Sabrina, you bubble burster.
The show and comic in its many forms are, of course, geared towards, well, teenagers, evidenced by the original comic title “Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.” Despite my teenage years being well expired, I am still nostalgic for my 90s sitcoms, so imagine my glee when seeing Netflix’s release of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. A modern, ultra blonde reboot of one of my favorite shows, which included a serious update to the original, making the magic more fantastical and the evil less censored.
I loved the first three parts of the show and was very excited to see the series continue. I am not the only one that thought that this show had some true sticking power on par with that of its 90s predecessor, or even Buffy!
StreamingDan of readysteadycut.com featured here, had similar high hopes for Sabrina, and I’m going out on a limb here to think that we were both equally disappointed in how the show ended. He’s reviewing up to Part Three.
Don’t read any further if you hate spoilers, because I’m about to ruin your day.
Double trouble
Part Three ends with pretty much every woman’s greatest fantasy realized, maximizing our potential twice over. One Sabrina becomes Queen of Hell, and the other gets to live a kind of normal teenage life, at least as normal as it can be for a witch.
Part Four. Roll credits.
Putting aside the fact that I didn’t want the series to end, I’ll give what’s called a “crap reel,” highlighting the points that just made the end of the series an all-out flop.
The Eldrich Terrors are severely lacking compared to the previous evils. The first being the Eldrich Dark, an all-consuming darkness that equates to a bunch of miners smashing lightbulbs and every teen’s inner monologue (you’re ugly, nobody likes you, everybody hates you, guess you should just go eat worms, etc.). Or the Uninvited, where Sabrina catfishes what appears to be a despondent man by staging a wedding and trapping him, all of which made me feel bad for the evil dude. He just wanted love, jeez.
Poor Greendale Sabrina gets bitch slapped with PDA from her exes while Queen of Hell Sabrina is getting married to her once rival, Caliban. So we have one Sabrina that fell in love with her abuser and then another that is the proverbial third wheel. But wait!
Nick, Sabrina’s ex and true love, randomly decides that she’s the girl for him despite STILL being in a relationship with Prudence, who is surprisingly super chill with the breakup an episode later, so much so you’d never guess that they were cuddled up as each other’s plus one the before.
Dear Prudence. Her hatred of her father, Blackwood, is palpable. She dumped Ambrose because he didn’t let her kill him in Scotland, and yet it was easy enough for her just to put off seeking him out again to finish the job. It’s not until episode four that she harnesses the power of her new sisters to find him, and where was he? Conveniently located in downtown Greendale. All that witchy power, and you can’t notice the new Church of Night by the local deli?
From Part One to Part Four, I was reminded that this was all supposed to have happened within a year from the age of 16 to 17, ending with Sabrina dying like some sacrificial lamb on an alter to protect everyone from the Nothingness. Not the way that I would want my Sabrina to go; I’d actually prefer the riding off on a motorcycle ending like my Melissa Joan Hart version. It wasn’t the death part that bothered me, but rather everything that led up to it. The vow of silence to learn to control the nothingness inside from Blackwood, who has been the series bad guy, how within this timeline of maybe a month, the world looked like it turned from metropolis to mad max, how apparently Heaven had a really tight budget that it could only afford giant white walls with “The Sweet Here After” written in bold and impressionist knockoffs, I was surprised there was a bench available. Hell at least looked like it catered.
My disappointment is really focused on Part Four; apart from that, I think the show is a great comic adaption. I wanted to mention something that irked me even before Part Four about the show, “marketable” queer love. The Theo character dating a male hobgoblin, Robin, was nice in theory but poor in practice. Theo, still femme-looking, dating a man, made it more digestible for the heterosexual masses. Although I’m sure it’s appreciated to be represented, it’s a trope that can be avoided by bringing in more soup (LGBTQIA+). All this to say, stop pandering to heterosexual viewers.
