There isn’t really any particular affection between them,
but it’s starting to seem like Wardwell and Sabrina have a similar cause.
Namely, neither of them wants Sabrina to end up as Satan’s prophet on earth.
Poor Wardwell! A loyal servant for many years, about to watch an unqualified
upstart get promoted above her. Who wouldn’t be upset?
But this episode makes clear that Sabrina isn’t totally
without her defenses. She’s clever enough to take the exact meaning she needs from
Hilda’s story—namely, that it’s possible to play chicken with the Dark Lord,
who is more invested in reassuring himself that his minions are in line than
actually testing them. This episode featured an unusually present Satan. The
episode begins with him chit chatting with Wardwell (note I wrote: “Satan just
chilling in an armchair”), and then he visits Sabrina and others around her
repeatedly in an effort to persuade her to commit increasingly evil acts. And
the picture that’s painted of him in that effort is none-too-flattering. He’s
simultaneously over-confident and insecure, positive that he knows Sabrina
better than Wardwell even though Wardwell has spent more time with her, and
vindictive when Sabrina won’t do his bidding. It doesn’t seem insignificant
that Nick says that he and Lilith are “free of the false god’s petty tests” in
the play Blackwood writes. Who’s doing petty tests now?
Wardwell’s reaction to that play is intriguing. She gets
quite emotional during it, but it’s hard to tell what she’s thinking. Does the
play remind her of what she’s been promised, and what’s being taken away from
her? Or does it remind her of her devotion to Lucifer Morningstar? Probably
bathing his hairy feet later doesn’t do a whole lot to keep her in line, but
Satan is just the kind of guy who’s going to gloat about his victory. Which we
also learn isn’t a complete victory, in that Sabrina knew what she was doing.
But the episode ends on a note of Schrödinger’s cat uncertainty. Did she steal
the gum, or pay for it? Is she as able as she thinks she is to resist the
darker parts of her power? The smirk suggests she’s a little more sinister than
we’ve previously witnessed, but we don’t actually see her leave without paying.
We’re left to infer the result from her reaction and the vacant cash register.
But even as she’s feeling some sense of triumph in her
battle of wills with Satan, Sabrina’s efforts to reconnect with the mortals in
her life are an unmitigated disaster. She panics while hooking up with Harvey,
causes Theo to commit a horrendous crime, and is so disconnected from Roz, she
doesn’t even go visit her to see how the fake chicken pox are going. There’s a
delicate balance for the show to strike between showing this disconnect between
Sabrina’s new world and her old, and making sure that world stays connected to
the ongoing plot of the show. The pendulum is always going to swing back and
forth depending on what Sabrina is committing too, but right now, she’s getting
further and further away from that world.
It’s hard to say which of these two places she should
actually belong in. At the Academy of Unseen Arts, Zelda threatens to kill a
fellow teacher so she can establish her own dominance, and over at Baxter High,
Theo is being tormented daily by brutish classmates while no one does anything.
And just as Sabrina’s mortal friends are generally kind and decent, she also
experiences kindness and decency from some of her Satanic connections, even if
it’s mostly her family. It may be playing out on a stranger, more demonic
stage, but the question of who you want to be in the world is pretty
traditional stuff in the world of teen dramas. It just doesn’t usually involve
anyone’s immortal soul.
Stray observations
- Not totally clear if it’s intended to sound this way, but
Satan whining about how Sabrina signed his dang book is comically petulant. - “No one has better diction than you.” “Well, that’s true,”
said with the crispness of a Shakespearean actor treading the boards. - Come on, these people have endless magical abilities and
Sabrina still has to get teleported home so Hilda can give her the Heimlich? - The show is leaning harder on the Nick romance, but he’s
clearly completely untrustworthy, right? He’s like the nice, cute version of
Satan, but still Satan. - I’m sorry, Zelda’s nemesis is named Shirley…Jackson?
- Dorian, let’s maybe refrain from saying things like “The
claw is inside you now” because it is gross. - That was an impressively goofy looking fake cat they had
Kiernan Shipka carting around. They really could have avoided the problem of
her allergies by making Salem animatronic. - Speaking of which, obviously the breaking point for Sabrina
is when Satan threatens her cat. This is the most relatable this show has been for me, a decidedly not teen with no magic powers.