Chapter Text
Statement of Intent / Why am I writing this?
When I watched The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for the first time, I found it to be a uniquely frustrating viewing experience. I don’t think the show was irredeemably bad. If I did, I’d find it far less frustrating. While often dull, ridiculous, or inconsistent, the show very often demonstrates the flashes of genuinely brilliant writing. Time and again, it tricks you into thinking that everything’s about to change, that it’s about to get really, really good, only to dash your hopes every time.
What made The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina so frustrating for me to watch is that it’s so perilously close to being a really great show. It’s a poorly assembled Lamborghini. As is, it’s runs okay, but with a little work under the hood, it can be made genuinely great. This is what I hope to achieve by writing this: to rewrite CAoS into the show I hoped it would be. This demands tweaking some things, and, despite what the car analogy might imply, many of these tweaks will be substantial. If what I’ve written so far is enough to pique your interest and you despise even the slightest whiff of spoilers, I’d recommend skipping the rest of this chapter and going straight into the next chapter, but if you’re on the fence and want to hear more specifics about the changes I intend to make, feel free to read on.
As I see it, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina suffers from a number of issues, the main one’s being…
- Sabrina’s Characterization: In the show, Sabrina often does things that are selfish and irresponsible. This isn't a problem in and of itself. Sabrina is a teenager, so it shouldn’t surprise us that she behaves irresponsibly sometimes. The problem is that Sabrina rarely faces significant consequences for her behavior, and even when she does—as with Tommy’s botched resurrection—Sabrina doesn’t seem to learn her lesson, making similar mistakes for the rest of the show. Furthermore, the coldness that Harvey feels towards Sabrina after the whole Tommy fiasco is a justified reaction to what Sabrina did, but even so, Sabrina remains uncritical of her actions, focusing more on Harvey’s unwillingness to forgive her than her own responsibility, a fixation that the other characters largely endorse. On the whole, it seems weird that Sabrina is perceived so positively by most of the cast, when she’s responsible for at least half of the show’s problems.
- Sabrina’s Specialness: On several occasions, Sabrina is shown to perform incredible feats almost effortlessly, and while some of these are explained by her Chosen One status, many are not. And even then, her status as a half-witch / daughter of Satan, is pretty nebulous in what it entails. As a result, the audience doesn’t really know what Sabrina is and isn’t capable of doing. This kills the tension of a lot of the show’s scenes, as the viewer implicitly knows that the writers can just invent some bullshit to make Sabrina win.
- Inconsistent Worldbuilding: There are a lot of instances where previously established worldbuilding is ignored, or when new worldbuilding is introduced that isn’t necessarily contradictory to what came before, but certainly requires explanations that are never given. For example, what happened to the wider Church of Night after part two? What actually happened to Sabrina’s parents? How do Edward’s reforms fit into anything? Exactly how powerful is Satan? Where did the demons come from? Where do people go after they die? Limbo? Hell? The Sweet Hereafter? What even is the Sweet Hereafter? Why don’t they use the Cain Pit after the coven is poisoned? Why don’t they use it when either Sabrina dies? How do the Pagan gods fit into everything? How about the old gods? Who is Hecate, exactly? Is she a Pagan god, as the name implies? How would that make sense, given they’re opposing the Pagan gods throughout Part 3? And so on and so on. There are many questions like these.
- Satan: Why is Satan content to have Sabrina rule hell in the later half of the show? That really didn’t seem like what he was pushing for in Part Two. Additionally, Satan seems far more ineffectual than he was prior to the end of Part Two, which really kills the menacing aura the first two parts had. After that, he seems to regularly alternate between an evil force majeure and an ineffectual oaf, depending on what the script demands at the time, but these depictions undermine each other.
- A Lacking Sense of a Greater World: Despite almost exclusively taking place in Greendale, we really don’t see much of it. We only see Baxter High, Dr. Cee’s, the movie theater (twice), and the houses of the Fright Club members. Beyond that, we really don’t spend any time with characters outside the main cast, except maybe the girl that’s abducted by the ice cream man, but even that’s grasping at straws, really. And what about the coven? Where do they live? The kids, presumably, live at the academy, and maybe Blackwood does too, but there are clearly a good number of adult witches that live elsewhere, even though we rarely see where. Additionally, despite being members of witch society, Zelda and Hilda never seem to interact with anyone besides Blackwood and the Academy students. You’d think they’d have friends.
- The Morality of the Witches: The witches, being servants of Satan, really seem like they ought to be more sinister than they are in the show, even if they aren't outright evil. The comic actually does a pretty good job at this; although, they might’ve gone a bit too far in the other direction. There’s a real alien quality to the witches in the comic that feels both credible and eerie, and it makes them—even those like Hilda and Zelda—seem unpredictable and therefore dangerous. Interestingly, the show seems to edge towards this early on—with Zelda’s murder of Hilda and her remarking that they haven’t had “long pig” (aka human meat) in a while—but this aspect is swiftly dropped after the first episode. Admittedly, this isn’t really an issue with the show. It has more to do with my personal preferences, but even still it’s a preference that will be reflected in the chapters to come
In short, the main changes I intend to make are as follows:
- A Sabrina that is less overbearingly powerful and special, who often faces consequences for her actions and either learns from them or is chastised by others when she fails to do so.
- More consistent world building that’s better explained.
- A more menacing and powerful Satan, backed with more developed world building.
- An overarching plot that feels larger in scale, and that is more suitably cosmic given the forces at play.
- A greater sense of what Greendale’s like, and how the people within it, both witch and mortal, live.
- A coven that’s less like a loose analogue for Evangelical Christianity (very Bush-era social commentary, not to my taste), and that’s generally more wicked and dangerous.
If any of that sounds interesting to you, read on!