t is the end of the road for this enjoyably baroque revival of the teenage witch, as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix) bows out with a fourth and final season. Some would argue that, like Glow, it was prematurely pulled, another victim of Netflix’s casual wave of the cancellation wand, but while it is still here, I am trying desperately to catch up with everything that has been going on. A confession: I dipped out at the end of the first season. It was fun and knowing and a touch campy but, to be brutal, there is a lot of that about, and it never quite drew me back in. Here on the last stretch, then, there are now two Sabrinas, one on Earth, one in hell, or not just in hell, but the Queen of Hell, and the two should not be meeting, because of a time paradox. But there continues to be very bad stuff in Greendale, so obviously Kiernan Shipka has plenty of opportunities to put in double time. That bad stuff is the Eldritch Terrors, eight nightmarish monsters/villains/fiends, unleashed on the town by the Reverend Lovecraft (who looks an awful lot like Father Blackwood) and the new, fascistic Pilgrims of the Night church. The Terrors are Buffy-scary manifestations of the townsfolk’s fears and anxieties, and the ghoul-of-the-week format suits this well, tempering some of its more rambling, less easy to follow qualities. Early on, the primary menace is an encroaching darkness, as Greendale comes under threat from a growing number of creepy-looking miners who smash lightbulbs and make people hear their darkest insecurities voiced in exactly the voice you would expect a creepy-looking miner to possess. It is incredibly of the moment. A mysterious wave of something that cannot be seen is spreading and there is no containing it. In its presence, Sabrina feels “hopelessness, despair, loneliness”, which encapsulates at least a certain aspect of the last 10 months. “Today, this day, the sun will set and never rise again” is me whenever Matt Hancock is on the telly. Still, these spectral miners – for some reason, I can’t hear the phrase without laughing, and they say it a lot – are easily defeated by ripping off their masks, which, come to think of it, is not a very responsible message for the present time, after all. There are more Eldritch Terrors, of increasing horror; some genuinely frightening, some a bit more silly. There is a bedraggled man who asks for help; whether he gets it or not may be the reason his victims live or die (and one dies horribly, and gruesomely). But the best episode involves a trip to a parallel universe. It is a shame that the clip has already been released by Netflix, because the sight of the original, 90s actors who played the first Hilda and Zelda, trapped on an endless TV set, existing solely to deliver their lines as written, is a real treat, and I can only imagine how wonderful it would have been for fans to come across it and be surprised that they were appearing. It is a smart, meta detour that taps into the best of the show’s wit. Elsewhere, Sabrina deals with the more mundane aspects of any 16-year-old’s existence, witch or not. All her friends have coupled up, and have less time for her than they previously did, what with all the snogging (and more: I loved Roz turning into the cliche of the girl who had sex for the first time, and now can’t stop talking about it). To resurrect the Fright Club, Sabrina fakes a Bloody Mary ghoul haunting the school bathrooms, which is an extreme way of trying to get your friends to spend time with you. As her friends move forward with their own affairs, Sabrina feels passed over at the Academy, and begins to wonder if she made the wrong decision to choose to live in this realm. Sabrina-in-hell looks to be having a lot more fun. Still, as Ambrose reminds her, she made her choice, and now she must make her peace with it. If only it were that simple. The world is under threat, the fact that Sabrina can pop to hell in disguise to visit the other Sabrina starts to be irresponsible, what with their meetings causing a cataclysm to end all cataclysms, and it all builds towards an epic finale, and the encroaching Void. For the neatness that the episode-by-episode terrors bring with them, it still manages to be completely bananas, occasionally bordering on the nonsensical, what with the weddings, body-and-soul swaps, and characters who I thought were dead and are not but, it turns out, might still be (I think). But this is spirited, gory, teenage supernatural fun, with a tidy-ish ending – and it has been a pleasure to hang out with Sabrina again.