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Archie Andrews and his friends from Riverdale have heard of what is in Greendale on the other side of the Sweetwater River. This is where Cheryl Blossom ventured with her brother Jason, resulting in her tragic death, and it is the subject of Farmer McGinty's unique experience. As he once said to Jughead Jones in the drama CW: "You never know [what you might see] on the Greendale road. "Netflix's Sabrina's icy adventures remove the veil to reveal a world of boiling sorcery beneath the surface and the half-witch teenager, half-mortal in its center. Follow with EWRecap of the frenzy.
EPISODE 1: "October Country"
The series of 10 episodes, directed by Riverdale the animator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, is not a formal fallout from Riverdale. It is clear that both exist in the same world, given all the references, but the gap between Netflix and the CW makes a crossover difficult – not impossible, but difficult. Instead, we should take CAOS like a Riverdale-sque takes the original film of Aguirre-Sacasa Sabrina's icy adventures comic, which was a twist of Gothic horror on the lively world of fishing Archie and sitcom-y by Melissa Joan Hart Sabrina, the teenage witch.
CAOS, the show, made for Sabrina what Riverdale done for Archie – he is looking at darker and more complex concepts to reveal the juicy stories at the center.
Half-witch, half-deadly, this new Sabrina (played by Mad Men"Kiernan Shipka) must constantly reconcile with the duel forces. She enjoys spending her life analyzing horror movies with her boyfriend Harvey (Ross Lynch) at the local Greendale movie and fighting patriarchy with the bests Roz (Jaz Sinclair) and Susie (Lachlan Watson). Sabrina's generally happy life as a teenager is contrasted by the darkness of her witchhood. As a young witch nearing her 16s, she must prepare for her black baptism, a ritual rite of passage in which a young witch enters the woods with her coven and signs her name in the Book of the Beast (aka the Lord's book). from the darkness). , aka the book of Satan). This will grant him immortality, ensure that his powers do not disappear and allow him to enter the Academy of Invisible Arts (like Hogwarts if Harry Potter studied necromancy and invocation). demonic instead of charms). The disadvantage, of course, is that she signs her name to the devil and renounces completely her mortal life, two things that do not belong to Sabrina.
But that's what witches have always done, so she makes the necessary preparations with the advice of her witty aunts Hilda (Lucy Davis) and Zelda (Miranda Otto). One is blonde, the other is a redhead. One is hot, the other is cold. One offers sympathy for Sabrina's deadly attachments, the other asks her to cut ties. They exist as visual representations of the polar forces influencing Sabrina, but they also constitute their own endlessly entertaining gothic troupe – like Punch and Judy (a reference that Zelda will discuss later) if you could actually see Judy's vomiting blood after received a shovel in the head. Sabrina's cousin, Ambrose (Chance Perdomo), assigned by the Witchcraft Council for a past offense, plays the role of common ground. He likes to meddle in business but also knows the pain of cutting himself off from the world of mortals.
Shipka gives the impression of the teenage witch, but her performance has been oversold. She does her job pretty well by evoking some of the most intimate and emotional scenes (the sweetness between her and Harvey and the comfort between her and Susie). But his delivery does not quite fit. The dialogue always gives the impression of reciting lines of dialogue instead of digging into the theatricality of the material.
The atmosphere is just as important as the character relationships that surround Sabrina. The cartoon is based on the distinct style of artist Robert Hack, and the series offers its own twist. The opening credits are an animated tribute to his art that draws images directly from his comics. In the episodes themselves, the fishbowl effect seems to be a popular technique for unbalancing the viewer and blurring the lines between what is real and what is a spelling job.
Much of this effect is used for scenes in the woods and those involving Mrs. Wardwell, Sabrina's favorite teacher at Baxter High. The innocent tries to help an apparently traumatized girl who appears at the side of the road. The girl turns out to be Madame Satan, servant of the devil. She then kills and grabs Ms. Wardwell's body horribly, a scene that sets the tone for the audience – it's not a band of Bednobs & Broomsticks. With the help of Stolis, her familiar raven (a goblin taking the animal to better serve a witch), her mission is to make hell its ambition to convince Sabrina to join the Church of the Night (the religious institution of witches) and to embrace the dark side.
Next are the Weird Sisters, three witches who dress in the same way and who oppose the presence of a half-dead mutt at the Academy of the Invisible Arts. Prudence (Tati Gabrielle), Agatha (Adeline Rudolph) and Dorcas (Abigail Cowen) appear before Sabrina to cast a blood spell while she is in the forest to summon one of her pets. It's nothing, Sabrina's aunt, Hilda, can not fix, but the trio is doing even more damage when they insinuate that Sabrina's parents were killed by witches and not in a plane crash like one had said it. This mystery persists in Sabrina's mind as she takes a bath of milk to clean the hexagon, has the idea of following her parents in the woods and meeting two babies on an altar – one normal and the other. other wearing slotted hooves instead of feet.
There are many references to classic horror movies across the series, another cartoon alignment; The books of Aguirre-Sacasa present a series of covers of variants paying tribute to titles like Rosemary's Baby and L & # 39; Exorcist. The first of them is The night of the undead, of which Sabrina and her high school classmates discuss in Dr. Cerberus & # 39; Books (Cerberus being Hezes' multi-headed dog who guarded the gates of the underworld in Greek mythology, and Greendale being a bridge between the mortal world and the world of the dead, supernatural). As Susie mentions, the movie's zombies were a metaphor for the Cold War on the collapse of the nuclear family. CAOS performs a similar function.
The series plays with the image of women in the 60s and 70s, a time of Suzy Homemaker, but then distorts this image with delightful results. Mrs. Wardwell's possessed form channels the larger hair and the elegant, vintage dresses of that era, but she is a man-eater. Harvey still seems like a coal miner of the industrial age, because of his family business operating the Greendale mines, but he is not poisoned by toxic masculinity. He keeps alive a lost age of chivalry and romance while allowing Sabrina to lead.
Sabrina also uses witchcraft, a symbol of the antinuclear family, as a weapon against "Puritan masculinity" and restrictive gender norms. Director Hawthorne (Bronson Pinchot) does not act when Susie (non-binary) is physically assaulted and harassed by homophobic jocks. The young witch takes things in hand. After Wardwell had the idea in mind, Sabrina asked Ambrose to mentor a horde of spiders like Hawthorne, just to "traumatize him" enough for him to take a day of illness to be able to create WICCA, a club at school to protect Susie. and all the women at Baxter High. (Spiders are familiar to Hilda, a comic book reference when Hilda turns into a gargantuan tarantula to scare a neighborhood girl who bullies Sabrina.)
There are many moving elements when it comes to introducing a new world, even one at least semi-familiar to Riverdale Fans …
Sabrina tries to tell Harvey that she is a witch to see how he is going to react, but magically takes her back when she does not like him. The parents bring the corpse of their recently killed son (who may well be a witch) to the morgue, which, according to Ambrose, could be the work of witch hunters. Sabrina finds her familiar when a goblin is introduced into her room and takes the form of a black cat (Salem!). Zelda warns against choosing a wild pet to serve a witch, but Sabrina says it's more of a mutual partnership than servitude. And with his worries about the baptism of darkness and the refusal of his aunts to report him, Ambrose suggests he go in search of a Malum Malice, an apple that offers knowledge to witches. Mrs. Wardwell has heard of it and, fearing that Sabrina will learn something that persuades her to leave the night road, uses a voodoo witchcraft to send her a scarecrow in the labyrinth of hay that separates Malum Malice. Unlike the Salem, well known to fans of Hart (pun intended), this Salem does not speak (he communicates mentally with Sabrina), but he can returned to its more threatening form of goblin and tore the shreds – as the scarecrow says -.
For the majority, CAOS manages to keep all these pieces fun and attractive, while starting a more complex story of adolescence that tells the story of a teenager trying to chart her own way in life.
Sabrina finally chooses a path when she bites into the Malum Malice and sees a horrible vision: the branches of the tree now contain multiple witches that hang from the necks of the branches and emerge from her decomposing trunk a half human creature half goat. Believing that this would be the future that awaits her if she signs the Book of the Beast, she goes home to inform her aunts of her decision – only to find that they are already waiting for her .
Hilda, Zelda and Ambrose gathered by the fireplace to introduce Sabrina to Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle), High Priest of the Church of the Night and Satan's representative on Earth. He came, at the request of Hilda and Zelda, to respond to Sabrina's concerns about the baptism of darkness. The refusal to do so "must not be," he says.
Thus begins the persistent mystery around the young Sabrina: why does the Church of the Night want Sabrina to sign the devil's book to such an extent that she sent her highest official to persuade her? What really happened to Sabrina's parents? What does it really mean to walk on the path of the night?
Grade: B +
(Click forward for episode 2)
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