The final season of the hit Netflix show, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, is out and I’ve watched it all, and well…. HEADS UP! If you haven’t binged the show already, maybe don’t check this out. If you have or you don’t care about spoilers, feel free to continue.
First, the plot: if you haven’t kept up, I’ll give a short run down. This season, our witches and others alike deal with the onslaught of all eight Eldritch terrors; the Darkness, the Uninvited, the Weird, the Perverse, the Cosmic, the Returned, the Endless and the Void. Each terror arrived in it’s own episode and everyone had to band together to defeat them all.
The terrors were released and called to Greendale by the world’s worst father, warlock, and the man who never dies: Faustus Blackwood. He opens up a church to gather worshippers for the terrors with Agatha- a former weird sister- who is still insane, the props of the century, Judith and Judas and Mary Wardwell, Sabrina’s teacher who deserved so much more.
For the last season of a show, this isn’t a terrible idea, it’s a great concept to have literal world ending entities come into your universe and threaten EVERYTHING you hold dear. But, the problem arises when it comes to execution.
This is in NO WAY knocking any of the team involved. I quite enjoyed this season and the whole show and I’m sure they put their absolute best foot forward, but this is my opinion and, to me, it all seemed too easy.
Let’s start with the first: the Darkness. The dark manifested as miners in all black suits. They would walk around destroying all the light they could find. While Sabrina’s friends distracted them, she and Sabrina Morningstar (the other Sabrina AKA the queen of hell and Kalaban’s fiancé?!) use their collective strength to defeat it by using their connection to hell and hell fire. The coven’s prayers to their new goddess, Hecate, also helped the girls. The darkness which is actually just black goo, ew, gets put in a sphere.
Their defeat of the dark was one for the more feasible of the terror defeats, seeing as Sabrina was one of the only witches to call forth hell fire from the pit itself, and being the child of Lucifer for sure helped them.
But then, the question I was left with was “what if she wasn’t?” What would have been their back up plan if the Sabrinas couldn’t stop the darkness?
Next, we have the Uninvited. This Eldritch terror comes to people as a beggar. When he asks for food and shelter, people have the choice of letting him in and being hospitable, or turning him away. If you turn him away, he rips out your heart, but if you let him in and make sure he is taken care of, you’ll be spared.
This one was one of the more interesting terrors, to me at least. Roz and Harvey come across him first. Using her cunning, she does the right the thing and invites him in. Blackwood also invites him in. He gives the Uninvited a tongue and swears his allegiance to him and the other terrors. Blackwood then cleans him up and tells the Uninvited about Hilda’s wedding (and Sabrina Morningstar is also having a wedding but we’ll get there) and if he was turned away to kill all the witches.
So, the wedding comes and ooh chile, rant time.
Thanks to a little necromancy, Ambrose was able to see what the Uninvited looked like and gave a picture to everyone and told them to invite him in. Sabrina and Nick are on the doors, and the new cleaned up terror shows up and of course he doesn’t have an invitation… and he doesn’t look like his picture, so Nick turns him away!
There are so many things wrong with this episode and I’ve listed them for you reading pleasure.
#1 UM…Harvey and Roz Anyone?
Why wouldn’t they put Harvey and Roz on the door? The two people who actually saw him with their own eyes? Oh, and Miss Rosalind Walker would’ve been able to use her cunning to tell who the terror was!
#2 You’ve wasted good printer paper, Nicholas!
I get that the whole second “plot” was about a rogue incubus (that Roz could’ve also helped find) and Zelda said not to let any strange men in, but wouldn’t you have the picture and put it up to his face to compare what he looks like? Isn’t that what bouncers do when they check ID? Seems simple to me!
#3 Screw Dorian, I Guess
The Uninvited reappears at the reception and he rips out Dorian Gray’s heart. It was a shock because he was supposed to be immortal – but his painting has a hole where his heart used to be and it’s bleeding – but then Sabrina uses her invitation to Sabrina Morningstar’s wedding to get him away from everyone.
But after that no one talks about Dorian. Like the man didn’t just die in front of you! There isn’t a quick mention of a funeral for him or a small service; nothing. It was so weird! I guess all of those drinks and sage pieces of advice got him nowhere.
#4 Sabrina Spellman Broke the Univited’s heart
Sabrina’s brilliant plan was to talk to the Uninvited about loneliness and kind of have a moment where they connected. She then asks him to marry her, so both Sabrinas have a double wedding and then, on their “honeymoon,” she tricks him into going to the yellow wallpaper room in the miniature dollhouse of their home to trap him.
He literally say’s “you’ve broken my heart!” My heart broke for him! It was a good idea to trap him, but to do it that way was so mean. He might’ve thought that he actually had a friend ,and then a wife, after being alone since the beginning of time! It just felt needlessly cruel and Sabrina could’ve trapped him without being so harsh. Like dang, Sabrina! First you were drunk at your aunt’s wedding and then you were such a jerk! I get the Uninvited killed people but I can’t help but feel for him.
Next is the Weird. Which, I believe, is supposed to be akin to Cthulu, because its a monster octopus creature. It first shows up to Blackwood in need of a body. Blackwood offers his body but the Weird declines. While Blackwood cries and rocks himself in a corner, they come up with a plan to get the body into the Spellman’s mortuary and then into Sabrina. This episode, we are introduced to Lucas, who I am still not sure what his involvement was supposed to be. He leaves at the end of the episode, so it was like he was never there at all.
The Weird is where they upped the ante on the terrors, but again it was cut short easily. The octopus taking over Sabrina’s body is such a cool idea because she is so powerful and this could mean hell on earth, people! At first, they thought they can just get rid of it by drying Sabrina out so, thanks to the River Witch we met last season, they get the body out. But, it is revealed that the Weird had somehow fused it’s conscience with Sabrina. Again, thanks to another witch they met last season, they saved Sabrina and froze the Weird.
So what you’re telling me is, if we didn’t know those exact witches, we’ve would’ve been out luck, right? Because, again, there was no back up plan; either they got it out of Sabrina, or she dies, or the Weird takes over Greendale.
Up next is the Perverse which is literally just an episode about Blackwood’s dreams coming true. He wishes on an idol of an imp and makes himself Emperor. He got the idol from a character who his never explained, The Trinket Man, who just shows up with magical objects that people need, right when they need them.
Roz and Sabrina are immune to the warp because they had already been touched by terrors and, oh, Roz is a witch now. Yup, Mambo Marie told Roz that she is a witch so umm.. why did they wait until now to tell us that she’s a witch? And, why wouldn’t her grandma just tell her when she told her about the cunning? We could’ve had two, three seasons with Roz being more of a baddie… but no.
Anyway, in this new parallel Greendale, Blackwood is basically a Nazi and is at war with witches. Spreading misinformation about them and having a literal witch hunt, to kill as many as he can. Sabrina tried to appeal to Ambrose but he doesn’t believe her. He heads out of town and his memories are restored. So, we see the Trinket Man again, where he gives him the answer to all of their prayers, a magic stone.
Long story short, Hilda makes magic stone soup (not kidding) and then gives it to all the witches so that they remember. Sabrina makes a wish and everything is back to the way it was. All in all, the Perverse really wasn’t a threat because it was only enclosed in Greendale and if anyone was fed up, they could’ve worked up the nerve to leave like Ambrose. There was no wall or anything keeping people from leaving either. And again, thanks to the Trinket Man, everything was wrapped up. It was a really boring terror in the line up.
The fifth terror is the Cosmic, where the literal cosmos is bumping into each other like this is a game.
There are insane earth quakes and pieces of hell and earth colliding with one other… which is obviously not good. Ambrose fears that this is the fault of Sabrina’s choice to split herself in two and then to hang out with the other Sabrina for a prolonged measure of time even though he explicitly told her not to. But, Sabrina being Sabrina, she didn’t listen.
It’s not a secret that I am NOT a fan of the fact that Sabrina split herself up but I was excited to see what came of it. And surprisingly, it wasn’t that much. It was never explicitly said that it was for sure Sabrina’s fault for luring the Cosmic; she certainly didn’t help it; it was her fault but not really because Eldritch terror.
We meet the angel, Metatron, who comes down to fix the balance. Either kill one of the Sabrinas or merge them, which has a small percentage of actually working. The Sabrina’s decided to merge but the merging is stopped when it is revealed that Metatron didn’t tell them that three other realms (that are parallel to their own) were being pulled together, implying the Cosmic’s arrival.
They still want to combine the Sabrinas, but with Lucifer’s and the witch’s strength they kill the angel. Then it is suggested that a Sabrina must leave to another reality in hope of stopping the three from colliding. And, if that was the case, why wasn’t that an option instead of killing Metatron? And why would they take anything an angel would say at face value? Did we forget about the two angels who invaded the academy to kill the coven?! And who basically killed Sabrina?!
Sabrina Morningstar is chosen to go after a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors and she leaves through a mirror.
Get ready for another rant! While this plot is important, I can’t write this without touching on Lilith. In this same episode dealing with the Cosmic, Lilith is hiding with her new son, Adam, in the academy. Lucifer confronts her about taking Adam back to hell with him. He gives her six hours to be with him.
TW: For child murder and attempted suicide.
So, at the end of the episode, it is revealed that Lilith killed Adam like Lucifer killed her former lover of the same name. I was praying to Hecate that she was bluffing and Adam was perfectly fine underneath the plate cover, or that she actually had someone hide him away. But NO! I couldn’t even understand what her thought process was. Here’s another list.
#1 You have 6 hours, use them, girl!
We barley see Lilith in the episode to begin with and you would think she would be coming up with a plan to save herself and her son. We don’t see her strategizing, talking with other witches, using some connections she may have to help her; we SEE nothing!
#2 Try to escape at least, sis!
Lilith was held up in that room since Adam was born. Lucifer is distracted dealing with the Sabrinas merging and whatever else. Pack some stuff up, grab your kid and run. Lilith still has her powers at this point but doesn’t use them to maybe cloak herself and Adam, or turn themselves into different people to try and hid from Lucifer or anything
#3 Why wasnt’ pretending to kill him a good enough option?!
I was holding my breath in hope that Adam was perfectly fine with his cute self. If she had just pretended she had killed Adam with the same set up, she would have been cursed, but Lucifer would have left her and unbeknownst to him, Adam alone! They could’ve lived out the rest of their days at the Academy under the protection of the witches and Hecate. Perfect solution. And once he came of age, if he chose to, he could challenge Lucifer for the throne.
#4 The @#&*%! Deus Ex Machina Knife!!
This happens a little later in the season but it matters a whole bunch more, now that you think about. Once all is said and done, Lilith was cursed by Lucifer to live forever without her powers, so she can never know peace. She’s haunted by Adam’s cries and begs Kalaban to find her some knife so that she can take her own life. And he does so with ease, it seems. He gives it to her happily.
So, if this knife is so powerful that it can even kill the immortal (which she demonstrates by killing Lazarus later) why didn’t anybody try to grab it?! Lilith has been plotting to kill Lucifer for a literal millennia and suddenly this blade comes out of nowhere?! This should have been plan B! She should have figured out a way, in that bedroom, to get that knife to her. She could’ve tricked Kalaban because, let’s face it, he’s not the brightest. And while pretending to have killed Adam in her confrontation with Lucifer, she would have been able to sneak up on him and killed him.
And Lilith spent so much time in Hell- she was there for months while the other Sabrina was Queen- she couldn’t have found a way to be sneaky or even ask Sabrina for help or protection? Overall, this episode was a mess and it was clear that they only had Lilith kill her son for shock value… and I guess it worked, I’m shocked and grossed out.
Whoooo, okay, I’m gonna have to wrap this up and continue in a part 2. Which will be right after this. I will cover the last two terrors and series wrap, so stay tuned. Make sure to let me know what you guys thought of the season!