A message from Darklighter Harry has Harry determined to face him (almost) alone, leaving the Charmed Ones alone at the Command Centre to get into trouble all by themselves.

Whereas I’m a fan of Poppy Drayton and her character in Charmed, it doesn’t help the show’s assertion that Harry definitely doesn’t want to give her the wrong idea that he keeps turning to her for help all the time. This time, having been haunted by a visit from his evil twin in a dream, Harry tells the Charmed Ones he must go to face the Darklighter alone and try to put him (literally) back in his bottle. Then he immediately bolts round to Abigael’s flat to reveal his full plan and enlist her help, which she reluctantly agrees to provide in return for… well, I’m sure anyone who’s watched the series this far can take an educated guess.

This leaves the girls back at HQ to do a classic repeat of the ‘We need to all open up more to one another and ourselves’ trope that the series does so insistently every five minutes. As they dig deeper and deeper trying to squeeze out some more black amber from the roots of the tree in the middle of their Command Centre, they trigger some sort of ‘ghost in the machine’ that shuts down everything and leaves them in increasing peril with only the most cryptic of hints and forces them (for reasons so forced it’s not even funny) to ‘speak their full truth’ to one another.

I would feel less frustrated by this is this weren’t a motif that the show has already visited repeatedly over the course of the last season and a half. Worse, it always ends up being pretty much the same thing: they always act as if the revelation of this will be some watershed moment that will change their lives going forwards, and then they rinse and repeat a short time later in another episode.

Meanwhile, Harry and Abigael’s mission doesn’t go at all as they planned, as they spend some time mucking about in a subplot that makes absolutely no sense other than as a bit more exposition, mostly of stuff we already knew. So that’s fun.

And back at base, the sisters three get a bunch of answers to questions neither they nor the audience were asking (honestly the big reveal here feels like something which was implicit in the core concept of the whole show from day one to me) and by the end of it, it feels like we’ve wasted a lot of screen time for very little result.

Verdict: Spinning its wheels so hard you can’t hear anything else over the noise of them. I’ll lay money on all three main characters having the exact same sort of massive self-realisations about the exact same elements of their respective personalities within the next three episodes. 4/10

Greg D Smith