Fluff, Sex, and Idiocy: Charmed Season Five

Charmed had been on the air for four years when Brad Kern, executive producer, decided that he was going to do change things. He had two goals that completely worked against each other:

He wanted to target a much younger demographic, namely tweens, He wanted to quadruple the sex factor. Maybe even sextuple it.

The result is a hodgepodge of idiocy. Welcome to Season 5 Charmed.

Previously on Charmed
Season 4 left off with Phoebe just coming off her stint as Queen of the Underworld, and showing absolutely no remorse for what she did

Also, Paige, Piper, and Phoebe were offered a chance to quit magic, and lead normal lives which they politely declined. And we learned Piper is pregnant.

Roll opening credits:

Phoebe: Proof That No One Pays Attention
This season of Phoebe, it’s almost impossible not to throw heavy objects at the tv when she appears onscreen. Character assassination at its finest, Phoebe takes no accountability for her actions of last season. Instead, she constantly complains how it was all Cole’s fault, and that she can’t trust anyone to fall in love with. Piper, Paige and Leo never say a peep about anything she is done. No one calls her out on the pain and torment she put her family through.

Phoebe’s story teaches us:
The world center’s around Phoebe.
Self-centered people deserve love the most, and will get lots of it.
Her problems, no matter how trivial, outweigh everything and everyone else.
It’s always someone else’s fault.
She is to be admired and adorned.
Phoebe does not know how to spell her name, signing the close-up on her divorce papers Pheobe, and not a single person or editor caught the mistake. But internet message board users around the Charmed world did!

I have a pile of darts to lend you if you need them.

Paige: Proposing Violence Against the Monkey
Paige is actually the one sister who remains likeable, smart, and genuine. She quits her job at Social Services to study witchcraft full time. She constantly works to please her sisters, and struggles with her desire to fit in and be Charmed, and to keep the love of her adopted family alive.

Paige is Piper’s biggest supporter in the month’s leading to the baby’s birth, and just all around. This pays off in a very tender moment between Piper and Paige, when Piper honors Paige and her adoptive family in her new baby’s name.

Piper: The Shrieking of the Shrew
Whenever Piper is onscreen, you will feel as if someone is poking a Q-tip into your eardrum. Piper whines and complains the entire season. And if it wasn’t bad before, the pregnancy will really kill us all. Her biggest complaint still is wanting a normal life. Memory is short when she can’t remember the Angel of Destiny just last month offered that exact thing!

Wacky pregnancy hijinx takes us through Piper’s story of this season. The three month old fetus in her womb is an extraordinary genius who on its own will activate powers to protect its mother. When Leo and Piper are fighting a lot, for fun and kicks, genius fetus switches mom and dad’s powers.

Leo is home all of the time, except when he gets called to save the life of another charge. This happens infrequently, but Piper has a conniption whenever Leo goes to his work. So the baby tries to teach her patience. This lasts for about one half of an episode.

After a few strange occurrences, Piper realizes just how powerful she really is. She temporarily has infinite abilities and she can heal herself. As long as she’s pregnant, she will be invincible.

When It Was Good, It Was Very,Very Good..
The season does have some highlights. One thing that Charmed has remained consistent on, (and there is very few of these things) is that everyone has a time to die, and there is no changing the time. This theme is the topic when Phoebe interferes with her new boyfriend’s fate. In doing so, she sets in motion a chain of events that will kill Paige and her. Although both Cole and her sisters warn her, she tries to defy fate, leading to the deaths. Piper has a window of opportunity to set fate back on track in A Witch in Time.

Charmed celebrates its one hundredth episode with Centennial Charmed. This will be the exit for Cole’s character. Because of his invincibility a group called the Avatars comes to Cole with a proposition. They want him to join them and stand outside of time and space to be ultimate rulers of the universe. He will join them on one condition; let him alter reality so Paige never exists in the sister’s lives.

I think it’s a great idea that it is Cole and Paige that get thrown back in time. These were the two who always hated each other. Paige was the only one who really wanted him vanquished. She was tortured at his hands, and it is fitting that it is she who really has the final showdown with him.

The hands of time turn back, and Paige finds that she is dead in this new reality, and everything is very different. Cole learns that he and Phoebe were never meant to be.

In The Day the Magic Died, we learn that an ancient prophecy existed that a twice blessed child will be born with the greatest magic the world has ever known. All magic will seize for a brief period of time. Conveniently, this prophecy is remembered in time for Piper’s child to be born. With magic stopped, the demonic world comes practically knocking on the Halliwell’s door to kill them as humans. And then to steal Piper’s newborn godlike child.

This is a suspenseful episode, with a different approach. It’s very rare that the Charmed ones get attacked without magic used against them. The birth scene shows the family: Piper, Paige, Phoebe, Leo, and Victor (Piper and Phoebe’s father) in a very intimate and emotional moment.

And in one last noteworthy episode, Sense and Sense Ability, a creepy little monkey is responsible for taking away Piper’s sight, Phoebe’s hearing, and Paige’s speech. This episode is actually a lot of fun, and brings all three sisters closer together as they have to rely on one another to complete their senses. In this episode, we have traces of the good old Phoebe, and it feels like a sisterly and witchy show if only for a moment.

...And When it Was Bad, It was Horrid
But then there is the rest. Phoebe starts the season in A Witch's Tail Parts 1 and 2 as a mermaid in pasties and fins. The Charmed Ones try to help a mermaid break a deal she made with the devil: her soul for love.

The sisters reenact fairy tales as they try to defeat a wicked witch in Happily Ever After. Phoebe lives out Cinderella, Paige turns Snow White, and Piper must don cap and cape to be the Little Miss Riding Hood.

Leprechauns turn to the Charmed ones for help when a demon steals their magic luck in Lucky Charmed. It even has the pot of gold, a rainbow and shillelagh. Yes, this episode actually aired.

And it gets worse! In the following episode, the Charmed ones must protect frolicking wood nymphs whose satyr was killed. Paige gets changed into a nymph and she joins in the frolicking in Nymphs Just Wanna Have Fun.

There is also the episode in which a lonely teenager has the power to make his comics come alive in Witches in Tights. Drawing the sisters as superheroines in spandex, they must defeat the demon that is the force behind some evil comic drawings that are being acted out.

We also have Oh My Goddesses, the two part season finale where Greek mythology is beaten, tormented, and re-released, in the form of Phoebe’s Goddess of Love, Piper’s Goddess of Earth , and Paige’s Goddess of War.

Don’t forget about Y Tu Mummy Tambien where Charmed writers get to butcher the story of Isis. In this version Phoebe gets to wear veil and Jasmine outfit as she seductively dances and jiggles through half the episode.

And then there are the many strip clubs and lap dances, and umm, other things that a faux-Phoebe performs for the insane Cole.

Whiplash
Cole’s story starts the season as wanting Phoebe to trust him again. The writers give all signs that they were setting out to reconcile the two, since Cole was actually tricked and taken over by the Source of Evil.

Cole is trying to keep his distance, giving Phoebe time. The sisters keep running to him whenever they have a problem.
Cole saves their lives more than once, and the more he tries to keep his distance, the more they keep chasing him down for help.

All of a sudden, the writers do a 180 and we now have Cole offering his help, with the sisters revolted at such a suggestion. He still saves the day, but they say he’s too invincible and dangerous; his power is based from evil and thus so is he. This makes absolutely no sense. And it is evident the writers are trying to rewrite the show's recent memory.

They then decide to have Cole go crazy, and be so obsessively in love with Phoebe. They have him trying to off himself, to no avail. When he tries to kill Paige again, and have Phoebe mummified for a few hundred years, things get really bad.

Now the writers decide Cole isn’t crazy, he’s just evil. They have him sabotage and ruin the lives of the Charmed ones to force Phoebe to love him.

In the end, you walk away from this roller coaster hating the writers for the flip flops and turn around.

Charmed and Enchanted No More
I was rooting for the “bad” guy and really not liking the sisters very much. When the show is supposed to be about the sisters and their goodness, there's a problem!

Season 5 introduces magical creatures, which in turn makes this show a joke. Piper and Phoebe are just unlikable caricatures, especially Phoebe.

This show was once about three sisters who happened to be witches, that protected the innocent. They respected their Wiccan heritage and their positions of power.Season 5 has very little connection to the sister’s humanity or Wiccan roots. It isn’t fun, well-written lightness. This is junk and silliness. Make that junk and silliness scantily clad.

So Kern dangles silly stories to pull a younger demographic in, at the same time he makes the show completely inappropriate to said demographic.

The season finale leaves us with a lot of dead Elders, Leo put in charge, and the sisters forced to have a new whitelighter.

And it just gets worse. If nymphs and unicorns weren’t bad enough, next year we get Magic School. Are you still with me? ;)