021: A Character Unto Herself
Or, I watched season 4 of CAOS and I have ~opinions~
Hi friends,
I’ve been edging slowly into 2021, tiptoeing carefully into the new year as if I don’t want to wake a sick child. Which sounds like a good—if obvious—analogy, given the nature of the pandemic we’re all collectively trying to survive. So far, I’ve been writing first thing during the day and spending the evenings cleaning up from the holidays, playing with my cat, and watching television.
I think, in years past, I’ve been beating myself up about something by now. On past January 3rds, I hadn’t written “enough,” I hadn’t exercised “enough,” I hadn’t kept a clean “enough” house, whatever the resolution was. But this year—or, let’s be real, this weekend—I’ve been able to let the hell go of whatever “enough” was. My kitchen and guest bedroom are both a mess because I’m (somehow) still unpacking. I haven’t exercised once yet. I’ve only written 400 words on a new novel. (For someone who can easily write 3000 words in a day, 400 feels paltry.)
Maybe this isn’t a surprise but hey, guess what? Not feeling guilty about what I didn’t do has freed up my mind to actually get shit done. I think we get so into our guilt about not doing “enough” that we forget that feeling guilty is doing something, a thing that takes time and energy, it’s just the wrong thing. If we could skip the guilt, we could get back to the rest of it pretty quickly.
If you’re feeling guilty about not keeping up your resolutions, whatever they are, take this as a reminder that there are better uses of your energy than feeling that.
There’s been a lot of talk this year about not making resolutions at all, especially not making resolutions related to health—and that feels so extreme to me. It’s okay to want to use the clean slate of a new calendar to better yourself! I hope you do it in a healthy way. I really hope you remember that the best, lasting, changes come gradually. There is no quick-fix for self-improvement, health more than anything. If you’ve never meditated before, don’t beat yourself up for not meditating an hour a day for the last three days. Start with a minute. One. I mean it. Once you’ve gotten good at meditating for one minute, go to two, then five. Maybe you’ll find that 30 minutes/day of meditation is actually all you need, that an hour is overkill!
Gradual change, a shift from the all-or-nothing approach I think we’ve had for so long, is something I hope becomes more common in the coming years. Astrologists keep talking about the movement of planets into Aquarius heralds a time of revolution, of changing societal structure, of shifting thought patterns. I hope extremism is one of the things we get rid of. I hope all-or-nothingism becomes rare. I hope the thoughtful nature of Aquarius brings a focus on thinking things through, an appreciation for nuance, for effort, for measured steps.
And if you’re not into astrology, just ignore that paragraph. The rest of this is going to talk about the fourth (final?) season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Spoilers ahead!
A still from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. 2020, Netflix.
I binged the entire fourth season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina yesterday. I love this show (and, it’s similar-through-interpretation cousin Lucifer) largely because of the way it deals with myth and religion in contemporary fiction. We have reached a Platinum Age of Television, where the right combination of practical and special effects can render any event believable, at least visually. It’s the perfect time for the resurgence of stories about magic, about faith, about things that shouldn’t be—can’t be—but are. And so Sabrina, the teenage witch split between two worlds, with her life halfway into the world of Hell & witchcraft and halfway into the world of mortals, is fascinating.
In season three, CAOS (the most fitting acronym ever, as it’s so close to chaos, an overarching motif of this show) seemed to find an answer for Sabrina’s struggles between the two worlds: Become two people. One Sabrina (Morningstar) could rule as Queen of Hell. The other Sabrina (Spellman) could live as a Regular Teenager™ on Earth. It was a way to have it all, a way to not really have to choose between one life or the other. But we see throughout season four that neither Sabrina is actually happy in this arrangement. Not only has the emergence of two Sabrinas caused a paradox that is ripping apart the very fabric of the universe, but both miss the life the other has. Morningstar makes Hell have prom every night (truly hellish, for my money) but misses milkshakes with her friends. Meanwhile, Spellman finds that both the mortal and witch worlds have moved on without her and she craves the drama of her birthright as Lucifer’s daughter. The two Sabrinas cannot, of course, see each other without consequences to reality, so they are supposed to live separate lives.
I thought, from here, we were going to get a feel-good story about how we are never fulfilled when we are not an integrated self (hi, Chidi!). Sabrina’s solution was not the panacea she thought it would be, which is fitting for what is ultimately a coming-of-age story.
That is emphatically not what happened.
When the two Sabrinas are discovered, both Lilith and the Aunties reject Morningstar, declaring Spellman the “better” one. Presumably, this is because Spellman is the one that they have spent time with, but they only interact with Morningstar once, and it’s such a non-interaction that it’s hard to believe they’d be able to pass judgment on either (assuming it was even okay for them to pass judgment in the first place).
Meanwhile, Spellman is rejected first by Lucifer, her real father, who decides that only Morningstar is his “true” daughter, despite the fact that they are literally the same person doubled by time travel. He takes to referring to Spellman only as ‘False Daughter,’ and when Morningstar is killed Lucifer attacks Spellman, attempting to kill her in order to have a body to bury and mourn. (There’s a lot missing here, but it’s really not worth getting into.)
Spellman is also rejected by her warlock father, Edward Spellman, in a cruel moment when he confesses to thoughts of killing her in her crib because he knew his wife had sex with Satan to conceive Sabrina. She leaves it with the takeaway that he doesn’t care about her and she shouldn’t care about him. And then the show just…moves on, never to revisit the moment, despite the moment it could be. The entire show up to then has primarily revolved around the question of Sabrina’s identity—who and what is she, really? What life will she choose? But when they had the chance to answer it, they breezed right past it to solve the problem of the day.
And what a problem it was: The eight episodes of season four deal with the Eldritch Terrors, an invention of H.P. Lovecraft. There are meant to be eight terrors, each more devastating than the last until The Void arrives to absorb and destroy everything like a black hole. They are set off by Faustus Blackwood, but somehow they are also the double Sabrinas’ fault? This isn’t totally answered.
And this is a big part of why I wanted to talk about CAOS in this newsletter that is theoretically about writing and life. This season tried to do so much in just eight episodes. The pacing is…breakneck is too gentle a word. The show has always been fast-paced, but I was reading a recap of the finale and thought, “Fucking hell, enough happens in this episode to fill out an entire season.” There’s no time to sit with any of it. Viewers have no time to digest any of it, and neither do the characters.
Not that that should surprise me—all four seasons happen in 380 days, give or take a couple. (The show begins a day or two before Sabrina’s 16th birthday and season 4 ends about two weeks after her 17th.) Sabrina grows in that time but doesn’t actually seem to learn a single thing, which is why in season four I was still screaming at her/the television for making the same mistakes she was making in season one. Instead of asking for help, something literally every other character has learned to do, Spellman, drowning in her grief over the death of Morningstar and the rejection of both her fathers, rushes headlong into the “solution” that ultimately (spoiler!) kills her.
And this is what left me reeling. The problem presented at the beginning of the show is not solved. The trouble of Sabrina’s dual identity is never solved. Instead, she seems to actively choose death rather than solve the problems of who she is, who she could be, who she is becoming. And, worse, Nick Scratch chooses death too, in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of emotion when he reveals to Sabrina in the afterlife (?) that he “went swimming in the Sea of Sorrows—wicked undercurrent.” He and Sabrina grieve his suicide for literally one second before realizing it means that in death they can finally spend eternity together.*
Zelda Spellman, at the funeral of the Sabrinas, mentions how there is no death for witches. Which, first of all, what? What have we been doing killing people and sacrificing them for this whole time then? Why do witches and warlocks like Dorcas and Edward Spellman come back from death during the episode where everyone comes back from the dead if there’s no death for witches? It’s never explained. Nevertheless, death no longer exists for witches and so Sabrina seems to be spending eternity in a museum from The Good Place, or maybe The Void (???), instead of the Heaven and Hell that have existed the entire show. So maybe the fact that there “is no death for witches” and the fact that she’s clearly in neither Heaven nor Hell is meant to be a happy solution—with choices between lives taken away, Sabrina is finally at peace.
But what kind of twisted Romeo-and-Juliet ending is that? This is what happens when studios cancel shows in the middle of them, giving a writers’ room a few weeks to solve several seasons’ worth of problems. (The show was canceled in July, season 4 was released December 31. Since actual filming and post-production take a long time, and everything is ostensibly slowed down by COVID-19, I can’t imagine that gave the writers a lot of time to figure out how they were going to wrap up everything.) But, still, they could have done better than this troubling ending where death is the answer to everything. Don’t know what life path to choose? Just die instead. Sad your girlfriend died? Suicide is the answer. Fucking hell.
Just to be clear:
Grief is hard and scary and consuming, but suicide is not the answer.
Choices—especially about something as fundamental as the lives we pursue—are hard and scary and consuming, but death isn’t the answer.
Meanwhile, I also can’t stop thinking about the weirdness around virginity that has been made a big deal since season one of the show. While the decision whether or not to have sex is a big one and important for teens, it’s both an obsessive and casually thrown away commodity in CAOS. I keep thinking about what Brittany Muller recently had to say about virginity in early Christianity—virginity was less about physical ‘purity’ and more about the idea of being a person whole unto oneself:
“Agnes believed, truly, that she was a person whole unto herself. She believed that she could be defined outside of her relationships to men, that she deserved to remain untouched by men, that she deserved to exist outside of their authority and outside of their interest.”
And ultimately, this is the struggle Sabrina faced, isn’t it? She had to pick between the identities offered to her by her fathers—Lucifer’s realm of Hell or Edward’s realm of Earth (witch Earth, but still), and instead of learning that she could exist on her own, outside of their authority, she chose death. After trying to remain a virgin for most of the show, going so far as to break up with Nick over his “addiction” to sex (he cheated babe, he didn’t have an addiction), she finally has sex with Nick, but only because she thinks she could die soon. And it is, upon reflection, the moment when all hope is lost. The decision to be with Nick keeps Spellman from seeing the fate Morningstar is being relegated to, so she doesn’t save her. That mistake leads to her decision to tackle The Void alone. Tackling The Void alone leads directly to her death.
And it all somehow centers on having sex. It’s the longest scene in the entire season. The moment Sabrina has sex with Nick, she both spells her own destruction, thereby confirming the old Christian standby that sex before marriage is terrible (in a show that’s literally about worshipping! Satan!), and she also gives up any hope of having her own identity.
Ironically, the show sees the Spellmans’ coven turn away from the dominance of Father Blackwood and the worship of Lucifer to the much more loving energies of the goddess Hecate. Even Zelda, ostensibly married to Father Blackwood, begins a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman, only to end it when she finds out the woman is actually a male/androgynous spirit. (A whole other thing; too much happened in this season.) The women around Spellman repeatedly turn to other women for healing and growth, but Spellman cannot learn this lesson, rejecting relationships with all women except Morningstar. Obsessed with the approval of her fathers, seeking that same affirmation in the men she dates, Sabrina never figures out how to be her own person.
That’s the tragedy of the show. It’s not that Sabrina dies at the end, it’s that she dies without ever figuring out how to be her own person. I think they actually were going for Christ-like in her death—she allows herself to die to save the world—but instead, the only note they hit was tragic. She’s not a savior. No one is better off, least of all the people she loved.
*The show also suffers from the same problem I think Harry Potter does—believing that characters must spend their lives with who they had a crush on at 15. Woof. Sure, some people marry their high school sweethearts and stay happy, but you’re telling me witches who live to be 160+/immortal (?) are going to be happy with the same person they first kissed at 16? I’m not buying that.
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Happy New Year!
Valorie