Mel is still mourning the loss of Niko, so Macy and Maggie make it their mission to try to take her out of herself a bit. Macy is still foxed by the mark on Galvin that only she seems to be able to actually see, but as she pulls at that thread she gets some unexpected revelations. Maggie is still feeling guilty over her betrayal of Lucy, but she’s about to find out just how much she hurt her former friend.

Charmed has had a rocky couple of episodes in this reviewer’s humble opinion, so it’s nice to see it return to a form of sorts. I’m still a little shocked that a show as determined to be ‘woke’ as this allowed for a storyline where a woman erases the memory of the woman she loves to cover up the truth, but perhaps I’m just reading too much into it. At any rate, Mel is still moping, refusing to get out of bed on the subtext of doing research into the unusual marks on the bodies of their mother and other witches. Macy and Maggie aren’t having it, however, and drag her out for drinks.

Macy of course has problems of her own. The guy she was into at work is with someone else, that someone else is ‘perfect’ and now she’s made herself look like a crazy ex in front of both of them. But there’s still that mark on Galvin’s body that only she seems able to see. Attending Galvin’s birthday party with Harry doesn’t give her quite the cover she might have hoped from Galvin’s new lover, but it does give her a new line of information to pursue. Trouble is, pursuing it gives her some answers she might have preferred to live without.

As for Maggie, her troubles with Lucy take a turn from plain bitching and nastiness to the more supernatural end of the spectrum. This leads to a fast bit of research and an odd little adventure for her and Mel which not only throws more light on the instant problem but gives them some further insight into their mother and Macy which will doubtless become important later.

This time out, the difference from the previous couple of episodes is that the characters actually learn things about themselves from genuine introspection. Maggie in particular is forced to realise quite a profound truth about herself and her actions, and Mel picks up the hint as well. There’s also more Harry, always a welcome thing, and we get more of a sense of the girls and their Whitelighter operating not just as a team but also as a family unit.

Verdict: Much less fraught with awfulness than the previous two episodes. I’m not saying that it’s fully recovered, but this show no longer feels like it’s on life support. 7/10

Greg D. Smith