When an apparent suicide pact death proves to have a potentially weirder edge, Parker alerts the Charmed Ones who set about investigating. Meanwhile, Macy and Mel each face their own fears as their respective relationships start to get a little more intense.

If the title of the episode doesn’t tip you off, this is one of the more on-the-nose episodes of this series, as the girls find themselves up against a literal manic pixie dream girl, albeit one with an apparently murderous edge, which is slightly unusual for their kind. Watching them work out what they’re up against and learn about them is equal parts whimsically amusing and frustratingly reductive, as you sit wondering how a show which seems determined to flaunt its feminist cred simultaneously seems to get so many basics wrong.

At any rate, while all that is unfolding, there’s other stuff in play as well. Macy’s continued attempts to find a ‘cure’ for her demon part with her boss aren’t going well. Apparently this relates to differences between the way in which her and Parker have demon ‘parts’ of themselves, and it is interesting to see the dynamic between Macy and her sisters, especially in light of Maggie’s continual refusal to trust Parker because of what he is vs her implicit trust of Macy who is basically the same thing just because she’s her sister. Maybe there’s supposed to be another message in there about women sticking together and men being inherently distrustful, I can’t honestly say, but at any rate it at least keeps things a little different.

Galvin has an idea though, and it’s on that relates to his dead Grandmother. It’s been nice that the show has circumvented a lot of the usual tropes for a character like Galvin. It’s refreshing that he’s just accepted the fact of his girlfriend and her sisters being witches and fighting supernatural forces rather than going down the normal ‘fish out of water’ route with him, though on the other hand to get there it has relies on yet another coincidence for the massive pile the show already has with Galvin just happening to have had a mystical grandmother etc etc. Anyway, his idea means danger for him, and that relates to the shared sense of fear on Macy and Mel’s parts about how serious their respective relationships seem to be getting.

In Mel’s case, that fear is prompted by something a little more mundane, when Jada asks her if she will accompany her to meet her formerly estranged parents (or foster parents to be precise). I’m still not sure how much Jada is to be trusted, but it becomes clear throughout the episode that Mel is all in on that front, and even starting to adopt some of the methods of the Sircana – how that plays out will be interesting indeed.

It all skips along toward a conclusion where things get really painfully obvious and subtext is abandoned almost entirely in favour of just text, but as it goes, it just about stays the right side of the tightrope between watchable and cringeworthy.

Verdict: Still confused in tone and execution, but with the odd decent idea poking through. 6/10

Greg D. Smith