Maggie keeps a close eye on Jordan as his twenty-sixth birthday approaches, but can she really protect him from his family’s curse? Mel and her father start trying to track down the people he sold their mother’s artefact to. Macy and Harry find themselves tangling with Abigael again.

For a show that’s all about witches and how very secret they must keep all their secrets, Charmed seems to be letting an awful lot of people in on stuff – last week Mel’s father was inducted into the secret and this week Jordan gets to find out what the deal is, although given the ghost of a witch his ancestor murdered is trying to have her revenge on him, that’s probably fair.

Split into three distinctive arcs for the three sisters, this instalment actually feels a little more coherent than most, and more impressively it manages to avoid the trap of repeating the same old tropes for its characters. Nobody is trying to learn a life lesson about their flaws here, they’re all just trying to survive a series of tricky situations, and each doing pretty well in their own ways.

In Maggie’s case, that means taking on the spectre of a very angry witch who is intent on her revenge. Maggie Vera doesn’t often get given much to do by the show, and it’s nice to see her finally get to step up and prove there’s more to her talents than simply making bad decisions and being sad about it afterward. For his part, Jordan takes everything that’s suddenly thrown at him remarkably well, and all things considered this is definitely the strongest plot strand of the episode.

Mel, meanwhile, is working with Ray to try to track down the people who he was busily selling artefacts to, including the one he took from the girls’ home. The interplay between these two is nice – for all that Ray Vera’s current backstory has been pretty much made up from scratch for this season, it’s pretty well done and Felix Solis has a lot of fun with this diamond in the rough and the way in which he can go from loveable rogue to irritating pain in the ass and back again in the space of moments. I hope that we see more of Ray going forward, because he’s definitely added positively to the whole show.

Then there’s Macy, who finds herself accompanying Harry when Abigael turns up out of the blue poisoned and in need of help. It being Abigael, things are of course not what they immediately seem, but there’s still an interesting amount of depth being hinted at here. For all that we know Abigael is not a good egg, her interest in Harry does seem (for now) motivated by genuine attraction, and watching her and Macy cross words on the subject makes for one of the more interesting storylines the show has tried so fare. Does Macy want Harry? Or does she just not want Abigael to have him?

Verdict: Better than it’s been for a while – if the show keeps going like this I may even start enjoying it. 7/10

Greg D.Smith