The Sabrina Episode You Did Nazi Coming (Season 4, Episode 4)
Degenerate art, fatherland songs, unsubstantiated arrests, witch hunts, drinking babies’ blood, and black uniforms with red trim. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch takes a turn to the fourth Reiche in season 4, episode 4.
The episode opens with Roz and Sabrina running for co-presidents student council. A slightly heavy-handed metaphor about white women and black women sharing power, but we will allow it in this much-beloved series.
If you had been following the Terrors storyline, you would know that Father Blackwood has been slowly trying to destroy Greenwood and all the witches using a series of 8 “Eldrige” Terrors to destroy the young witch and conquer the world. In a previous episode, the Uninvited Terror bears a shocking resemblance to Elijah, who must be invited in when he shows up at the door unexpectedly and offered food and water. If the Uninviteds is turned away he rips the heart out of the “heartless” homeowner. I don’t think Elijah gets pissed if someone at the Pesach table drank out of his cup, but don’t let my Cousin Babe near the cup just in case.
Blackwood embraces the Perverse Terror for this episode’s danger by tricking the traveling salesman out of a golden statue. Blackwood uses the object to create an alternative reality where he is the emperor remarkably similar to Hitler, down to the greasy telltale hair part.
Prudence, Blackwood’s daughter, tries to kill her father before he could make the wish and the alternative reality cast. It reminds me of a question that New York magazine asked back in 2015, would you go back in time and kill baby Adolf Hitler. Prudence did not seem to have any problem as she drew her killing swords and ran for Blackwood, but misses as he disappears into Reality’s Perversion.
The new reality is a society where the whims of a disturbed man are placated by fawning, though brainwashed, minions who do the man’s evil deeds. The traveling salesman describes Blackwood as a mad man who has convinced everyone in Greendale that witches are dangerous and should be routed out. Why are witches evil in the world? Because they kill babies and drink their blood. It sounds eerily similar to the ancient Blood Libel that still haunts the dark corners of the internet and is hurled as an accusation at Jews everywhere.
When Sabrina and Roz end up in the Spellman house, we see marks and writing on the door, windows were broken, and words written on the house. Ambrose says he has been marked in a place that kills witches. In an apparent reference to Kristallnacht. Ambrose is terrified and is packing up his heart and getting out of Greendale.
The Spellman academy is similarly marked with the scrawled W on the door. Inside we find witches who have been forced to give up their observance and worship the new emperor. When Sabrina shows up to talk to Zelda, she does not recognize her but agrees to help her by directing her to the imperial Resistance home.
Blackwood shows up at the academy. The students are forced to sing a song about a Fatherland, eerily reminiscent of Das Lied vom Vaterland! a german song of expansion or Die Wacht am Rhein that the Nazi soldiers sing in Rick’s Cafe American. There are also many references to the Resistance, which could have modern-day references to our own resistance against an Imperial menace or to the French resistance in Casablanca.
Blackwood calls witches evil, scheming, and disease spreading in the critical scene, coming to take babies. It is a poo-poo platter of hate remarkably similar to ancient antisemitic tropes that go back to the Protocols and of course exist in the creased corners of the Internet.
The episode’s aim is for Sabrina and the gang to escape the mind-bending efforts of the Perversion and Blackwood by drinking a heavy dose of reality. Slowly but surely, a truth tea is brewed, and everyone gets woke.
The nazi movie references are dropped in as well, somewhat awkwardly. There are three primary references in popular culture to Nazi movies: the Sound of Music, Casablanca, and The Diary of Anne Frank. All three make an appearance in the episode.
Not so subtly, the writers toss an utterly unnecessary reference to sare sugar rations making cake unavailable. It seemed the only reference that made sense was in the moment of The Diary of Anne Frank, where Miepa makes a small piece of cake and Mrs. Frank comments that it must have consumed her entire sugar rations.
There are notes of the Sound of Music when in Mr. Cerebus’s shop, the backroom is filled with WOKE WITCHES. Harvey, who is in the Blackwood Youth, enters the shop and finds the witches, who are part of the Resistance, in the back. Roz begs Harvey not to turn them in, harkening back to the Sound of Music moment when Rolf has rejected Liesl and calls the Nazi guards. In this case, Roz volunteers herself, and Harvey ignores the other witches.
At the end, when all is resolved, Roz and Sabrina are standing on the steps in the high school announcing their alliance and wokeness standing against the patriarchy. Perhaps the ending is meant to be a call to resent our efforts as a way to bring us back to the beginning before the hate and before the mad power-grabbing monster that has been living with us for a while is gone.
The episode’s goal is more subtle, a jagged little massage to the woke set that if we don’t stand together, we will fall apart. It is an imperative message for the progressive movement who have been beset and befuddled, trying, in vain, to deal with the yolk of antisemitism. The cure on offer is to stand up together with our and retain our own identities, standing in solidarity with allies to defeat the forces of darkness and division.
