Charmed Season 2 Episode 14 Review: Sudden Death

This Charmed review contains spoilers.

Charmed Season 2 Episode 14

In this week’s episode, the sisters continue their search to regain the Power of Three, despite receiving a dire warning about what that power has done to all the Charmed Ones before them. With no clear answers as to why the power eludes them, they all assume Macy is the weakest link. Maggie concocts a plan to retrieve Abigael’s ritual knife to restore what they think was taken from Macy when she had her demon powers stripped away.

Jordan begs Maggie to let him join her on her mission to retrieve the ritual dagger because he is absolutely committed to serving the witches now, I guess. She reluctantly agrees, and he serves as a decoy/distraction for Abigael while Maggie goes to the dungeon to find the dagger. She sees Parker, he tries to talk to her, she tells him off, and he tells her where the dagger is. Abbie peeps game and catches her in the act. When Abbie learns the reason Maggie’s after the dagger, she just offers to let Maggie do whatever she plans to do because, according to her, neither the dagger or Macy’s missing demon powers have anything to do with the Power of Three.

I hate to agree with Abs, but… It makes no sense to me how, with all of their personal and interpersonal conflicts, the Charmed Ones don’t even consider that the issue may be internal. These are supposed to be intelligent women, one of them has a PhD, and yet the obvious answer —we have a lot of unresolved conflict within ourselves and between each other— doesn’t occur to them at all. It just has to be an external force keeping the magic away from them, and not their repressed emotions, overall uncertainty, and unexamined guilt blocking their power from manifesting. At this point, the writers are going to have to either convince me they’re smart or offer a reason why they’re acting the opposite.

Last week, Harry’s Darklighter —who now goes by Harry’s human name, Jimmy— asked Harry for help to escape The Bad Guys. When Jimmy goes radio silent, Harry assumes he’s in trouble, and springs to action to find him because if he dies, they both do. Harry and Mel follow a trail of magical mischief and evildoing to a facility in Duluth where they find and eventually capture an evil smoke monster that was inhabiting the body of a person who was resurrected. This is what the Bad Guys are doing with the magic they’re stealing.

Because Jimmy is in danger and therefore Harry is too, Macy searches for a way to sever Harry from his Darklighter. She can’t untether them, but she does discover a way to unite them. (Truly shocking -_-) When she presents the solution to Harry, he agrees to do it even though it may be dangerous. He just wants his “friendship” with Macy to be repaired so he can die without regrets or something. They hug and make up and I guess romance is dead?

Speaking of romance. Macy and Julian are still a thing and, as I predicted he’d do if their relationship was allowed to persist, he offers her a consulting job in a lab. She doesn’t accept or decline because something he says leads her to her Harry solution, which she immediately goes to test. But I assume she’s going to fumble the bag because feminism and also, another thing I predicted, his Aunt Vivian is The Big Bad. Apparently all magic is bad, full stop, and it needs to be destroyed. And Aunt Vivian and her team are… Using magic to get rid of magic. We love logic and reason.

So now we know what those Bad Guys want, but we still don’t know what Abigael wants. She continues to pontificate and be bitchy in the general vicinity of the Charmed Ones and I await the day she does a single thing that isn’t just surface-level mean girl shit. Kill somebody (important), lead a demon assault on witches, throw a fireball at Macy… Do something. Anything. Viv has been on-screen no more than a combined total of five minutes and has already been more menacing and generally threatening than Abigael has been all season.  Let’s stop trying to make The Overlord happen and focus on the anti-magic cabal.

I really want to believe that the writers of Charmed have been holding back so they can pull out all the stops and wow us in the third act. I want to believe that when the show returns on March 27th, the story will make sense, the pacing will be on point, and every episode will be better than the one before it. I want to believe that this season’s arc will resolve in a way that is satisfying and makes the slog through the rest of the season worthwhile. I want to have faith in Charmed but I know better than to set my expectations too high. I am hoping for better but expecting more of the same.

Additional thoughts.

Kat is not back but the writers felt it was important we know that she told Mel to find someone else to manage her store while she’s gone. What’s better than having a character on-screen? Reminding us the character exists for seemingly no reason while keeping them off-screen indefinitely.