‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Episode 9 Recap: A Tale of Two Zombies

It’s like mother always said: life has its ups, its downs, and its zombies.

This is the hard truth our Chilling Adventures of Sabrina friends are learning this episode, though they don’t all totally know it. Harvey is ecstatic that his brother is back, and is sure he’ll start talking and eating again soon. Sabrina, rightly, is alarmed, and we are treated to the return of Kiernan Shipka’s masterful uh-oh face. Later, when Ambrose asks how Tommy’s doing, Sabrina hedges and he sees right through it, delivering the greatest iteration of a toldja so: “I knew you shouldn’t have performed that resurrection. Everyone told you.” Yes, everyone.

Back at the homestead, zombie Tommy (Zommy) continues to stare silently like it’s his job (it is, he’s a zombie, and zombies can’t work in the mines), wanting nothing to do with Harvey’s attempts to draw him out with old photos and stories of times they went to carnivals. He spots a photo of himself in a football uniform and points at it, frowning.

In other zombie news, Agatha is doing not great, Bob. She passes out and vomits black sludge during evening prayers at Evil Hogwarts. It would seem that resurrection doesn’t really agree with her.

Ambrose has also been somewhat resurrected: with Luke’s help, he’s gotten Blackwood to soften his sentence by letting him do community service at Evil Hogwarts. He’s picked an outfit that he believes seeps “Carnaby Street cool” for his first day, and is immediately a terrible school employee. He and Luke start humping on a couch in Blackwood’s office the actual first minute they’re left alone, only to be interrupted by the Fenty Triplets and Nick, brandishing a turnip that poor Agatha spit up. Prudence, for one, is not pleased with this turn of events.

Also at Evil Hogwarts, Aunt Zelda has been doing some Blackwood humping of her own and has a few new lines to add to her resume: interim director of the Satanic Choir and unholy godmother to Blackwood’s eventual twin sons. She’s delighted and smugly tells the gathered family that she “will be restoring the luster to the Spellman family name” while they’re off doing whatever.

At boring, non-magic school, Roz has a vision and knows that something’s not right with Tommy, while Susie continues to chat with Aunt Ghost, who asks if the Spellmans are still witches. Um, spoiler, Aunt Ghost.

Evil Wardwell is lurking more than ever, and with the way she’s delivering her lines, I wouldn’t be the last bit surprised if when she receives her scripts, all the dialogue is in italics. When Sabrina shows up looking for help with what is obviously a flop resurrection, Wardwell asks her if she felt the Santa Diabla winds the night before, “the frisson of electricity as if the door between the worlds had been blown asunder?” Uh, no. Can’t say I did. Sabrina chickens out and makes an excuse, fleeing.

Zagatha is getting worse: while the Satanic Choir sings “Do Re Me,” she staggers into the chamber looking like a sentient garbage can, croaks, “help me,” then collapses. Blackwood demands to know the meaning of this, and Prudence immediately sells Sabrina out, much to Zelda’s dismay. So much for restoring that luster!

Hilda posits that Agatha came back too quickly, prescribing seltzer water and cayenne pepper so she, I don’t know, burps all the death out of her. She admits to Ambrose that she was stalling, then says that Agatha clearly wasn’t supposed to come back. Ambrose, a loyal cousin despite his earlier toldja so-ing, keeps his mouth shut about Zommy. Down in the embalming room, the other miners’ bodies are waiting to be embalmed, and all of them have great big human bites taken out of them. Not great!

Sabrina confesses to the aunts that she brought Zommy back and asks for their help getting into mortal limbo, where she believes his soul is still trapped. When Zelda refuses, Sabrina basically tells her she’s not her real mom and flees to Evil Wardwell, who continues to somehow speak in all italics and warns Sabrina about messing with power bigger than her, but immediately relents and says she knows a threshold, no problem. If you’ve seen The Good Place and caught their occasional glimpses of hell — wailing, gnashing of teeth — you’ll recognize the sound effects used when Sabrina goes into limbo. It’s misty, and she sees her mom, who doesn’t recognize her, and then Tommy, who she tries to steal back into the mortal world, a monster her mom referred to as “the soul-eater” in pursuit. She runs back through the portal with Tommy, except, uh-oh, Tommy’s not there, only red smoke. “It seems that the soul-eater’s got him,” Wardwell says. What, uh, what does that mean, Sabrina asks. Well, Sabrina, it does what it says on the box. Zommy is doomed. Wardwell has a nice moment with her terrible bird, monologuing, “finally, it’s going to happen.” Harvey was her last tie to the mortal world, and now they’ll be dunzo.

And dunzo they are: Sabrina goes to Harvey’s house, where Zommy is sleeping off the draught she slipped him, and admits that she’s a witch and that she tried to resurrect Tommy, but that she effed up and brought back “something I need to put back in the ground before things get worse.” Harvey, shell-shocked, realizes that she means they can’t go on living the rich life of watching Zommy point at pictures of himself playing football and clawing at his own reflection in the mirror while contemplating eating their throats. “I’ll do it,” he says. He tells her that she needs to not talk to him for a while, and that she should go. “You’ve done enough.” As sad Sabrina leaves the house, she hears a single gunshot. Zelda rubs her back as she sobs at home: “It’s done.”

We’ve all learned a valuable lesson today: never try to outsmart the laws of mortality. Your boyfriend will dump the heck out of you if you try.

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 9 ("The Returned Man") on Netflix