Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s02e16 – At the Mountains of Madness

I got really hopeful when I saw the title, At the Mountains of Madness, because they mentioned the Mountains of Madness in a previous episode and it’s the Lovecraft story with monster dinosaurs and so… monster dinosaurs are probably going to be cool.

There are no monster dinosaurs in the episode. There are the Mountains of Madness but they’re pretty boring and during the worst part of the episode, when the action leaps ahead two weeks and we lose Kiernan Shipka as lead of her, you know, own show. She has to go the Mountains because she’s become a danger to herself and others, but mostly others. See, she tries to take on the last Eldritch Terror herself because she’s feeling guilty about bringing about the end of the universe.

Things do not go well.

It even messes up Shipka’s seventeenth birthday party, which should be a book end to the series but isn’t really important. Not much in the episode works out being important, including Michelle Gomez’s resolution with Luke Cook. Gomez—in her Earthly variation—narrates the episode from a pulpit, where it quickly becomes clear she’s narrating in the past tense, making some of her statements all the more ominous.

Trying to help Shipka, the witches get into shenanigans to piss off Cook and the rest of Hell, leading to an utterly disappointing big fight scene. More risible than disappointing, especially since Sam Corlett makes a big deal out of the soldiers he can muster for Cook’s cause and then they’re… well, no spoilers, but it’s a pretty weak army and seemingly only there to gin up some more angst for Shipka and the supporting cast.

The finale goes on way too long—with one heck of an epilogue—but some nice homage to the original comic series and a few resolves for the supporting cast. Not most of them. Ninety percent of the supporting cast get no closure in the final episode, though since the show hasn’t given any of them significant subplots for the season it doesn’t really matter. They’ve all just been hanging around waiting for the show to finish apparently. Episode writer—and show creator and original comic (Chilling Adventures comic not, you know, in sixties Archie Comics) creator—Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa really doesn’t come up much for the finale.

It’s not the worst, but the episode is rushed, wastes everyone—including Coyle, who gets an unexpected big role—and doesn’t even provide a good finish for the Eldritch Terror storyline. My impulse was to blame it on Netflix, like maybe they cut the season order (before cancelling the show all together) but maybe Aguirre-Sacasa really just didn’t have it.

Rest of the show’s pretty good if not better. And, I guess at least there’s not one of the bad musical numbers.

But it’s a definite miss.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e20 – The Mephisto Waltz

So, Luke Cook, who plays Lucifer this episode, looks a lot like Taylor Kitsch. Enough I thought they maybe paid for Kitsch. They didn’t, they got Cook. Who doesn’t seem to have voiced goat Satan in the previous episodes.

Anyway.

It’s the big finale, with Kiernan Shipka unintentionally letting Cook out of Hell and letting him assume his original appearance. There are flashbacks to Lilith and Lucifer’s time after the Fall, with Jenna Berman in for Michelle Gomez in the flashback, and we learn how Cook was originally beautiful but the longer he was out of Heaven, the faster he turned into a goat demon.

Cook’s got some big reveals for Shipka, including some hard truths about her father and mother, as well as a bone to pick with Richard Coyle. You think you’re going to get a great Coyle vs. Satan scene and then you don’t. Instead you just get Coyle being a weasel, as usual. It’s a missed opportunity but not a surprising one—Coyle remains the show’s only significant casting mistake. He’s nowhere near as good as the other adults.

Then there are some big reveals for Shipka’s love life; not just because it’s the season finale but also because it figures in to the finale.

It’s all hands on deck trying to foil Cook’s plans: mortals Ross Lynch, Jaz Sinclair, and Lachlan Watson go into the mines to find the gate to Hell while Shipka and witch family do the magic stuff. Michelle Gomez plays for both Cook and Shipka throughout, leading to both good humor scenes and some more serious contemplations on gender structures and power between Gomez and Shipka. There’s a lot of good acting in the episode, even if it basically reveals the season could’ve easily been seven to ten episodes. When Chance Perdomo and Tati Gabrielle reunite after having been lovers, mortal enemies, and whatever else, it’s like they haven’t seen each other in forever. But it’s only been a week in show time since she was torturing him.

There’s also the problem with Shipka and friends all of a sudden getting great ideas, great enough to outsmart the Great Deceiver. Where was this imaginative thinking throughout the season when Shipka couldn’t breath without screwing something up.

And the season two teasers at the end, the promised developments, aren’t great for Shipka and the teens. The setups for the adults at least promise to amuse.

It’s a solid show but twenty (actual) hour-long episodes is a lot of investments for a conclusion and setup the show could’ve done in half the time, if not even less.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e17 – The Missionaries

So, actually, no, “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” apparently hasn’t hit the darkest hour or the point of no return yet because this episode just sort of shrugs at all the disastrous things gone wrong for Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) and her family. Cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo—who’s great this episode) is locked away and Shipka and aunt Lucy Davis are trying to get him out, but life’s still going on as usual for the most part.

Miranda Otto and Richard Coyle are off honeymooning in Europe, with Tati Gabrielle (whose character arc is a disappointment) minding the school. Shipka’s banned from witch academy so she’s just back at the human high school because she… can just sit in, apparently. Meanwhile beau and fellow expelled witch academy student Gavin Leatherwood’s just drinking away his sorrows and being mean to Shipka.

There’s some stuff with Davis trying to get in to see Perdomo, which is good enough thanks to Davis and Perdomo, but isn’t super compelling because it’s too drawn out. Then there’s Ross Lynch and Roz Sinclair freezing out Shipka because they think Shipka’s the one who made Sinclair blind. It’s intense.

They drive Shipka away. When she gets home, she soon answers a knock on the door to reveal Spencer Treat Clark, who the audience has already met because he’s a Christian missionary kid who’s already killed a witch. The episode opens with Clark killing off Darren Mann, who the show forgot for a few episodes just to bring back and kill off.

Turns out Clark’s not alone—he’s got a team of witch hunters—and it’s going to be up to Shipka and Davis to save the day (and Perdomo). Big surprises in store for Shipka in the finale, including some of the show’s most impressive special effects to date.

Michelle Gomez gets her subplot too, of course, which is just the show getting rid of Alexis Denisof three episodes after it introduces him. It’s not a great use of time in general, worse it seems to be wasting Gomez.

But the stuff with Shipka and the witch hunters? Awesome. Even if “Sabrina” introducing the idea of an interventionist God seems a bite bigger than it can chew, only without realizing it. It’s not a flex, it’s a misjudge.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e10 – The Witching Hour

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Ross Maxwell co-write, sending off of “Sabrina”’s first season, with a deus ex machine of an episode where Michelle Gomez decides she’s been waiting too long for Kiernan Shipka to embrace the Dark Lord and it’s time to get drastic about things. If Gomez can’t sabotage Shipka’s friendships with mortals—in addition to the big action, Shipka also reconciles (enough) with boyfriend Ross Lynch and other friends Jaz Sinclair and Lachlan Watson embrace her immediately upon the big “I’m a Witch” conversation in the high school bathroom.

Incidentally, I don’t think the show’s writers know how to deal with telephones in general. Sinclair and Watson tell Shipka they’ve been calling her all weekend and apparently Shipka just hasn’t been answering… but they’d have to answer the phone at the house because it’s a mortuary and a business. Sure, they eat the bodies in the closed caskets, but it’s still a business.

Anyway, it’s a telling oversight. Same goes for astral projection, which was a huge no no in the first or second episode but now is literally how the witches check in with one another because they don’t have cellphones. Astral projection is the texting of “Sabrina” world.

Gomez brings back thirteen witches to destroy the town; the sequence where she brings them back is the only good use of the digital Vaseline filter in iMovie the series has done (and, sadly, not in all the shots), but it works because Gomez is flipping amazing in the scene. Just awesome.

So the witches are going to protect themselves and let the ghost witches eat the townsfolk and Shipka, along with Lucy Davis, Miranda Otto, and Chance Perdomo all decide they’re not going to let the mortals die, causing a rift between various parties. But the scene where Otto decides to play hero is pretty great. And Davis has some very nice stuff this episode, particularly with boss slash love interest Alessandro Juliani, who has been around for a while on the show but hasn’t made much impression apparently because I thought he was Taika Waititi.

Doesn’t matter. Nice stuff this episode.

Lynch and romantic rival Gavin Leatherwood team up to protect Lynch’s drunk-ass dad, while Sinclair and Watson protect Sinclair’s grandmother, L. Scott Caldwell, from the ghost witch attack. Throw in Shipka’s turn to the Dark Side of the Force—relatively speaking—Zelda kidnapping one of Richard Coyle’s newborns, Perdomo joining Coyle’s Jordan Peterson-esque like cult of male students, not to mention Gomez’s big reveal where she lays it all out to her captive audience.

Literally captive audience; she narratives the episode, from the beginning, like every episode is some tale she’s telling to her listener. As the episode progresses, we find out more and more about the listener, but we’re all in it together. Fantastic finish, fully delivering on all the promises of Gomez’s character throughout the season, including expectations from the comic. It’s very good.

In fact, everything’s so good it makes up for Shipka’s wanting arc. Once she gets the proverbial Force Lightning, she stops being the protagonist and becomes the subject of the show. Not a great place for the next season setup, though maybe it’d work better if they hadn’t wasted a couple minutes flashing back through the entire season when Shipka’s got to make her big choice. Instead of let her act the season, they let the clips do it for her. Not a good move.

But otherwise a successful end to a very successful season. Though I do hope they get Shipka back as show lead next season. They didn’t take it away from her—turning it into an ensemble—until the very end of the episode, but they’ve been moving in that direction for a while now. Fingers crossed for next season.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e04 – Witch Academy

I’m very confused; the witch school is within walking distance from the farm where Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) lives. I thought it was a boarding school far away. Turns out it’s a boarding school—Shipka has to do three nights there—but it’s within walking distance. So she was never going to see her human friends again by just not… going to town anymore. Or something. It’s not explained and confusing but fine.

Because the welcome to witch school episode, which is mostly about how the other witches haze Shipka, works out. The characters it introduces, the twists it introduces, the whatever—they all work out. Shipka being terrified when the mean girl trio of witches (Tati Gabrielle is the leader and good, the other two are fine but background) lock her up in a well or simulate burning her or hanging her—it’s called harrowing and the established students put the new ones through it because it’s what the witches went through back in the olden days and the witch trials. Or something. The backstory on it isn’t very important, not after we find out Miranda Otto majorly harrowed sister Lucy Davis back in the day. Also not after Shipka discovers she’s fairly old to be a new student, apparently, because the school grounds are inhabited by the ghosts of all the little kids who died in their harrowings over the decades. They’re not exactly haunting the place, not exactly not.

The ghost kids leads to a great subplot for Shipka, Otto, and Davis, where the show does a fantastic “girl power” move and never pauses to acknowledge it much less congratulate itself for it. “Sabrina”’s very comfortable doing well.

But Shipka not being able to get through the harrowing just doesn’t fit; it does the hazing PSA and well, but it doesn’t really work with Shipka’s character as she’s developed to this point.

Anyway. Simultaneous to Shipka being away for a long weekend—she tells her human friends she’s at the state fair or something—boyfriend Ross Lynch gets some more information about the creature in the mines after it turns out Lachlan Watson has a possessed uncle living in her house and never told friends about it even though the guy’s obviously demonically possessed. It’s a scary subplot. Very effectively done.

Overall, it’s a solid episode. Not perfect, but very solid. They succeed at introducing the school, including warlock love interest for Shipka but not really Gavin Leatherwood.

So, solid.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e03 – The Trial of Sabrina Spellman

No Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa script this episode, Ross Maxwell instead, which initially confirmed my idea about how the first two episodes were the extended pilot and now we’re getting into series proper.

Actually, no, because this episode serves to set the series up to be, you know, a series. The episode opens with teenage half-witch who denied the Dark Lord Kiernan Shipka running out of principal and temporarily possessed by said Dark Lord Bronson Pinchot’s office and bumping into teacher Michelle Gomez, who’s also possessed—unknown to Shipka—by a demon in the Dark Lord’s employ. Their goal? Get Shipka to sign her soul over to the Dark Lord.

Then Shipka goes off and has flashbacks about the event, which occurred at the end of last episode. Like we didn’t just stream it. “Sabrina” seems like it was intended as a weekly show. Possibly with a two hour pilot episode. Meaning Aguirre-Sacasa left it up to Maxwell to get “Sabrina” from pilot to series, meaning a resolve to what came before while still allowing for an interesting future. So a trial.

Where Dark Pope and not Ewan McGregor Richard Coyle is going to try Shipka for not signing her name in the book—she breached contract, implied by her wearing a wedding dress to her Dark Baptism—and Shipka has to convince human lawyer named Daniel Webster (John Rubinstein) to defend her in court. Witch court. Meanwhile her boyfriend, Ross Lynch, has to contend with a bullying father sending him to work in the mines, which would be unpleasant even if Lynch hadn’t wandered down into them and seen the Dark Lord once in childhood.

Then Shipka’s friend, Jaz Sinclair, has a subplot about discovering Pinchot’s soft-censoring books from the school library while Chance Perdomo has a romance arc with fetching, suspicious warlock Darren Mann. It’s a full episode, with yet another strong lead turn from Shipka. The supporting cast is all good too. Rubinstein does a lot with a guest spot, Gomez is fantastically evil… Lucy Davis is really good. The story even seems to be going in a direction Miranda Otto could work out.

I would just like the show to start now. Like, a full quarter turn at the end of next episode should be expected at this point; the show hasn’t had to settle in yet.