The Chilling and Ever So Woke Adventures of the Comatose Sabrina
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is purpotedly about a half-witch/half-mortal teenager (Sabrina from Archie comics) who battles the forces of evil to protect both witches and humans from dark forces. While there are slight indications here and there designed to let the audience know that Sabrina is really a good witch and not some Satanic worshipping psycopath, througout nearly all of season 1, and almost all of season 2, Sabrina not only flirts with the dark side, she quite reguarly embraces the Satan worshipping ways of the strange mythology the show creates. The show itself seems to be a campier and somewhat spookier version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer just not nearly as smart and profoundly lacking that shows moral compass.
The derivative nature of Sabrina is not the problem with the show. The problem with the show is it’s blind faith in relativism. Sabrina (played charmingly by Kiernan Shipka) ain’t your granddaddy’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She ain’t even your daddy’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She’s decidedly darker, but Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (both creator of the comic book and showrunner for the television seires) isn’t willing to abandon the Archie comic’s roots altogether and instead hopes that by keeping the camp of the original character this will be enough to overcome the shockingly dark spin he has put upon this teenage devil worshipping witch. The number of times any character is praising Satan is certainly alarming but worse is the utter lack of clarity on what good actually looks like.
Like the original comic book character and television show from the nineties, Sabrina lives with her two aunts, both full blooded witches, whatever that means. The show likes to make a distinction between witches and “mortals,” but Sabrina the half-witch lives with her two aunts because her father (another full blooded witch) died in an accident along with her mother. Throughout both the seasons there are several witches that die making the distinction between witches and “mortals” meaningless. The two aunts (played by Lucy Davis and Miranda Otto) are both devout to their “dark lord” and doting mother figures to Sabrina.
Clearly we as an audience are supposed to idenitify with the aunts even while they’re praising Satan and delighting in Satanic rituals. Much of being a Satanic worshiper in Sabrina’s world is apparently opposite Christian references. Instead of “a cold day in hell,” it becomes a hot day in heaven, and “for heaven’s sake” becomes “for hell’s sake.” None of this is even clever let alone informative of the strange religion they practice. Confounding this confusion is Sabrina’s friend “Roz” (Jaz Sinclair) who is a preacher’s daughter struggling with a crisis in faith.
Roz, who’s suffering from a macrodegenerative disease leading to blindness, understandably struggles with her faith, but tragically it doesn’t appear that Aguirre-Sacasa and his writers actually know much about the faith she struggles with. In fact, beside a lazy broadstroke painting of her father as a profiteer off of other people’s faith, there is nothing else ever shown or mentioned about it. Presumably her father is a Christian preacher, but that’s never made clear. Making matters even murkier is the gradual discovery (just the same as we eventually learned that the girls in Buffy’s circle had powers of their own) that Roz has…well, powers of her own.
Despite the fact that Roz has an ability to see visions of future events, she has a hard time believing in the supernatural figures of her faith but all too willingly embraces a faith in Sabrina’s power and willingness to even embrace the religion of her coven. Another friend, Suzie/Theo Putnam (played by the non-binary actor Lachlan Watson), starts out as a girl who wants to be a boy. Watson is a diminutive actor but the show decided to have Suzie who turned to Theo tryout for the basketball team. Of course, without the help of Sabrina Theo could never make the cut but Sabrina helps and Theo is grateful.
While Theo has shown a tacit gratitude for Sabrina’s spell allowing her to be a talente basketball player who could hold his/her own among the boys, she rejects any witchcraft to actually turn her biological female body into a biological male body. This moment is of course used to accentuate that binary people don’t need “fixing,” but it is undermined by Theo’s continued use of Sabrina’s spell to hold her own on the basketball court. Where Buffy the Vampire Slayer used Willow’s embrace of witchcraft as both a cautionary tale on addiction and the corruption of power, Sabrina barely seems to recognize that power corrupts. It being a show about Satan worshippers doesn’t concern itself at all about things like drug addiction, reckless carnality and other dubious activities.
Where Buffy’s tendency to fall in love with vampires was smartly used to highlight to toxicity between ill advised love affairs, Sabrina doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say about teen love and making good choices. The showrunners want to eat their cake and have it too, pretending that their power mad witch is really just a sweet little girl. They also want to be woke and check off all the favorite bugaboos of the woke culture, but fail miserably in offering any clear sense of what this means in terms of morality. If woke culture is moral then it shouldn’t be so difficult to clarify that morilty. Instead the show flounders and fumbles on that regard.
The show doesn’t have to have any moral footing and could just embrace the darkness fully instead of waffling back and forth between light and dark. The shades created by light and dark should be an opportunity to explore the contrasts and how a hero must struggle to remain in the light and not succumb to the dark but so far – now two seasons in – the show struggles, even while offering up plenty of delightfully dark moments that do tend to chill, to understand the dynamic they play with. This would be problematic enough but the embrace of wokeness only muddy’s the witches pond where witches wear neither white hats and gowns nor black hats and gowns instead (metaphorically at least) all dressed in the gray of relativism.