The solving of her father’s puzzle sees the release of a mysterious demon into Sabrina’s home, who immediately sets about tormenting Sabrina and her aunts and cousin. Can this creature be stopped before she takes her revenge against the Spellman family?

As concepts go, the one for this episode is fairly straightforward, but the way in which it gets used to tell stories about each of the characters and inform their individual characters is very interesting, leading to some surprising revelations for each.

The basic setup is that having cast a spell preventing the demon from leaving the house, the four find themselves put to sleep and tortured by terrible nightmares in an attempt to force one of them into revealing how to break the spell so that the demon can roam free in the world (having exacted her very personal revenge on the bloodline of the man who imprisoned her for several decades first). So far so fairly run of the mill for the genre. How each of the nightmares unfolds and what they tell us about the Spellmans is where the meat is.

In Sabrina’s case, there’s a certain amount of fear about her dual nature, which manifests in a particularly gruesome ending to what should be a perfect day. There’s also the hint that maybe she might be attracted to someone other than Harvey, that perhaps Harvey isn’t the love of her life she believed him to be after all. There’s even a certain amount of uncertainty suggested about her relationship with her aunts with regards to her nature as a ‘half-breed’ and it all adds up to make our protagonist even more interesting.

Ambrose’s nightmare pans out much as might one expect, centring on his incarceration and his desperate desire to be free once again to roam the world. There’s nothing much that we are taught about his character by this than we already knew, and the real pleasure – if that’s the word – of this particular part of the episode is in watching Chance Perdomo have real fun with his character as he explores a pretty weird situation with him, even by the standards of the show.

As to the aunts – what’s interesting most of all about their elaborate respective nightmares is the juxtaposition of what the show has led us to understand about each of them. Though their basic characters remain intact, there are hidden depths to each revealed which almost stand as polar opposites both to one another and to what we understood of each. Hilda is no more the willing doormat than Zelda is the unfeeling monster, and it will be interesting to see if the show decides to explore these themes further as time goes on.

The resolution, when it comes, is pleasingly Sabrina-centred but reliant on the others (and a little outside assistance) to come to fruition. More importantly it leads to a new revelation for our heroine, and a deliciously intriguing showdown which begins just before the credits roll.

Verdict: An excellent use of what could have been a fairly by-the-numbers concept, exploring our characters and adding new depth to them. 8/10

Greg D. Smith