s a small price to pay for restoring order once and for all to the town (not to mention the rest of the world) and the people she loves.
As Wardwell unravels the cruel tale of what befalls Sabrina, she pays continued homage to Lovecraftian horror, calling what she’s teaching the “Word of Reverend Lovecraft to the Church of Night.” And who knows what the “Eldritch Gospel” might wreak in the future? One supposes without more seasons, we’ll never know.
With a concluding moment designed to give viewers “peace,” we’re only given more torment. Let us instead imagine a scene that might have at least done more justice to the unbreakable bond between Sabrina Spellman and Morningstar, for it might have been better to dispense with that whole “I went swimming in the sea of sorrows. Wicked undertow” line and instead go back to the image of the two Sabrinas dancing together to Billy Idol.
