Part 3 of Chilling Adventures has finally arrived with Sabrina taking Hell under new
management and doubling her efforts against dangerous new cosmic threats to Greendale.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!
I'm Jan and in this video I'll be discussing the mind-blowing finale of Chilling Adventures
of Sabrina Part 3 and how Sabrina changed her destiny forever.
Plus, I'll explain what was unleashed in the very final scene and everything to expect
in Part 4!
There will, of course, be spoilers ahead, so take care if you're not all caught up.
Part 3 of Chilling Adventures is perhaps the most complicated season so far with Sabrina
using time travel to undo the apocalyptic catastrophe that unfolds in the final two
episodes.
So, first we need to quickly recap what happened.
In an attempt to secure Hell against her challenger Caliban and gain control over the three Unholy
Regalia, Sabrina left her family and friends just as they were most vulnerable.
While she was away, tragedy struck Greendale as Father Blackwood invaded the Spellman Mortuary
killing Prudence, Mambo Marie, and Zelda.
Meanwhile pagans abducted Sabrina's friends to use as human sacrifices for the Great Flowering
ceremony to summon their Green Man god.
And Sabrina herself was tricked into handing over the final item of unholy regalia to Caliban
who then entombed her in the Ninth Circle of Hell.
Decades later, a Sabrina from the future arrives in the Ninth Circle to free the young witch
from her stony prison by swapping places with her.
The newly liberated Sabrina returns to Greendale with the Unholy Regalia and discovers the
only person she knows left alive is Ambrose who explains that the pagans now rule the
mortal realm and are harvesting human blood to feed the Green Man.
Ambrose still has the time egg he stole from Blackwood, and together they use it along
with the magical energy from the Unholy Regalia in a time travel spell.
Sabrina travels back several decades to just before the catastrophe.
Knowing what's about to happen, she reaches her family and friends before Blackwood and
the pagans, and teleports them to safety at Dorian's Gray Room.
She also hatches a plan to defeat the pagans which involves hedge witch Pesta using a glamour
to masquerade as Ms Wardwell who's placed in the Green Man statue as a virgin sacrifice.
Pesta then infects the plant god statue, causing it to rot and die, preventing the Great Flowering
from ever happening.
With her friends, family and Greendale saved, and a catastrophic future averted, Sabrina
knows she has to return to the Ninth Circle of Hell because as Future Sabrina told her:
"When you're done, it will be your turn."
"My turn to what?"
"To be me.
To do this."
Right now I have to go.
There's a promise I have to keep."
But this wouldn't be Chilling Adventures without Sabrina ignoring the rules and advice she's
given, even by herself in this case.
So she goes back to the Ninth Circle, but with something else in mind.
She intercepts a past version of herself and warns her she's about to be tricked by Caliban.
Basically, Sabrina figures that if she stops herself from ever being trapped in the Ninth
Circle, then she can avoid having to swap back with the imprisoned Future Sabrina because,
her thinking is, she never gets trapped.
This creates a huge time paradox, which I'll explain in just a moment, but to mix things
up further, when the intercepted Sabrina suggests they should merge back into a single Sabrina,
our original Sabrina instead reveals she has a plan for them both to get what they want.
As a way of reconciling her dual nature and balancing her own conflicting desires, original
Sabrina decides to have her cake and eat it, by allowing a double of herself to exist,
so one can be in Hell while the other is on Earth.
Now by the end of Part 3, we essentially have a set of Sabrina twins, something that was
foreshadowed right in the very first episode of Season one.
If you've watched my previous Sabrina videos, you'll know I theorised that when Sabrina
had a vision of two babies in the woods, one with cloven hooves and another with human
feet, it hinted at Sabrina having a secret twin.
Of course, that vision could have simply been a metaphor for Sabrina's dual heritage.
But now we see it was more than that and did actually hint at the future existence of two
Sabrinas.
Sabrina herself is unfazed by the implications of this and revels in the doubling of herself
when she boasts to Caliban: "Because I'm one step ahead of you and twice the monarch you
could ever be."
Now, if you're anything like Ambrose, you might be rolling your eyes at Sabrina's evident
disregard for maintaining a stable timeline: "If you never fulfilled your role and freed
yourself in the first place, the fact that there are two of you...
You have created a time paradox."
"Cool."
"No, not cool at all.
No, the ramifications of this are horrifying at best."
Ambrose is technically correct, as logically if Sabrina has changed the future so that
she was never trapped, then Future Sabrina would never have come back to free her, and
our original Sabrina would never have been able to go back in time, save Greendale and
intercept herself.
Sabrina's own actions could put the stability of her timeline in danger in something akin
to "Back To The Future", the movie which Future Sabrina referenced when she came back to set
original Sabrina free.
In Back To The Future, Marty has to be careful not to interfere too much with events in the
past, such as his parents getting together.
And when he temporarily puts that in jeopardy, his own existence becomes threatened.
Future Sabrina already warned Original Sabrina about this:
"Just remember when you're done with everything, you have to come back to right here, right
now, and do what I just did to complete the time loop.
It's the only way to keep the realms preserved.
If you don't, it could be chaos."
Chaos, of course, is to be expected in this show.
I mean, the show's acronym almost spells out the word in English, and does so completely
in Spanish, a lovely little detail from creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.
And as Ambrose pointed out to Sabrina: "Everything has consequences and there are
always loose ends."
One of those loose ends that everyone, including Ambrose, seems to have forgotten is revealed
in the very final scene of Part 3, and it's as a major consequence of altering the past.
In this new timeline, Blackwood has actually managed to get back both the Time Egg and
his twin son and daughter.
To understand why Blackwood now has the egg, we need to think back to what happened when
he went to the Spellman house in search of the Time Egg that Ambrose and Prudence had
stolen from him.
In the original apocalyptic timeline, Blackwood killed Prudence, Mambo Marie and Zelda when
he broke into the house.
But just before dying, Prudence begged Ambrose to stop Blackwood's plan by keeping the Time
Egg away from him.
So Ambrose hid the Egg in the Greendale Mines until Sabrina returned decades later and used
it for the time travel spell.
In the new timeline, Sabrina prevents the death of Prudence, Mambo Marie and Zelda and
they're teleported together with Ambrose to safety at Dorian's Gray Room
What everyone forgot though is that this time when Blackwood breaks into the house there's
nobody there to stop him from stealing back the Time Egg and finding where his children
are hidden.
And so, with the Time Egg in hand, we see Blackwood summon the Eldritch terrors he talked
about so much this season: "Hear the birth cries of this abomination
and tear through the skin of reality."
Blackwood continues the ritual and pierces the Time Egg with a dagger which releases
an unseen monster.
We hear shrieks, a snarl and some chittering sounds, as one of the Eldritch Terrors that
Blackwood's ceremony summoned is let loose in the Greendale woods.
To properly understand the nature of the beast Blackwood has summoned, we need to jump back
to the second episode when Ambrose and Prudence tracked Blackwood down to his hiding place
in Loch Ness, Scotland.
At the lake, Blackwood summoned a creature he called the "Deep One", which is a term
that's been used for a group of water-dwelling humanoids in the literature of H.P.
Lovecraft.
The "Deep One" which rises of out the lake brings Blackwood the Time Egg that will later
give birth to the Eldritch Terror.
The Deep Ones are also part of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos where they're kept in check
by the magic of the Old Gods.
But with the pagans and their Old Gods defeated in Chilling Adventures' new timeline, the
door is now open for Lovecraftian monsters to enter the world.
It'll be interesting to see how these Eldritch beings and their powers are portrayed on screen
in the show as, in Lovecraft's works, the idea is that simply gazing upon a cosmic entity
like Cthulhu will drive an ordinary human insane, a concept that was also used for the
monsters in the Netflix movie Bird Box.
Blackwood references this idea somewhat when he refers to the creature he plans to unleash
as "unspeakable".
These Eldritch creatures also likely come from an entirely different dimension.
In fact, Ambrose already suspected that Blackwood was hiding in an alternate reality of sorts
when they were searching for him at the start of the season.
"Someone who could be anywhere in the world, if not another dimension."
And Blackwood deliberately chose Loch Ness in Scotland for his hideout because of its
special location: "Loch Ness lies atop a powerful rift along
the Earth's ley lines.
Aleister Crowley himself once harnessed its energies for his own higher magicks.
A magick that could warp the very fabric of time and space."
Blackwood himself seems to have dabbled in some time manipulation while at Loch Ness,
because when Prudence and Ambrose find him and his children, in the space of just a month
they've grown from babies into teenagers.
"I've spent fifteen years inside a temporal church of my own creation."
The threat that these Eldritch monsters may pose to not just the mortal realm but also
Hell if not Heaven as well is already felt by two characters in the final episode.
Mambo Marie senses something wrong in the air and tells Zelda:
"We must harness your coven's maternal pouvoir for protection, and prepare them for war."
And over in Hell, as Sabrina prepares for her formal coronation as queen, Lilith tells
her: "Every queen must be made battle-ready.
Every girl must prepare for war."
Lilith is probably sensing the incoming inter-dimensional threat that the Eldritch terrors represent.
But I also wonder whether we'll see Heaven getting involved in this conflict.
Indeed, there was a little tease to this briefly by Zelda in Part 3:
"Oh, honestly.
First Purgatory, now Hell.
What's next?
Heaven?"
And in the original apocalyptic timeline, Heaven decided to intervene after the armies
of Hell attacked the pagans on Earth.
So it's quite possible we'll see another heavenly intervention if Hell interferes in the earthly
clash against the Eldritch Terrors.
Alternatively, or perhaps as well, Heaven could get involved in trying to remedy any
possible instability caused by the time paradox created by Sabrina.
"You have to come back.. to complete the time loop.
It's the only way to keep the realms preserved."
Fortunately, to combat this new cosmic terror that's coming in Part 4, Sabrina seems to
be levelling up with each new season: "Update: I have more power than I did before."
By the end of Part 3, she's able to teleport between Hell and Earth without any special
spell or portal like the ones she needed from Dorian in the first episode.
Another new ability she seems to have is persuasion, where she can convince another person to believe
something.
Sabrina uses this with Lucy Anderson's mother when she and Roz are looking for clues to
the girl's whereabouts.
"You wouldn't mind if we took one of Lucy's pinwheels with us, would you?
No... you wouldn't mind at all."
"I wouldn't mind at all."
Star Wars fans might see this as a power similar to a Jedi Mind Trick.
"These aren't the droids you're looking for."
"These aren't the droids we're looking for."
On top of that, Sabrina's eyes go white when she tells Caliban to back off.
This seems to indicate that when Lilith restored Sabrina's powers at the end of Part 2, the
young witch also got back the powers she inherited from her father Lucifer which saw her resurrect
from the dead, levitate and burn people alive.
"I am the Dark Lord's sword!"
As for Sabrina's love-life, well, things didn't turn out so great for her in Part 3.
Although she rescued Nick from Hell, the after-effects of being one with the Dark Lord made him feel
he could no longer be with Sabrina because he saw too much of Lucifer, her father, in
her.
And when she goes to perform a cord-cutting spell to permanently remove any feelings she
has for Nick, Salem brings up Harvey.
Despite claiming she only loves Harvey platonically, Sabrina quickly realises that she does still
have romantic feelings for him as well.
So, she adds Harvey's name to the candle and performs the spell.
It's a painful moment for Sabrina and implies she may be mostly loveless in Part 4, something
that Lilith also mentioned while preparing Sabrina to become Queen of Hell.
"Let nothing touch you, let no man hold power over you."
A small question I have though is whether the cord-cutting spell actually worked if
Sabrina added two names to the candle?
Fans of Sabrina and Harvey eventually getting back together also had their hopes dashed
when Sabrina herself said to Harvey that he and Roz are destined for each other.
"You guys are endgame."
An important change by the end of Part 3 is that the Greendale coven no longer worships
the Dark Lord, but has now become the Order of Hecate, worshipping the Triple Goddess
instead.
Early in the season, Zelda realises it makes no sense to continue worshipping Lucifer when
he's deliberately causing the coven's powers to weaken by withholding his powers as punishment
for their part in trapping him inside Nick's body.
But it's not until Zelda's shot and enters the Nether Realm, aka Limbo, that she finally
discovers the solution to restoring the coven's powers.
When she sees the three pictures of the new moon, half-moon, and full moon during a vision
of her own death, Zelda understands that only Hecate, the three-formed goddess, has the
power to restore the coven.
"The order of Hecate, worshipping the three-in-one" I think Hecate could come into play as well
in Season 4 as part of restoring the balance between realms and defeating the Eldritch
Terrors.
In Classical mythology, Hecate has acted as a goddess of boundaries and as a mediator
between the divine and the mortal realms.
She was thought to have the power to either prevent or allow dangerous spirits to pass
through entrances.
In Chilling Adventures, when Zelda leads the coven in prayer to the goddess, Hecate is
able to bring Hilda back to the world of the living and, conversely, she may be able to
help banish the Eldritch Terrors back to their own dimension.
As a mediator, Hecate could also assist in any dispute between Heaven and Hell or Earth,
perhaps over how to handle two Sabrinas existing at the same time.
Something that Season 3 expanded on was the connections and easter eggs to Riverdale.
In fact, the show even revealed some dark backstory about the origins of the Blossom's
maple syrup business.
Tap in the top right for a full breakdown of that and many other details you might have
missed such as the hidden clue that told us right from the beginning that Robin [Goodfellow]
was a hobgoblin.
There's also a link to that in the video description.
So, what do you think of Part 3 and Sabrina doubling herself?!
Leave your thoughts and any theories you have about Part 4 in the comments below.
Next, tap left for all the amazing details you might have missed in Part 3 or tap right
for another video you're sure to like.
And if you enjoyed this, a thumbs-up and a share are hugely appreciated.
Thanks for watching and see ya next time.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!