It’s the crossover we expected a couple of years ago: Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) will finally make her way from Greendale to the neighboring town of Riverdale in the hit show’s upcoming sixth season.
Her appearance is a welcome suggestion that maybe the upcoming season will be a bit more interesting than Riverdale‘s just-ended and all over the place fifth season has been. Time-jumping seven years into the future was a bold move, but without the central focus of high school, the characters have felt scattered and disconnected.
Surely a twenty-something witch can provide a bit of magic.
Shipka slipped the news onto her Instagram yesterday:
Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa confirmed Sabrina’s appearance to Entertainment Weekly, saying they’d been planning on having their characters cross over since the first season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The no-longer-teen witch will appear in the fourth episode of season six, “The Witching Hour(s),” to help Cheryl Blossom with a spell.
This sounds like a one-off, which is not a surprise but still a bummer. I want to see Sabrina’s secondary characters—the aunts! Michelle Gomez! Ambrose and Roz and Theo!—on Riverdale, but I’m not holding my breath.
Sabrina ended abruptly last year: While the fourth part (the second half of season two) finished filming that March, the cast didn’t know it was the end—that announcement came in July 2020. And the series finale didn’t quite feel right. (I’m going to have to talk spoilers here for a second.) In the end, Sabrina died—and was reunited with her magical boyfriend, Nick, in a scene that just felt a little tacked on. Something about the place where Sabrina and Nick find each other was definitely off. But even if it was really the sweet hereafter, Sabrina’s ostensible death raises the question: How is she around to appear on Riverdale?
The sixth season of Riverdale premieres November 16th on The CW.
