Charmed Reboot Season 2 Breakdown

So, Season 2 of the Charmed Reboot is over. Cut off by the Corona Virus ending production before they could finish filming. And barring the show taking one of it’s many inexplicable breaks, around the point I’m writing this would have been the shows actual finale would have occurred. So now that all is said and done, I have but one question, what the fuck happened?

Prior to the start of season 2 they replaced the old show runners with new ones who decided a revamp was in order. This did actually somewhat fall in line with how the old show runners had left things as they had mostly torched everything anyway. All the villains had been killed, all the love interests had been done away with, and the big powers were all wiped from the face of the earth. So it made sense that the new show runners decided to finish the job. Now, in theory this could have been fine and I was actually interested when the season started, but it rapidly went to shit as old problems and new problems started to arise.

So I’m going to try here, to break down what happened section by section and tell you what I thought about each one. Spoilers, it’s mostly negative.

The General Plot Summary

I should start with actually happened this season. So picking up where the last season left off, the Charmed One’s; Mel, Maggie, and Macy, basically found themselves as the protectors of the magical community, what with the Elders and the Sarcana all dead. This is a role that doesn’t last long as in the premiere they are attacked in their house by an assassin who blows past all their attacks and destroys the Book of Shadows, their source of knowledge on the supernatural world. Destroying the book however opens a random portal and with their powers not working and their Whitelighter Harry dead, they decide to jump through it.

Doing so lands them in a magical bunker/command center that is revealed to have belonged to the Elders. They used it to find Witches in trouble and bring them to them, a process that strips the witches of their powers as the trio finds out. The Command Center is located underneath Safe Space, a shared workspace located in Seattle. If that name sounds like a joke it’s because it is and the show will never stop repeating it even though it wasn’t funny the first time. To hammer the joke further, there’s even a character named Swan whose role on the show is to mostly be every annoying millennial stereotype the writers could think of.

Anyway after getting their bearings and discovering Harry’s survival and the fact that their house magically transported itself from Michigan to Seattle. They decide to make it their new home by rebuilding their lives and using the command center to help protect their fellow witches.

So, this premise is actually decent (Minus the Safe Space shit) and if they had followed through with this premise it probably would have been fine. But they didn’t do that. They instead focused on a couple of half-baked story lines that I’ll talk about later.

So what happened to saving witches and rebuilding their lives? Well the former did happen, just mostly offscreen, and not that much. In fact the Magical Community was pretty much a nonentity during this season as barring a couple one shots we saw nothing of the people that the Charmed Ones were supposed to be protecting.

Would we did see was a lot of time puttering around Safe Space and the Command Center, and doing so apart for most of it. This season spent a lot of time having the Trio not interact with each other, especially Macy, who spent most of her time away from the other two. For whatever reason they decided that the sisters relationship wasn’t important and that they should spend their time off doing other things. I’ll go into what they were doing in their own sections, but they were not good uses of time. And that’s because this season decided to put a big focus on romance

Yes, nearly everyone on this season was involved in some complicated love story that took up a lot of the shows time. This got bad enough that there was a love triangle and a love quadrangle at different points all involving different people. None of it was good and practically none of the people involved looked good coming out of it.

Well with all this out of the way, let’s move onto the characters.

Macy Vaughn & Her Relationship with Harry

So Macy was probably the sister with the most focus during this season as she was actively involved in the main plots of most episodes. This was mostly because near the start of the season she was the only sister to still have powers, courtesy of her demon side.

However, they also stripped away a lot of her character traits. During season one Macy was a scientist and as such spent a lot of time focusing on scientific solutions to supernatural problems. Not so much in this season, sure her scientific background does come up occasionally but it’s very much not that important this time.

Then’s there’s also the issue of Macy’s demon side. A big part of the first season was Macy coming to terms with her demonic nature and not letting it control. It wasn’t handled particularly well but it was fine and going into this season Macy using her demonic powers wasn’t a problem for her. However, about halfway through the season Macy abruptly gets rid of her demon powers in an attempt to get her old powers back. This just makes the whole conflict of her controlling her demon side pretty much pointless in hindsight as they just swept it all away in one moment, all because the writers had some idea that they never really followed up on, and I don’t think that this is because the season got cut off.

She was also unfortunately one of the people involved in the aforementioned Love Quadrangle, having two (technically three) love interests during the season. The first of these was actually with Whitelighter Harry in something that ended up spanning the whole season. Now this was in general actually good because these two actually had good chemistry together. However, they couldn’t just get them together, they had to do a “Will they, won’t they” all season to drag things out, and in doing so they killed this relationship.

How so? By making the characters incapable of just talking to each other and introducing distraction love interests. For Harry he gets saddled with Abigail, who I’ll talk about later, and Macy gets Julian. I’ll talk about Julian himself later, but basically he was a billionaire tech mogul who was introduced as buying Safe Space. Macy ends up getting close to him and bonds with him over their mutual love of science. Their relationship was alright but was very obviously not going to last and it was basically over by the time the big reveal happened.

As far as not being able to talk to each other goes, well we first have to talk about Dark Harry. Dark Harry is Harry’s evil half who as it turns out was the assassin from the start of the season. More on that later but because Dark Harry is basically the same person as Harry he has feelings for Macy and tries to romance her early in the season. Macy as it turns out kind of likes Dark Harry (He’s the technical third romance) and this in turn translates to her liking Harry. But as mentioned they won’t just about their feelings for each other. Or they’ll half talk about but never move anywhere with it.

This does FINALLY get resolved towards the end of the clipped season as Macy and Harry finally acknowledge their feelings and get together. And then we end the season with them apparently going to break up. Like, what the fuck? You got them together and immediately ran out of ideas? You thought that things were more interesting prior to this? They weren’t.

I honestly can’t tell what prompted this decision but it’s worth noting at this point that this show, going back to season 1 and the old show runners even, has never had the ability to focus on any one thing. They will introduce and drop plot elements and story lines seemingly on a whim. So I can’t tell you if this was them doing it again or if they actually thought that this was a good idea. It just makes it all very frustrating to watch.

Maggie Vera (And Jordan, And Parker)

Speaking of frustrating let’s talk about Maggie. Maggie in season 1 was the sister least interested in being a Charmed One and who would have rather focused on her time in college. Robbed of that in season 2, she instead tries to rebuild herself as a useful member of the team and an adult by getting a job at Safe Space so that the group would have an excuse to be there and have a means to access the Command Center (The Command Center’s entrance by the way was hidden in the rooms maintenance area).

This isn’t a bad story line but they never really focus on it, once she gets the job we never really see her at work and she’s always just hanging around Safespace with sporadic references to the fact that she thinks everyone treats her like a child. Like many things on this show it never goes anywhere.

What does go somewhere though is romance, two of them in fact. Maggie was the sister in the first season who’s romance arc got the most attention and that’s mostly true here as she ends up meeting Jordan. Jordan is a lawyer/ex-medic in the army/guy who runs a gym in Safe Space. He’s also as it turns out a descendant of a witch hunter whose descendants are cursed to die when they turn 25. Jordan doesn’t know about this or the Supernatural and his introduction to both is when Maggie saves him from the ghost of the witch that cursed him. Having learned this he vows to make up for his ancestors sins and tries to help The Charmed Ones fight evil.

All that is once again, good in theory, but here’s the problem. First is that Jordan is a huge asshole when he first shows up, he acts really aggressively and bizarrely so towards the sisters. Like his really strange conversation with Maggie where he accused her of trying to stealing his med kit and that would lead to her asking him to pay for her house or whatever, none of that was said as a joke. I think some of this was supposed to be early teasing that he might be a villain but it ceases to make sense when he turns out to not be this. This killed his likability and it took nearly all season for him to recover.

The second problem is, Jordan has a girlfriend. This is a typical obstacle for TV romances that usually lead to cheating. In this case however I’m happy to say that there was apparently never any cheating at any point between these two, mostly because the girlfriend suddenly ceased to exist. That’s not something that happens in story, I mean she just stops showing up and they never mention her or act like she exists. Doing this doesn’t clear things up, it instead just draws attention to the fact that she just suddenly stopped existing and we’re just supposed to shrug and move on. I don’t know if this was another example of the show runners getting tired of this plot or if they just didn’t know how to progress it and dropped it but there it is.

They also don’t really actually get together, the relationship never actually left the teasing stage before the season got cut off, so there was just a lot of build. This isn’t a positive or negative in my eyes, it’s just something worth noting.

But moving onto something that is negative, let’s talk about Parker. During season 1, for whatever reason Maggie is the one whose romance arc got the most focus. This was a big problem because said romance was the worst of the bunch as she got paired up with the sentient block of wood that is Parker Caine. Parker’s actor is probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen, he can’t emote, he has one tone of voice, and had all the charisma of a block of wood. He was supposed to be the Cole Turner of the show, a half-demon who was a villain but could maybe turn good, but he ended a very pale shadow of this idea.

You can imagine from the way I’m talking about him how annoyed I was when he of all people came back for this season. Parker was involved in one of the two main story lines, although to call this one a story line is a bit of a stretch. Demonkind at the start of the season was being hunted by the mysterious assassin as well as the people who he worked for, and not knowing this they blamed witches and started going after them. At the same time a mysterious individual tried to unify the Demons under their banner as the Demon Overlord. This person eventually got outed as Abigail, Parker’s long lost sister, who after being outed dropped the role and fled. In order to keep the unity going her second in command Godric found Parker and propped him up in the role, where he tried to unify the demons as well as bring peace to the war between Witches and Demons by marrying Maggie.

This all fell apart when Abigail came back and schemed with Godric to reclaim her former position. To this end they gave him some magical fruit that increased his power and also drove him insane, causing him to turn hostile to the Charmed Ones. This ended with his apparent death at Abigail’s hands when in actuality he was just being kept prisoner under her apartment building.

In doing this story arc they decided to reenact Season 5 of the original Charmed, where the Charmed Ones decided that Cole was suddenly irredeemably evil in spite of not being this at all. They pretty much did this with Parker where they suddenly decided that he was a mega villain who couldn’t be trusted or redeemed anymore. This was in spite of them repeatedly trusting and going to Abigail who was demonstrated to actually be the mega villain they treated Parker as (More on Abigail later because goddamn all that shit that followed her).

The story did have a better ending in that Parker eventually got free and got his demon powers removed (Oh yeah Parker also had a demon side story during season one, and much like Maggie’s this got easily swept aside) and they do have him part with Maggie on somewhat good terms but still it was not at all fun to watch.

Mel Vera

So now we come to the third sister of the bunch Mel and, well there’s not much to talk about here. Mel was the sister who got the least amount of focus during this season, for several reasons.

The first is that the writers seemed to have no idea what to do with the character. This is a problem going back to season one where they also didn’t have a clear idea what they wanted to do with her, just settling into a vague rebel kind of role. This continued into season 2 where she largely had nothing to do and could have been removed from the show without much changing.

The second big reason she didn’t get focus is that Mel didn’t have a major love interest during this season, and that’s a big problem in a season that put a lot of emphasis on romance. Sure she had some romantic interests during this season, first with Katrina, the lady who ran a herbal supply shop in Safe Space, and then Ruby, a barista whose gimmick was that her roommates where all Soccer fans. Yeah that’s it.

As far as Katrina went the relationship didn’t really go anywhere at first when early in the season it turned out that Katrina could talk to the dead, although she didn’t know this until Mel told her. Their romance never really went past flirtation and after the reveal of Katrina’s powers she disappeared for a while and until she came back to resolve her story line and leave. She ended up giving the keys to the shop to Mel by telling her that she felt that it would be in good hands with her.

You would think that this would lead to Mel running the shop but we never see her doing so and in fact we pretty much never see the shop again for the rest of the season. So yeah, even when they did have something for Mel they never followed up on it.

As for Ruby, she was basically just a casual thing, something the show even acknowledged as she basically only showed up a couple times. She did come back in the “Finale” where it turns out she was actually a witch who didn’t want to use her powers and the episode ended with her and Mel breaking up over this. So yeah that didn’t go anywhere.

They did also towards the end of the season seem to tease pairing up Abigail and Mel which, I don’t know if that would have helped either of them but it would have at least given Mel something to do on this show.

I will end this section more positively then the others by noting that Mel did get a kind of nice story line about patching up her relationship with absentee father, but like many things in this season it didn’t really get as much focus as it should have.

Harry & Jimmy

So Harry got a bit of a boost this season in terms of focus. In the first season he was mostly a supporting character, here though he was one basically one of the leads. This was kind of a mixed bag because on one hand Harry is a good likable character and on the other hand his ascension took away a lot of time from the Charmed Ones.

A lot of this was the drive for Harry to figure out the deal with Dark Harry. As previously mentioned the assassin who started off the events of season turned out to be an evil version of Harry who was attacking Witches and Demons alike for some mysterious benefactor. Harry eventually figures out that Dark Harry (Who when properly introduced called himself Jimmy, Harry’s original name) is his Darklighter, basically an embodiment of all his negative traits as a human drawn out of him and stuffed in a jar so that he could be turned into a Whitelighter.

Solving this mystery leads to Harry learning new things about himself, like his attraction to Macy and his feeling incomplete as a person because a part of him is no longer there. This was quite good and Harry probably had the best storyline of the season. But a lot of this focus came at the expense of the sisters as he usually did most of this stuff apart from the sisters or with one of them in a supporting role or with Abigail. And as good as he is, it’s not a great look to have your white supporting character suddenly over take your POC leads.

I mentioned before that they tried to draw out the Harry & Macy romance by giving them both other love interests but Abigail’s pairing was an absolute waste of time. Her reasons for being interested in him were vague and unclear and his were equally unclear. They never went anywhere the “romance” ended after most of the season by the writers basically going “Nah” and ending it as abruptly as they do most things. This is usually bad but in this case it was probably for the best.

I don’t know what the exact endgame for Harry by the end of the season was but they seemed to be angling for a reunion between him and his Darklighter half to become one person again. I don’t know how that would have gone but it may have been turned out alright. It would have been the only thing.

Abigail Caine: Demon Overlord

So let’s talk about the worst character of this season, Abigail Caine. Having failed with their original Cole knockoff Parker they decided to make a new one with a bit of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer thrown in. In theory this could have worked, but not the way they wrote her.

Abigail as portrayed on this show is a Late 90's/Early 2000’s TV villainess. She works as a dominatrix, she has random threesomes with women, she can only talk in snarky snippy lines. She got old fast and it just got worse as the show went on.

Her introduction to the show was as a witch being hunted by demons before this was revealed to be a ruse and that she was actually the Demon Overlord and also Parker’s sister. She then disappeared for a while before coming back during Parker’s return where she tricked him and the Charmed Ones and got her old position back.

It’s worth noting that Abigail was supposed to be a morally questionable and smart character who helped the Charmed Ones but was also scheming on the side. There were several problems with that, first being that the writers didn’t know how to make her come across as smart. A lot of her plans revolve around dumb luck or things outside her control playing into her favor and then her going “Just as I planned” at the end like this was somehow supposed to be all her doing.

The second problem is the dumbing down of the Charmed Ones to get them to work with her. frequently after she becomes the Overlord again the Charmed Ones would run into some problem and only she could help them solve it. This was in spite of the fact that she wasn’t trust worthy, actively worked against them at points, and was generally unpleasant towards them and they her. Nearly every interaction she had with them had them all just sniping at each other back and forth. There’s also the visual optics of having your POC leads playing second fiddle to yet another white secondary character, but I’m guessing the writers didn’t think about that.

Anyway, the Demon Overlord plot never actually goes anywhere as we never see or hear about it at any point in spite them involving Abigail a lot and it abruptly ends after a while. And by that I mean Abigail's lackey Godric stages a coup against her and forces her out. It’s at this point we get the shipteases between her and Mel and also her maybe turning into an actual good guy. The season got cut off before this could go anywhere but I guess we’ll see. I do think that you could maybe salvage Abigail’s character a bit but I don’t have faith in that happening.

Julian & The Faction

So I guess after all this we should probably talk about the villains of the season, minimal and underutilized as they were. For most of the early part of the season, the Charmed Ones faced off against Jimmy before seemingly killing him. Afterwards they started discovering that Jimmy was being controlled by the dully named The Faction, a group of well financed humans who were kidnapping monsters and witches with the hopes of acquiring their powers for themselves. After a long while and investigation it was eventually discovered that The Faction was being lead by Macy’s tech mogul boyfriend Julian Shea and his Aunt Vivian.

The reasons for his actions it turns out were that when he was a kid he and his family got into a car accident that killed his parents and left his sister brain dead. During the accident a Whitelighter showed up and saved the occupants of the other car, they were witches you see, while callously leaving Julian and his sister to die. He became obsessed with learning all about the supernatural and finding a way to bring his sister back.

This is like many things on this show, a good idea in theory. However, we don’t start learning about any of this until very very late in the season. Like even without the cut off we would have only known about Julian and his plans like four episodes before the end. To say nothing of Aunt Vivian and whatever her deal is, she seemed to have her own separate plans from Julian.

There’s honestly not much to say here so I’m just going to move onto the conclusion.

Conclusion

So as you can see this damn thing was a mess. The show runners lost sight of what’s important and we were subjected to a lot of meandering shit. And as you may guessed from how much I talked Mel having nothing to do in her section and how little I talked about Macy and Maggie in their own sections, the show spent a lot of time sidling the main characters in their own damn show. And there was a lot that I didn’t even talk about like the bullshit that lead up to them regaining their powers or the fact that they once again unintentionally made the Charmed Ones mother Marisol into an even worse person than before.

It is worth noting that this season was renewed for a third season well before the Corona Virus cancelled the rest of the season. Their plan at the moment is to wrap up season 2’s plot lines at the start of season 3 and then move on from there. We of course won’t see this until 2021 at the earliest.

I don’t know if the showrunners can improve things from here, their track record with this season would suggest no. But if it can be done, for fucks sake, please do better.