Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Part 2: “‘Evil? That word means nothing to our kind.’”
In the winter special, “A Midwinter’s Tale,” Sabrina’s new platinum blonde hair gives us a clue that there’s something different about her, maybe even something wicked. I loved the second half of Sabrina and thought it was a great counterpart to the first half of the show with plenty of action, mystery, and thrills. In the second part, Sabrina’s cursed identity is revealed, and despite her fighting against it, it made me wonder, what does it mean to be evil if you don’t know what you’re doing is bad? Can you be held responsible for following a dark path that was chosen for you before you were even born? Sabrina isn’t aware that her actions from the first half of the season is fulfilling a prophecy—until it’s too late—and she’s forced to sacrifice everything that’s good about her.
The first half of Sabrina ends with Sabrina signing her name in the Book of the Beasts, essentially her soul, to save her friends and her town from the Greendale thirteen; it was a decision she made of free will, but a choice she was coerced into making, nonetheless. Before her Dark Baptism, Sabrina refuted the Path of Night, unbeknownst to her that Lilith, the first witch, the Mother of Demons, Madame Satan—Ms. Wardwell as better known by Sabrina and her friends—was leading her down the path she, Sabrina, was attempting to forsake. The second half opens with not only a newly minted platinum blonde Sabrina, but an isolated young witch who feels unworthy of being around her “good” mortal friends. Like a tortured superhero, Sabrina feels the only way to protect her friends is to stay far away from them, but not because she has enemies seeking to hurt her. Sabrina believes herself to be the enemy. My heart breaks for her as she’s stuck in a paradox of emotions and thoughts: she fears the evil that’s rooted in her religion, but she can’t escape it. I heard so much about the devil in the Catholic faith I was raised in that I believed he was omnipresent, influencing every bad choice I made, making me inherently bad, so I understand Sabrina’s fears that her sins could contaminate her friends if she gets too close. I wonder though: Can Sabrina be truly evil if her motivations are for the good of everyone else? For the growth of her church; the relations between witch-folk and mortals; the survival of her own family, the Spellmans?
Sabrina is justified in her fears of being evil (her religion hails Satan after all), and after signing the Book of the Beast, her fears come to fruition when she begins demonstrating otherworldly powers, using magic without reciting incantations or making sacrifices the way witchcraft normally works. Sabrina isn’t herself, her emerging powers are the result of the acts she performed in the first half of the season—exorcism, resurrection, crossing into limbo—completed under the sinister guidance and instruction of Ms. Wardwell. These actions were Satanic perversions mocking Jesus’ path on Earth, executed to fulfill a prophecy to bring about the End of Days. It’s not fair that Sabrina trusted someone she thought was her mentor, guiding her in the Satanic religion, sharing secrets with Sabrina as an “excommunicate” of her own church, lessons her own aunts, as strict practitioners, could never have provided. Although Sabrina blindly follows the path Lilith guided her towards, sealing the requirements of the prophecy, Sabrina is inherently good, seeking to complete her father’s work, a mission she holds dear to her heart if only to prove to herself that she isn’t the evil she believes consumes her. Before learning of the prophecy, and the truth of her powers, she tells Nicholas Scratch, “I always thought being half-mortal made me less than, but maybe being half-mortal is what’s allowing me to tap into these other mystical energies. Maybe these gifts were given to me to make the world a better place.” Sabrina’s outlook on these mysterious powers are positive, or delusional. She, like another fiery fair-haired heroine whose powers as the last dragon led her to do evil, believe her strengths to be for good, for a better world built in union, but both women fail to understand that their destructive powers are hard to contain and control, no matter how hard they want to use it for good. Sabrina’s burgeoning powers turn her into the very thing she’s been fighting since episode one.
When Lilith learns from Lucifer that Sabrina’s purpose is to be his prophet on Earth, his herald, Lilith, appalled that she’s been grooming Sabrina to replace her, tells him Sabrina would balk at doing evil. Lucifer’s response? “Evil? That word means nothing to our kind.” “Evil” can be one dimensional when describing characters because, as in real life, we are all flawed, drawn in shades of gray, our actions and motives rooted in desire and pleasure, not salient traits of evil. We’re human, not always all bad, nor always all good. Now, we are talking about Lucifer, a figure in history, whether you’re religious or not who is the ultimate personification of evil. Satan is the perfect villain, which makes Sabrina’s struggles far more complex and leads to the Dark Lord and Lilith striking a wager: Lucifer will test Sabrina’s devotion, and if he wins, Lilith will remain subservient; if Lilith wins, she keeps her queenly position beside the Dark Lord. It’s ironic how Sabrina practically hates herself for being evil, isolating herself from her mortal friends, yet evil means nothing to Lucifer, the leader of her religion, whose only interest is to return to Earth in his true form. It’s comical that the figure we view as evil doesn’t describe himself that way; in the same manner, angels, figures known to be the most holy are, in Chilling Adventures, depicted as murdering evangelists with the deadly mission of converting the members of the Church of Night, demanding they abandon their false god to follow the true one who resides somewhere in Heaven. When Sabrina’s cousin Ambrose informs her, Harvey, and Nick, that two angels kidnapped the students from the Academy, Harvey asks, “Aren’t angels nice?” to which Nick retorts, “Angels are the ones with the fiery swords.” I love that this show forces us to examine what’s good and what’s evil, if everything we’ve been taught is the truth; it also illuminates the power of choice. After passing the Dark Lord’s test, Sabrina chooses to pilfer a pack of gum after running into Harvey. Why would she do that if she proved her devotion? Maybe she wanted to be the bad girl for once, indifferent to the repercussions of stealing an item from the store. Maybe it was for the rush of adrenaline after seeing her ex-boyfriend. Or, maybe, we’re all Beautiful Creatures, human in our desires, both light and dark.
Sabrina has been fighting the battle of light (her nature) versus dark (her environment) since the first episode, the reminder of her Dark Baptism marked ominously on her bedroom calendar, the dates crossed out until the day she is supposed to fully embrace her birthright. However, Sabrina’s no ordinary witch, and, technically, not even a Spellman; she’s the offspring of the devil himself. It’s written that she’ll commit works for her father as Jesus did for His. The truth of Sabrina’s fate is guarded deep inside the Kinkle mines in cave thirteen, (if you needed things to be spookier), inhabited by an albino witch and a mosaic with an uncanny resemblance to Sabrina when she was crowned and killed by the angels, and then subsequently resurrected into something like the Dark Phoenix. Harvey shows Sabrina the cave and her illusions of a grand destiny joining witch-kind and mortals, her excitement of having superior powers, are crushed the second she sees herself on the walls of the old cave. She immediately makes a dark declaration upon the meaning of the mosaic: she is the Herald of Hell; she is evil. And yet, Sabrina doesn’t stop opposing Satan, even as a centuries-old-mosaic seems to confirm her identity and role in his reign.
Sabrina’s forced to meet with Lucifer who tells her she’s to rule over Hell on Earth with him. She all but laughs in Satan’s face, letting him know, without mincing her words, that she won’t participate or be used in his dark plans. (“Sorry, I have school!”) Even with a prophecy depicting Sabrina as the half-shadow girl, the evidence that her ruminations are right—that she is evil—it doesn’t thwart her plans of saving the world by weakening herself. In her quest to rid herself of her powers, she inadvertently becomes the antithesis of Jesus Christ by completing the final perversion: suicide. As Jesus Christ sacrificed himself on the cross, Sabrina siphons her powers onto a mandrake, rendering herself mortal, susceptible to death, to ensure the Dark Lord’s plot becomes nothing more than a wish. If only Sabrina had been more patient, less recalcitrant and heeded Ambrose’s advice—although, she’s a teenager, so who can blame her? —she would’ve been able to prevent the End of Days without losing herself.
Sabrina’s sacrifice is the last step in the prophecy, according to the footnotes in the definitive collection of infernal prophecies, The Codex Prognostica. It’s the final perversion for Lucifer to return to Earth, leading Sabrina, once again, right where Satan wants her. From Lilith, Sabrina learns that the only way to defeat Lucifer (or at least trap him) is to confine him in “the mightiest prison, the first one, created by the false God: the human body,” and it’s Nicholas’s body that’s sacrificed for the gruesome task. Although Sabrina loses her boyfriend to the pits of Hell, she succeeds in proving that the path to evil, that word that means nothing to Lucifer, can be a choice and not a destiny.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Developed by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Netflix Streaming Services, Warner Bros. Television Distribution, 2019.