It’s the Winter Solstice, and Sabrina, troubled by what she saw in Limbo, elects to hold a séance, with calamitous consequences. Meanwhile, Susie’s new role as an Elf at the local Santa’s grotto might be more than she’s bargained for.

At this point I am confused by Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Just a handful of episodes ago, it was a dark, well-paced, thoughtfully written show about someone standing on the edge of the darkness and light, a foot in each camp and doing her best to balance both. Then in the mid-season finale it seemed to have fully embraced the dark, as she signed her name in the Book of the Beast, got a Weird Sisters-style makeover and winked cheekily at the camera/Nicolas as the credits rolled.

Now, this time out, it’s almost as if none of that ever happened. She’s at home with the family celebrating the Solstice, with the only visible change being her hair and makeup. All she really wants for Solstice is to see her mother again, and so she decides (against all common sense) to hold a séance at the time of year when the veil between this world and the next is thinnest, using the help of people she shouldn’t really have any reason to trust (after other, saner people declined). Predictably, things go wrong because the last thing certain people want (for reasons of their own) is for Sabrina to actually speak to her mother in the beyond and so we are set for one of the monsters of the week making their presence felt.

Meanwhile, Susie is finally doing her dream job of being an elf at the local Santa’s Grotto (Jingles the Elf, to be precise) though she seems oddly to skirt from this being her lifetime’s ambition to hating every second because the guy playing Santa is a grumpy old creep and back again in the blink of an eye. Roz gets one of her attacks of ‘The Cunning’ again (seriously, why is it any different from witchcraft?) but as one would given all recent events, waves it off and leaves Susie to carry on, meaning that things take a very unfortunate turn later.

And there’s Harvey, moping around the place in an oddly conflicted way, whereby one moment he just wants to see Sabrina and feels better about everything and then the next gets all weird at the merest hint of a mention of Magic. I get it, teenage angst, relationships are difficult, etc but for the love of God, could we have some consistency from somewhere please?

It all rather storms heedlessly along, with so many things happening with little to no explanation or at best a kind of hand-waving skim of one, that much like last time out the only real option becomes to switch off one’s brain and delight in the good bits. And they are there – Aunt Zelda continues to be a complete enigma, equal parts loving Aunt and darkly sinister witch, and credit needs to go to Michelle Gomez, who remains as fun to watch as ever, even with an accent that seems to slip more and more as the series wears on. But compared to what it had built itself to only a few episodes ago, this just feels like it’s declining into something a lot more throwaway.

Verdict: Time will tell but at the moment this is starting to feel less Chilling Adventures and more Scooby Doo reborn. Frustrating. 5/10

Greg D. Smith