Charmed

by John Kirk, January 2003

"The power of three shall set us free..."

Overview

N.B. By this page's nature, it does contain some spoilers, up to season 4. I've tried to keep them to a minimum, but there is a trade-off between providing enough context for new viewers to catch up, and being sufficiently vague to avoid ruining surprises. So proceed with caution... At the same time, some changes have occurred during the course of the series, so the descriptions below won't apply to every episode you see.

Charmed is a series based around three 20-something sisters, who live in San Francisco, and happen to be witches. There's no bubbling cauldrons here - they are all trendy, glamorous, etc., and they do their best to maintain normal lives. In fact, the Halliwells come from a long line of witches, dating back to the Salem trials. Every female in their line since then has had magic powers. This generation is special though - the three sisters are "The Charmed Ones" (phrophesised in myth and legend), who possess "the power of three". This means that as well as their individual powers, they are extremely powerful if they say spells together. There seems to be a general cumulative effect - any two witches who recite a spell together will be more powerful than one witch acting alone. However, these three sisters have a special bond, so their trio is more powerful than a random coven of three witches.

Just as Buffy makes the clarification between slaying and killing, the witches have their own terminology. "Innocent" means the person they're trying to save, rather like a client, as in "Our innocent is currently at work". "Vanquish" means killing a demon. As well as witches (human, with powers), you also have whitelighters. These are basically guardian angels, except that they're more like ghosts - people who died, and returned to earth, as opposed to a separate species of seraphim or whatever. On the evil side, you have demons, who were never human (basically a separate species) - the most powerful demon of all is "The Source" (as in, the source of all evil), who rules the underworld. You also have darklighters, who aim to corrupt humans - they carry crossbows, which are the only way to kill a whitelighter. I'm not quite clear on what happens when a whitelighter dies - presumably they don't go to heaven, since that's where they live, so I guess that they actually risk oblivion.

In the earlier seasons, the episodes are mostly independent of each other - the basic plot being that "demon of the week" shows up and gets vanquished. However, you do get character development going on between episodes. In later seasons, it's much more arc-oriented - the whole of season 4 is really one big story, with a chapter each week.

Characters

Prue Halliwell. Powers: Telekinesis, and later astral projection. She works in an auction house, and later becomes a photographer.

Piper Halliwell. Powers: Freezing (basically stopping time for everyone in the room), and later blowing things up. She manages a restaurant ("Quake"), and later owns her own night-club (P³, named after the three sisters).

Phoebe Halliwell. Powers: Visions (mainly premonitions), and later levitation. Also knows martial arts (since she didn't start out with an "active" power). She was a psychology student for a few years, and then started writing an advice column.

Leo Wyatt. A former WW2 medic, now a whitelighter, he acts as a guide/adviser to the sisters (and a few other witches in the area). And he's a plumber/handyman in his day job. Powers: Orbing (teleporting from place to place on Earth, and between Earth and Heaven), and healing wounds by laying on his hands. Piper and Leo are in love, but this relationship is frowned on by the Higher Powers.

Paige Matthews. (Season 4 onwards.) She's the half-sister of the other three - same mother, but her father was their mother's white-lighter. Since this relationship was frowned on, she grew up with foster parents. Powers: Orbing from place to place, and bringing objects to her by remote orbing. She works as a social worker.

Cole Turner. (Season 3 onwards.) Phoebe's boyfriend, who unfortunately turns out to be a demon.

Andy Trudeau and Daryl Morse. Two detectives who find that the Halliwells keep showing up in all their unsolved cases. They do eventually learn why, and help out by doing cover-ups - more heroic than it sounds :)

Where to watch it

At the time of writing (10 May 2003), there are ample opportunities to watch it on TV, assuming you have Sky/cable. However, it can get slightly confusing:

• Saturday, Five, 19:15-20:10 - season 2

• Saturday, Living, 21:00-21:55 - season 5

• Sunday, Living, 14:15-15:10 - season 4

• Monday, Living, 20:00-20:55 - season 5

• Tuesday, Living, 20:00-20:55 - season 1

• Thursday, Living, 20:00-20:55 - season 2

N.B. The Saturday evening episode on Living (season 5) is repeated on Monday evening. All programs on Living are repeated 1 hour later on Living+1. The season 2 episodes on Thursday (Living) are earlier than the season 2 episodes on Saturday (Five).

There are currently no plans to release the series on VHS or DVD, so we don't have any episodes in the library. There are several books available that tie in with the series - "behind the scenes" guides, original novels, and novelisations of episodes. We don't have any in the library at present, but this may change in the future, so you can search the database to find out.

Links

 fanfiction.net

Link submitted by Sulkyblue on 2002-07-28

Contents include - Fanfiction, Bulletin Board/forum

Subjects include - X-Files, Gerry Anderson , X-Men, Star Wars, Angel, Farscape, Babylon 5, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pratchett, Books, Comics, Movie Site, Star Trek - General, Stargate SG1, TV Show, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Enterprise, Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Dark Angel, Sliders, Highlander, Charmed, Blake's 7, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Red Dwarf, Star Trek: TNG, Dr Who, Firefly

If you want fanfiction, go here. This site is absolutely immense and beautifully layed out. I recon there's about 210 shows and 15,000 stories in the tv section alone. This site has many nice features - Categorised - sorted into large categories, like tv, comics, movies. Then sorted into smaller sections by tv show. Updated regularly - Updates appear every few hours, depending on how many authors are writing for a particular section. Author searches - each author has their own page, giving a full list of their fic's, links to their homepage, their favorite authors, whatever they wanna put there really. Discussion forums - if you are an author yourself, there's plenty of help available. Ratings - each fic has a summary, rating, word count and record of last update. You can even change the site colour scheme! How much more do you want?!
Brilliant. Fat loading and simple. You can even change the colour scheme if you want.

 Charmed - TV Tome

Link submitted by John Kirk on 2003-01-01

Contents include - Links, Information, Synopses, Reviews, Spoilers, News

Subjects include - Charmed

Useful site, particularly the episode guide. Watch out for spoilers though...

 Charmed - WB official site

Link submitted by John Kirk on 2003-01-01

Contents include - Official Site, Information, Images, Synopses, News

Subjects include - Charmed

Well, this is the official site, so it's here for completeness, but there's not much there.
Lots of short pages, with minimal content and loads of adverts etc.

 Paramount Television - Charmed

Link submitted by John Kirk on 2003-01-01

Contents include - Official Site, Information, Images, Synopses

Subjects include - Charmed

Ah, now this is more like it. This is the official site from the production company (as opposed to the TV network), so it has a lot of info on it - basically an expanded version of the ICSF guide.
Easy navigation, clear layout.

 The Charmed Ones

Link submitted by John Kirk on 2003-01-01

Contents include - Videos, Music, Images

Subjects include - Charmed

This is a fan-run site, and it is gloriously tacky :) Want to the same hairstyle as Piper? You need the Hair Glove (TM)! The movies are Flash thingies - a collection of still photos (image grabs from the series) that spin around, with a pop song playing in the background. I think it's fun.
Easy to navigate, although you may not get quite what you expect...

 Television without Pity

Link submitted by Sulkyblue on 2003-05-16

Contents include - Bulletin Board/forum, Synopses, Reviews

Subjects include - Charmed, Enterprise, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, TV Show

A recap site. Basically a collection of reviewers rewatch episodes of lots of different shows and give a recap of what happens. It's not only a good way to catch up on missed episodes, but it's absolutely hilarious. The one's I've read tend to be extremely sarcastic and had me laughing out loud repeatedly.
The site is pretty slow to load and often seems to get completely jammed, which makes the fact that recaps are spread over about a dozen pages even more frustrating. But once you're there it's very easy to get trapped.

Hmm, I had a brief glance at this, but I wasn't very impressed. I looked at the recap for the latest episode of "Charmed" that's been on Living, which the author describes as "gushing". Within the first paragraph, Leo is referred to as "the Dolt" eight times (and never by his actual name, so I'm identifying him having watched the episode). Now, I have no problem with people being sarcastic/critical (e.g. saying that Porthos has had more screen time than Travis in "Enterprise"), but I prefer it to be vaguely imaginative/entertaining. If you don't like Leo, fine, but at least think up different ways to insult him...

On the other hand, this particular recap may not be representative, and my patience isn't really at its peak right now.

Fair enough if you don't like it, but that's one of the things I find funny. The 'recaps' do tend to make more sense if you read from the start, alternate names tend to crop up when the recapper wasn't entirely certain of someone's name when they first appeared and a nickname stuck. Recaps for different shows also vary wildly as there's different reviewers. I'm not entirely fond of the fact that sometimes recappers seem to get 'assigned' shows that they don't actually like.