The penultimate episode brings forth the arrival of The Void on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Season 4 Episode 7.
And it’s not at all what any of us expected or envisioned.
The episode takes place in the parallel realm as Sabrina Morningstar steps through the mirror wormhole in an attempt to save the cosmos from imploding.
It’s a nice surprise considering it seemed as though we had seen the last of her and her new aunties Zelda and Hilda, played by Beth Broderick and Caroline Rhea from Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame.
Sabrina quickly realizes that’s she’s stuck in a TV show where they live and work on the sound stages. It’s the TV sitcom version of Groundhog Day.
The Aunties fill her in that her only goal and priority is knowing her lines and showing up prepared for work. Otherwise, it’s the the “green room,” a place that all the actors fear getting banned to.
When she asks her aunts if this is the work of an eldritch terror, they don’t seem to know what she’s talking about. Even worse – her magic doesn’t work here!
As Sabrina wanders around, she realizes that she’s basically trapped on the sound stages as each door leads to a dead end. And she won’t find her answers in any of the books because everything is a prop.
On her first day of filming, she learns that her real Aunt Hilda and Zelda are the “stand-ins” and well, Salem, who talks (though, what a miss by not getting Sabrina the Teenage Witch actor Nick Bakay to voice Salem!), is the star of the show! That may have come as a surprise to Brina, but we’ve known that all along.
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As Sabrina films her “scenes,” she’s surprised to learn that she’s still dating Harvey and Nick is simply his stand-in. They truly love playing with the fandoms!
When Harvey invites her to dinner, she hesitates to accept because she’s still Sabrina Morningstar who is married to Caliban. However, fake Aunt Hilda informs her that this her life now. The faster she accepts it, the easier it will be, which honestly, just sounds like something a cult would say to convince you to stay.
Dinner at Harvey’s consists of tuna and milk, which will make sense eventually. (Or, if you’re like my clever husband, you already figured out that Salem is the eldritch terror known as the Endless.)
Sabrina, however, remains clueless for now, but she does get confirmation that this is the work of an eldritch terror when real Harvey’s drawings of the “terrors to come” pop up on fake Harvey’s wall during dinner.
He doesn’t know anything about them and insists that they rehearse their lines for the next day instead, which is when Sabrina realizes she’s experiencing a sort of deja vu. Only hers isn’t a dissociative memory but an actual memory from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Season 1.
She asks Harvey for copies of the sitcom that she can watch when he puts on the pilot episode for her… it’s the pilot of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. How meta!
Sabrina is creeped out by the fact that people were watching, spying, and recording her, but Harvey explains that it’s nothing to worry about, it was “just the crew.”
Realizing that she needs to do something and fast, she opens the forbidden red light door (a big no-no) and walks into the green room where she finds this cosmos’ Ambrose (he does exist!) chopping up people and grinding them into cat food. I know we’ve seen Ambrose work on cadavers before, but this is a new level of gross.
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At this point, Ambrose admits he knows about the eldritch terror and confirms what my husband guessed early on… the terror is Salem Saberhagen. Also, how is Ambrose so smart and clued-in in every iteration?
Despite his knowledge, however, Ambrose refuses to help and channels the same energy as Hilda: “accept your new reality.”
The following day Sabrina realizes that whatever the writers write into the script actually happens after learning that Roz, who is going blind in the script, is going blind in real life.
During lunch, she chats up the real Aunt Hilda and Zelda and learns that they used to play her aunties but were replaced by “new blood.”
The fact that they’re all stuck on a permanent TV show isn’t even the weirdest thing happening in this cosmos when you consider the stand-ins sleep under the man cast’s bed and Caliban is the head of construction. The latter is a much more important development because it reveals that his latest project is building a vacuum aka a VOID for tomorrow’s script.
When Sabrina realizes the urgency, she asks for Harvey’s help fetching tomorrow’s script, but danger, in the form of Nick, is lurking right around the corner.
Upon reading the script, Sabrina calls an emergency meeting of the minds to inform the rest of the cast that everything ends tomorrow. Everyone seems to take her warnings about the end of all things seriously except for fake Aunt Hilda and Zelda, who continue pushing back that “this always happens on shows.”
When Sabrina wakes the next day, she notices that the calendar has run out of dates indicating that the end and the Void are near.
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She learns Nick has been promoted to series regular since Harvey was sent to the Green Room. Fed up with everything, she demands to see the head writer, who she learns is none other than Salem. Of course, you can be the star of the show if you’re the one giving yourself the best lines!
She informs him that the Void means the end of all things, even the Endless, but Salem is in denial and explains that they’ve always co-existed.
When she shows him that there’s no script past page 29, he begins to realize that she’s onto something.
The two are summoned on set, and when Sabrina attempts to change the script, Hilda and Zelda reveal that they are servants of the Void.
Salem, now on Team Sabrina, tells her where the magical mirror is. We should have known it was locked up in the prop department.
As the duo outrun the monsters that fake Zelda and Hilda have turned into, they see their loved ones – Harvey, Ambrose, Theo, Roz, the real Aunt Hilda and Zelda – dead.
Salem makes writing changes on the fly, which hilariously manifests in real life and buys them sone time. And finally… Sabrina and Salem reach the mirror and jump through as it breaks into a million tiny pieces.
Do they make it out? Have they successfully stopped the Void, which seemed to be swallowing up the parallel cosmos?
And where will they end up?
The episode ends in a “to be continued…” as it leads into the very final installment of the series.
Brace yourselves.
