Maggie gets a surprise reunion. Mel, Kaela and Dev run into trouble following a lead on The Unseen. Jordan and Harry seek the help of a powerful trio of magical creatures.

One of the issues I have with Charmed quite often is that it feels less like a coherent narrative background is being built up and more like random things are just invented week by week. That’s part of my issue here, as Harry and Jordan enlist the help of the Graiai, a trio of seers ‘blessed and cursed with knowing all truth’. Like, really? Why now is this suddenly a source of info? For that matter, overall why is the Blue Carmelia suddenly just there, to say nothing of Gemcast?

Anyway, where Charmed often redeems itself is in its character work and thankfully, we get some of that here too. Having connected with Dexter (Maggie and Macy’s biological father) in The Veil last time out, Harry seems to have somehow inadvertently brought him back. That means that – for now – Maggie has the reunion she probably equally dreads and needs – both her ‘dads’ in the same room, and that means rivalry, backbiting and all the good stuff that you don’t need when peril is threatening in the form of a magically alive stuffed toy intent on chaos – yes, you read that last part right.

Again, there’s an issue here (and no it isn’t the stuffed toy). All we saw at the end of the previous episode was Dexter waking up next to a comatose Harry. Here, nobody even thinks to go check on Harry for at least half the episode, and it’s implied that Dexter has been wandering about for some time. No explanation is furnished either as to when Harry woke up, or why he didn’t mention to anyone that he’d brought back Dexter with him. Again it feels like chunks of the episode are missing, and that’s not great, working to offset somewhat the actually good dynamic of Ray and Dexter fighting and eventually uniting over their shared concern for Maggie.

As to Mel, Kaela and Dev, they follow up a lead which puts Mel directly in harm’s way, trapped with an enemy who wants her dead and leaving Kaela alone with Dev to figure out some way of rescuing her. The issue here is that the whole setup feels forced. There’s no real reason for the trap to be sprung, the opportunity to confront an enemy and dig out the source of the evil moving against the Charmed Ones feels somewhat squandered, and at any rate it all ends up meaning relatively little.

It’s frustrating because this has been a season that started strongly, and still has good elements, but the feeling of whole scenes missing added to the cluttered nature of what we do have is working against it. Disappointing.

Verdict: Struggling to be anything coherent at this stage. The magic has worn off. 5/10

Greg D. Smith