‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Episode 4 Recap: Bully For You

The day has finally come for Sabrina to go to Evil Hogwarts, and boy is she mad that owl ever come owlin’ at her window. She sulks to the Scooby Gang that she has to go to a farm expo with her aunts (fake) as she dreads her three-day immersive orientation before she can continue on as a day student at Hell School.

Each of the Spellmans tries to comfort her: Hilda gives her protective charms to keep in her pockets, Zelda says her academy years were some of the best of her life, and Ambrose points out all the hot warlocks who will be at there. In the greatest line-reading in the history of streaming, Sabrina seethes, “I’m not going there to hook up with hot warlocks!” She’s going to learn “how to conjure [Actual Satan], bind him, banish him. That’s my only agenda.” Also, who knows, maybe some extracurriculars? Consider the duhhhrama department, ‘Brina, just saying.

Once she arrives on campus, Sabrina is met by a charming baby, Quentin, who gives a little tour on the way to Father Blackwood’s office, since he of course also runs the school — each of the rooms is a pentagram that interlocks with the next, and the entrance hall has a nice big statue of Actual Satan on a throne.

Blackwood greets Sabrina, then sends her off the choir, taught by his pregnant wife. We soon learn that Sabrina’s difficulties range beyond filler subjects — the Weird Sisters are in the house, and Prudence is not okay with Sabrina’s lovely singing voice or general existence.

If we hadn’t figured it out from all of the soul-bartering and body-snatching in prior episodes, this one drives it home: witches can be real assholes with no respect for the social contract. The Weird Sisters haze the hell out of Sabrina for three nights straight, a ritual they call the Harrowing. First, she has to spend the night in a haunted cell where accused witches were tortured, hearing sounds that my closed captioning can only describe as [rustle thud whoosh gasp] and [beast noise]. The next night, she stands shoeless and shivering in front of the tree where the same witches, the Greendale Thirteen, stood vigil before dying, listening to demons mimicking her parents begging her to turn around (if she turns around, nothing good will happen). On the last night, they decide to just, whatever, kill her. “You die tonight, half-breed,” Prudence says. The joke is on them, however, because she’s got a whole bunch of child ghosts on her team.

Turns out creepy little Quentin isn’t just a student at Evil Hogwarts, he died during his Harrowing years ago, as did about a dozen other kids over the years. The kids reveal to Hilda that they want revenge — something that she makes it very clear she’s into, since Zelda apparently hazed the stuffing out of her back in her school days. The ghost kids show up chanting “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” and the Weird Sisters are strung up on their own nooses, twitching until Sabrina decides they’ve had enough and they fall to the ground. The harrowers are the harrowed, but a later conversation between Blackwood and Prudence reveals that he put her up to it: “The Dark Lord wants Sabrina educated at the Academy, but there’s no reason she shouldn’t suffer while she’s here.”

Meanwhile, back at Chez Spellman, Ambrose has a daaaaaate, ooooooh. Luke has asked him to a coffee shop, but since Ambrose has been under house arrest for the past 75 years, he has to project himself there along the astral plane. Hilda reluctantly helps, warning him about psychopomps, which are apparently gnarly little birds (do not trust a single bird on this show, they only bring woe and evil, animated scarecrows) that will try and…steal his soul? Unclear, but nothing good. Luke blows off Ambrose’s update about the investigation into Connor’s death, and I’m calling it now: Luke definitely killed that guy, and he’s going to come for Ambrose next. He’s handsome, but it’s the kind of handsome that he hopes distracts you from what a shady murderer he is.

Evil Wardwell is, as usual, up to some shady nonsense and rings the doorbell just as Ambrose goes under. She poses as a mourner looking for info on planning a funeral then wanders around touching basically everything and stealing hair and toenail clippings (??? Why are you keeping those in an ashtray on your desk, gal? This is not the L train) from Sabrina’s room for future malarkey, one can assume. She also charms the mirror so she can spy on Sabrina from the comfort of her own lair, which we see her do later before she realizes that teenagers are pretty boring.

Harvey, meanwhile, must be busy somewhere crafting a big button that says “ASK ME ABOUT MY TRAUMATIC MINE EXPERIENCE.” When he learns that Susie has an uncle who’s never been quite the same since seeing something weird down there, he gets to witness Uncle Jesse pull a Satan Classic: blind eyes, red face, mouth foam, jerking limbs, beast voice warning that “he’ll eat your soul,” etc.

To top it all off, Sabrina is concerned about her academic workload. She’s been told that if she wants to study the aforementioned conjuring and Satan-fighting, she’ll have to solve a puzzle box called the Acheron Configuration, one that happened to be her father’s thesis and that Blackwood has been trying to open for 20 years. A “warlock-slut,” so called by Prudence, named Nick Scratch, gives her one of her father’s forbidden journals and pledges to help her solve the puzzle box.

Which, of course, she does as soon as she gets home from her orientation. The episode ends on a beast paying a visit to Sabrina’s doorway, and our girl screaming and screaming. Yes, Netflix, play the next episode. Sheesh.

Kase Wickman is a writer, editor, Ravenclaw and certified fraidy-cat who lives in Brooklyn. If she had powers, she’d never have to wash off mascara again. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram, if you dare.

Watch Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Episode 4 ("Witch Academy") on Netflix