Hell and High School

This is overdue! Like high school, stuff came up and I just didn’t get around to it until now, okay? No excuses, I’ve been dormant, but let’s just roll into what I’ve been watching lately.

I never watched the original series because it looked laugh-track lame. The commercials for this piqued my curiosity. They were going full-on into witchcraft with the Dark Lord and all. I wanted to watch that. Especially since it was little Sally Draper all grown up and ready to take over the world.

I have the emotional maturity of a high school student. I function in my day-to-day life as an adult, but anyone who’s been in a relationship with me or has spent a significant amount of time with me will tell you- I’m still a teenager.

To honor this inability to launch and grow up, I’m going to talk about this series as if I’m a Senior in high school reminiscing on the summer that just ended.

S is for Samhein

Of course she was born on Halloween and so her dark baptism would be on a full moon. What could be cooler than that?

Sabrina doesn’t point a wand and yell, “stupify” at things. She raises the dead. She has people killed. She rips open portals into purgatory to try and save people’s lost souls. This is not for the faint of heart. This series goes very dark, but with a light-hearted touch.

What I mean by this is that the Spellman family can sit around the dining room table talking about school, life, burning people at the stake and give a resounding, “Hail, Satan!” at the end of their meal prayer before digging into Aunt Hilda’s turkey and stuffing.

This is your family-friendly Satan. You will work on spells at school, have seances in the woods, but the night still ends with pie and ice cream.

A is for Adulation

Netflix is not shying away from different beliefs. The characters in this show worship the devil the same way the Duggards believe having two dozen kids will get them into Mormon heaven. I’m bias in that I’m all for belief systems that allow you to live your life and to be extra fashionable while you’re at it, so the worship of the Dark Lord is fun and interesting to me.

Like all religion, it comes to fruition, that people in power are manipulating the teachings of the Dark Lord to serve their own purpose and it circles back as the perfect analogy for what happens in the real world.

Side-note, this is the worship of Satan from the old books. This isn’t to be confused with the often political Satanic Temple. The followers of the Dark Lord worship the ones that came before. I got goosebumps during the dark Exorcism when they started praying to the witches of ancient dark magic — Lilith, Hecate, Marie Leveaux, and my personal favorite and go-to that watches over my tarot cards, Morgan Le Fay.

B is for Brimstone

A lot of the characters will talk about wanting to sit at the Dark Lord’s side for all eternity, but in the same breath, no one wants to go to hell. LOL! It’s like a talking point, but in the end, no one actually wants to live in fire and brimstone.

Somehow witches get to live a lot longer than humans. They get a good two to three centuries at the least, and I could totally see myself going along with something that allowed me the ability to live a few hundred years. The next step would be to find a way out of the end game of ending up in eternal hellfire.

R is for Romance

Sabrina and Harvey are so precious. They’re the kind of couple where everything went right from the beginning. They met, they decided they liked each other and it just went from there. Is it because they’re teens or because they’re in a fictional story about witches?

There is no angst or stress here. There’s no reading between the lines to try and figure out what the other person is trying to say. It’s teen love, that’s the only explanation. The sarcasm and jadedness of their twenties hasn’t set in and the cautiousness of being in your thirties are miles away from them at this point.

My favorite scene between the two is when Sabrina places the protection spell on Harvey. He doesn’t know she’s doing it and she never tells him. She just whispers the words that she hopes will keep him safe when she’s not there to watch over him.

I is for Incantations

Where would we be without spells and seances? I’m from the world of Buffy so I appreciate that incantations have rules in this world. If you bring someone back from the dead, well, you’re going to have to kill someone to get it done.

There are high costs to performing darker incantations and they learn quick that they can’t crib their way through it and hope a loophole will save them. This is where Sabrina learns the most. She can try to talk her way into why some things should have worked, but she learns quite quickly that the rules apply to everything.

I often wondered during this series if the adults are playing along for the children. Do they play fast and loose with the rules or are they exactly who they say they are. I feel like I haven’t really gotten a chance to see the adult characters without their masks on. This show may be too light-hearted to delve into the psyche of the parents, but it could help explain a lot.

N is for Necromancy

In other supernatural shows, the main character will spend quite a bit of time in disbelief of what their powers are and will fight to be “normal”. Sabrina wants to be normal in that she doesn’t want to become an immortal that lives without her friends for a few centuries, but she fully embraces witchcraft.

Before the season is out she uses blood, snakes, human sacrifice, demonic spirits and even calls upon the devil and hellfire to complete in spells. She doesn’t fear the dead or crossing over and she utilizes all of the tools at her disposal to right wrongs and keep her friends and family safe. This is definitely not Riverdale.

A is for Acceptance

Sabrina accepted herself at a level 7 at the beginning of the show, but by the end of the season she was at a level 10. She fully embraced that her path would be running parallel with the dark one and that there was no way to stop it.

What do we know at the end of the episode? She has earned Lilith’s respect, but Lilith will end her if it turns out that the dark lord plans to put Sabrina’s at his side instead of her.

The second season will delve deeper into the Satanic pact that her parents made, but I also think it will involve Sabrina growing up more and realizing that there are a lot of people around her that would see her dead before she finds answers.

It seems heavy, but this show is fun! I will definitely tune in for the second season.