Mel and Harry go on a strange journey in their quest for answers about the Book of Elders. Maggie goes for a new job to try to ensure that the sisters still have access to the Command Centre, but the process isn’t without complications. Macy makes a new friend who may not be all they appear.

Another week, another set of the same old themes being re-trodden by the Charmed Ones, but at least this week Harry gets to hang out with Mel instead of Macy which I guess is progress of a sort?

In Macy’s case, this means her feeling all isolated once again because of her half-demon nature and then taking off on her own for an ill-advised solo mission in which she will get in over her head and end up letting herself do something against her better judgement. You know, just for a change. Wonder if there’s any possibility at all of it going wrong this time.

Maggie meanwhile gets to have another one of her usual plotlines wherein she wants a thing, it’s complicated by a boy she’s crushing on and then magic takes a role in a way that she’ll come to regret. Seriously, how many times does Maggie have to have this exact same storyline in an episode before the show will deem her to have actually grown, rather than declaring she has and then doing a hard reset the next time?

As for Mel and Harry – they go on a little spiritual quest of their own in search of answers for the uncrackable code hiding the answers of the Book of Elders. This is at least a slightly different setup for a change – traditionally Mel and Harry haven’t been all that close and it’s nice to see them working together for a change. However, it rapidly (once again) descends into the boilerplate Mel subplot whereby she gets to agonise over some moral choice which has the added personal factor of involving a woman she may or may not be into. Per usual, Harry is mostly relegated to being an occasional exposition generator who seems woefully under-educated for someone who is supposed to be a ward to the girls.

I wish I wasn’t beating up on the show week after week. I wish it cared equally about all its characters and that it actually wanted to give them agency and character development instead of running the same basic template arc for each of them week after week, but here we are. There’s a smidge of development in terms of the whole ‘Demon Overlord’ arc, and to its credit, it doesn’t end up going quite where it looks like it was, but mostly this is just the same old same old. Careful what you witch for, indeed.

Verdict: Bland, repetitive and obvious in all the wrong ways. It’s starting to feel less like the sisters are alive in hiding and more like they died somewhere around season one and are in plot purgatory. Dull. 3/10

Greg D. Smith