Three months after reuniting The Source and saving magic, the girls and Harry still find themselves unable to touch one another. While Macy searches endlessly for a cure, Maggie and Mel focus on trying to get themselves back into the real world, now there’s no more reason to hide.

So having defeated Vivienne and the threat her work posed, and then saved all of magic by restoring the Black Amber tree, the Charmed Ones have a slightly less world-threatening problem – that they aren’t able to touch or get too close to one another (or any magical person/creature) without explosive results and bad rashes. Oh for a simple life…

For Macy and Harry of course, this is a particular frustration, given that they have just finally started their relationship and they’d like to be able to be more physically intimate. This means that Harry is orbing around the world searching for various rare ingredients so Macy can put together every spell and potion she can think of to try to find a cure.

What’s nice is that where the writers in previous seasons might have made this feel like Macy being once again punished for her sexual agency (yes, I’m looking at you, Season 1), here it’s an opportunity for Macy to express herself, to assert her own feelings and the importance they hold, as well as for her and Harry to become more emotionally intimate. More of this please, the poor girl has suffered enough!

Meanwhile, Mel and Maggie are back to their old lives – Mel as a lecturer at the college and Maggie as a student. This gives each of them some more grounded issues to face. Maggie has a sexist, overbearing fellow student to contend with and a teacher who’s not interested in hearing anything she has to say. Mel has a trans student being bullied in her class and no apparent power to do anything to help them. It’s all far-removed from the stuff the Vera sisters have been faced with for a while now, but it’s also a welcome return to the show’s roots, with much to be said on the subjects of casual sexism and the struggles of trans people simply to exist (and it’s also nice to see the basic effort has been extended to have an actual trans actor play the trans character).

But of course, this is Charmed, so aside from Harry and Macy’s sexual frustrations and Mel and Maggie’s encounters with basic nonsense, there’s also a supernatural element to the episode whereby something is stalking the girls and compelling them to do its bidding in ways of which they are not aware. It’s a bit of an odd plotline, seeming in its execution to be a basic monster-of-the-week type scenario but suggesting in the way it ends up that it may well be the beginning of a whole new thematic arc for the show.

Time will tell, I guess, but it’s interesting to see the show overall seem to return to its original premise of ordinary young women dealing with the twin challenges of the real world and their place as supernatural protectors of all.

Verdict: It feels like they’ve breezed through an awful lot of fairly major stuff in the opening episodes and this by comparison feels like a bit of a soft reset. Colour me intrigued, for now. 8/10

Greg D. Smith