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00:00 Sabrina The Animated Series Episode 6 "Witch Switch"
00:04 If the episodes were in the proper order in the playlist, I'd have reviewed this earlier.
00:09 I finally get to see Sabrina in front of a cauldron wearing a witch costume.
00:13 She uses magic to get rid of stereos making spooky noises.
00:18 We also see her aunt wearing witch costumes, and she complains about having witch chores.
00:24 This is all very generic for Sabrina, but it's surprising to see in the animated series.
00:29 She lampshades that she doesn't need to learn this stuff, so they're just sticking to tradition.
00:35 And the potion splashes on her, so she must have done it wrong.
00:39 It's annoying that her complaints about being a witch to set up the episode seem exclusive to this episode.
00:46 It'd be a more compelling argument if this came off the tail end of her suffering for a whole episode because of her magic.
00:54 She answers the door to Harvey, and he invites her to a concert.
00:57 And quickly says she can't go because he just gave her money two nights ago.
01:02 And tonight is family night, where they have to play trivia whiz because he wants the families to be closer together.
01:08 And obviously has no regard for Sabrina's feelings, since obviously she would hate that night in situations like this.
01:14 Also, it's just his anti-witch bias again, because he could have told her to zap up gold and sell it to get money.
01:22 I have to assume she doesn't have the guts to simply turn her into statues or frogs so she could go to a concert.
01:29 And undo the spell when she gets home, so there'd be no harm done.
01:33 A lot of the story's next scene is a waste of time.
01:36 Harvey begs her to go with him to a jam party she doesn't want to go to.
01:41 I don't get why he wants her to go. What a jerk.
01:45 I'm sure his other friend is going anyway, so he could just have him for company.
01:50 She says that the party only has $100 door prizes going for it to avoid it just being generic.
01:57 I really hate that she went when she has no excuse to go.
02:02 When her going to this is the whole reason the plot happens.
02:07 You could have had the plot happen because of how Jem was acting in school, so it's not like the plot couldn't have happened.
02:13 And then way too much time in the episode is wasted on Jem showing off.
02:18 When we could have all assumed her life was that spoiled, this isn't fun to watch, so I wouldn't blame anybody for skipping all of it because they'd miss nothing.
02:26 And we really didn't need to see this to get why Sabrina would want to get Jem's life.
02:31 How does Sabrina think she's the only one living with a family of slave drivers? Does she not watch TV?
02:38 Also, why would Salem want to give Sabrina a new life when he'd lose his only friend that way?
02:44 He's not saying that the spells she casts will bring him with her.
02:49 It's so lame that Spooky inexplicably raps.
02:53 When I would expect a centuries old genie to be totally resistant to rap because he thinks it's trying too hard to be cool.
03:00 And somehow Sabrina and Salem don't lampshade the rap's lameness.
03:05 Because the story is showing no self-awareness all of a sudden.
03:09 Sabrina puts stuff on Jem to switch lives with her.
03:13 Sabrina wakes up next to an alarm clock that wakes her up by talking very early in the morning.
03:20 There's no way Jem would have to wake up early every morning.
03:24 Her parents are revealed to hate her, so there's no way they'd want her waking up early because that'd mean they'd hear her earlier in the day.
03:33 There's also no way their mansion would have a conveyor belt in its hallway all the time because this isn't the future.
03:40 So what if it constantly breaks down?
03:43 They'll have to buy a new one or something and her father would hate the constant extra expense.
03:47 While you'd think he wouldn't care because he's rich anyways, unfortunately it doesn't work like that with all rich people.
03:54 Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt this is realistic because out of all the different mansions I saw in fiction, I never saw a conveyor belt in it.
04:03 Sabrina gets told by a stunk up person that she's behind schedule, arbitrarily.
04:09 Somehow she doesn't question Sabrina telling Salem that she's got a personal assistant, as if she's surprised by this.
04:16 Sabrina wants to go yachting and instead is forced to sit at a kitchen table with her parents who are just ignoring her.
04:22 One of them is on the phone and the father is busy typing on a laptop, caring about stunks.
04:29 The mother is just wasting time gossiping.
04:32 It's like she's tried every breakfast she could think of and just doesn't want to eat.
04:37 It seems unrealistic that they're doing this when they're supposed to be eating breakfast.
04:42 And as rich people, they could try every type of breakfast imaginable until they find what they love.
04:49 Sabrina says she wants to talk with them, and somehow he sounds cheerful when threatening to ship her to boarding school.
04:56 So if he hates Jem that much, there's no believability to Jem not being in boarding school the whole show.
05:03 Sabrina is also forced to run on a treadmill and then walk around with books on her head that fall off.
05:09 I get her parents wanting to make her miserable, but why these specific things that come off like they're trying to benefit her and improve her, when they wouldn't care enough to do that?
05:22 Then she is forced to get makeup put on her.
05:25 We didn't need the story to do a bunch of explaining for why Jem flaunts her wealth and bribes all the time outside of home.
05:32 It was easy to understand that she did that because it was fun.
05:37 There's no way Salem would convince her to say she's just overreacting.
05:42 Sabrina is told by reporters that she just became the richest girl in the world.
05:47 We never see Jem constantly badgered by reporters for being rich.
05:52 If she just took over Jem's life, then it comes off like she was sent to another universe where she's always been the world's richest girl.
05:59 But then she sees Jem, who says she's a half-witch like she used to be.
06:03 So that means it really was as simple as Jem's parents had their memories rewritten.
06:10 And she summons Harvey, who kisses her foot.
06:13 There's no way Sabrina's spell would cause her to lose her powers.
06:17 There wouldn't be a spell or potion ingredients like that because the Witch's Council really wouldn't want any sort of risk of a mortal getting magic.
06:26 I guess it's a good thing that an episode implies later on that witches are not being spied on.
06:31 A witch would take immediate action and Sabrina would be punished for this whole episode.
06:37 Hilda and Zelda don't live in the house anymore because Jem turned them into statues on the roof.
06:42 Because she was intelligent enough to use her magic to make them stop forcing her to do things she doesn't want to do because she doesn't care about them.
06:51 I know I said the statue thing, but that's because it just came off the top of my head and they're annoying me.
06:56 But she could have also brainwashed them into not forcing her to learn stuff she doesn't want to learn.
07:02 If she made Harvey her brainwashed servant, then you'd think she'd very quickly make them go from statues to her brainwashed servants.
07:11 That would benefit her constantly.
07:14 That must have been why she kept Quigley around when he's the annoying one and not her auntie in the show because she wants him to cook for him.
07:21 Then Sabrina goes home and Jem's dad bitches at her for having a low daily progress report.
07:27 Again, if her parents don't care about her, why would they even care about her progress at all?
07:32 Sabrina's threatened with boarding school and Salem refuses to leave the pleasure zone until she hears Jem's mom planned to make an appointment for him.
07:41 So he uses his nails to free Sabrina from a car.
07:44 And now it's a good thing it's explained that somehow she doesn't have magic anymore.
07:49 When it could just as easily be that Jem also has magic because that's the only way she can have Sabrina's life.
07:56 I should need to explain that Sabrina's magic is an inherent part of her body.
08:00 And so it only makes sense if Jem got magic because that's the only way to switch lives with Sabrina without taking away Sabrina's magic.
08:09 If you want to have a story where this makes sense, you need to have them actually switch bodies.
08:15 She runs away and someone says she's getting away with ridiculous acting.
08:19 You'd think they would just run after her while saying that.
08:23 Sabrina plans to make a potion that stops time for everyone but her.
08:27 Why don't witches just use magical artifacts that let them cast whatever spell they're thinking about instead?
08:33 Salem falls down the stairs and has to run from a dog that wastes a lot of time on us.
08:39 Salem eventually puts a web on the dog and somehow the spider instantly covers a part of the dog with the web.
08:45 So the spider must have been made by Jem, but she wouldn't do that.
08:49 Especially since I bet she would scream at a spider.
08:52 Then he runs while holding something.
08:55 I'm still wondering why the spell makes it even possible for the witch who used it to lose magic.
09:00 Enchantra would be pissed.
09:02 Jem says the witch girl is up to something.
09:04 What took her so long?
09:06 And she instantly knows to warp to Sabrina.
09:08 How does she know to go here?
09:10 I assume she knew how to home in on her location.
09:14 It makes Sabrina look completely stupid at memorizing and stuff that Jem is an instant expert at magic
09:20 while Sabrina constantly sucks at magic because she's supposedly a novice.
09:26 Like of course Jem would be good at it immediately.
09:28 It's all about visualization and memorizing a few spells granted, but that's as hard as memorizing school information.
09:35 Jem's frozen literally by the potion, but that would make things obvious to mortals immediately.
09:41 That's stupid.
09:43 Things go back to normal and Salem doesn't remember what happened.
09:47 Even though the spell was all about switching Salem's body with Jem's dog too.
09:53 So how does Sabrina remember what happened just so that she learns her lesson?
09:58 I have to assume that Spooky made the spell so that Sabrina would remember what happened at the end of it, but not Salem.
10:05 For no reason.
10:07 He just naturally assumed Salem can't be taught lessons.
10:10 But he'd know that Sabrina can't be taught lessons anyways.
10:14 She keeps saying she's taught lessons, but a day later she forgets them.
10:18 Sabrina hugs her aunt in Quigley and says she wants to play with her family in Trivia Night.
10:23 This is trying to be heartwarming, but most of the time I'm not giving her reasons to feel like she should care about and get attached to her family
10:31 because they're not deep characters and they're not constantly doing good things.
10:36 Quigley's just there to boss her around and her aunts barely do anything other than harass each other.
10:41 She says she's always been lucky and hugs him.
10:44 The show is showing no self-awareness of the fact that her life still sucks.
10:49 Her aunts still have no excuse for forcing her to waste time learning how to make potions.
10:54 Especially when the whole premise is that she's being raised to be a normal girl and discouraged from using magic.
10:59 So why would Quigley let them teach her?
11:01 Are they doing it in secret? Because he doesn't question the potions on her, so no.
11:06 They'll use magic on him if he doesn't let them teach her about potions, but they won't use magic on him any other time he tries to exert his authority.
11:14 Yeah, right.
11:15 But yeah, her aunts have no excuse for forcing her to learn how to make potions she doesn't need to learn about.
11:20 It's not like one of them said that they know she's gonna switch lives with Jem in the future,
11:25 and so she needs to be taught how to make a potion in case she's stuck without her magic.
11:29 And even then, they'd have only taught her about the potion in this one episode then.
11:33 And she'd only ever need potions in a life-or-death situation where she's out of magic, and she's never been out of magic.
11:42 And she could've very easily not had Jem to deal with anyways, because how did she know she was in the attic anyways?
11:48 This episode is interesting most of the time, to the point where it usually keeps our attention away from the fact that it's totally forced that a life-switching spell took away Sabrina's powers.
11:58 Because she never tried using magic when living at her house, when the Sabrina I know would've tried that as soon as she was bothered by something.
12:06 I get the meta-logic, that she wouldn't really experience Jem's life if she could get rid of any problem with magic,
12:13 but there's no way that the Witch's Council would keep the possibility that a witch could give her power to a mortal around.
12:22 Since it was always easy to understand why Jem would flaunt and abuse her wealth, it's totally unnecessary to establish that Jem's got a restrictive, horrible home life.
12:31 That really makes no sense, considering that if her parents hate her, they have no reason to care enough about her to make her run on a treadmill every day and get makeup when she looks the same without it.
12:41 We're not gonna feel sorry for Jem no matter what.
12:44 If her parents are this evil, why would her dad buy her whatever she wants and agrees to buy a new wing for the school library to help her win student of the year?
12:52 It's not like she'd scream until she got what she wanted because he threatens to send her to boarding school, so he would just threaten to do that as soon as she tried whining at him.
13:02 I'd also never imagine that her parents still ate breakfast at the breakfast table with her, if the idea is that they're rich, busy parents, because you'd think they'd already be at work at this point.
13:12 That's what I thought Scourge's home life was like.
13:15 Anyways, the episode barely showed off what Jem would do with Sabrina's powers, but it showed everything important.
13:21 She's annoying, so it does make sense to not show an entire day where she uses magic to cheat at every problem.
13:27 But that'd be far more entertaining than wasting entire scenes at the start on Jem's party and obnoxious dialogue when we know why Sabrina would envy her already.
13:37 The episode thinks it's valuable by contributing to the show's lore, but if Jem had restricted parents who'd want to send her away at the drop of a hat for anybody's normal behavior,
13:47 then she wouldn't be getting everything she wants bought for her and wouldn't have money to bribe with.
13:53 So it contradicts the show, to the point where it doesn't even count.
13:57 There's no indication that Jem has to do any chores, so she wouldn't get an allowance.
14:03 Jem wouldn't be allowed to do whatever she wants at school then.
14:06 Her parents wouldn't be constantly bailing her out.
14:09 The teachers wouldn't be letting Jem insult her in front of the students and so on and letting Jem pay people to do her schoolwork.
14:18 Because if her parents are like this, they wouldn't be pressuring the school staff into letting her do whatever she wants.
14:24 The point is, her parents always came off as lenient and apathetic.
14:28 [music]