Creature Feature: Charmed Season 5, An Overview

While it’s easy to say that Charmed’s downslide on quality began in this season, I don’t think it’s fair to say this season is bad. In fact, it’s actually a lot more fun than other people make it out to be. It was an obvious attempt to make things a lot less serious than they had been during the fourth season, and make things a lot lighter, though a lot of the time this attempt resulted in some horrific episodes, it sometimes resulted in pure gold. Season 5 wasn’t the most story heavy season, but a few pivotal things occurred; Cole is vanquished by Phoebe; Piper gives birth to her son; and Paige quits her job as a social worker to become a full-time witch.

Last season was easily the darkest season in the shows history not just because of Prue’s death, but also because of the heavy arc that the season ended with. It’s no surprise that the show would want to have a bit more fun with everything, given the drama the enveloped the past year. It’s immediately evident from the first few minutes of this season just how drastically different things have become, even the show itself seems to LOOK brighter. Unfortunately it seems to give the show a much cheaper looking quality to it. I’m a firm believer that any series can’t really go from dark to light. Once you’ve started down that road, it can be very difficult to go back the other way, especially to this extent. While it worked in some instances, this new feel to the series was a bit of a mistake. It would be easy to simply blame Brad Kern for a lot of this, but to be honest I think Network meddling had a lot to do with it. Not just because of it's shoddy treatment of the show, but due to their messed up perception of what the viewers wanted. Thankfully, the first half of the season had to keep some level of seriousness, if only for the sake of Cole's arc.

The first half of the season focuses on Cole and his desperate attempts to win Phoebe back. For some reason the moment he steps back into the picture, he is immediately treated like total shit. Not one attempt is made to allow him to explain that everything that had happened was NOT HIS FAULT. One can understand Phoebe’s fear of his demonic powers, but her treatment of him a lot of the time is just plain unfair. His story is given quite a strange send-off during Centennial Charmed, and it’s one that I really felt could have worked a lot better had it been under different circumstances.

The majority of the season also focuses on Piper’s pregnancy. Bringing a child into any series can be a very bad thing, but in Charmed’s case, the majority of the time it actually worked. Sometimes the whole kid thing can start to seriously get in the way, but here he seemed to gel into the stories a lot better than I thought he would. Though things did feel a little lost after Wyatt’s birth, without any major ongoing story to latch itself onto, it did turn out one or two great episodes.

Piper spends most of her time dealing with the implications of being a pregnant witch this season (hiccuping orbs, fireworks). I’ve always felt, though, that the show cheated its way out of Piper’s vulnerability by making her invincible for the duration of her pregnancy. I do understand that Wyatt was a powerful child, but protecting her from all the attacks was just a cheap way of avoiding writing her out of major demon fights, and made things way too easy, which they were already starting to become.

Paige’s decision to quit her job as a social worker is one that always baffled me. Yes, she did want to give herself a lot more time to focus on her witchly duties, but quitting her job just seemed very unnecessary. Prue could handle it while she had a job, so her leaving work was a weird thing to do. That being said, the show had a lot of fun with her super-witch kick, and it’s a side of Paige that I always liked; her immediate attraction to magic.

This is the first season when I think my dislike for Phoebe actually started. I think the main issue is she lost her edge. Naturally this had to happen since she couldn’t be the baby sister any more, that role had to go to Paige. Unfortunately it worked to the detriment of her character, making her lose a lot of her appeal. Once Cole disappeared she wasn’t as annoying as she was in the beginning, but she was far from the best character, though in some cases during season 7 she actually is. Though this is the first season where she ended up filling the role of the 'Ditz', particularly towards the end of the season.

A lot of episodes during the fifth season are devoted to introducing a pile of new magical creatures into the Charmed ‘verse. While some of the ideas they had could have been amazing, they ultimately ended up being complete disasters. I think the hatred for these episodes and magical creatures is almost unanimous among fans, but for some reason no attempt was made to remove them from the series at all and they returned over and over again.

While it had its major flaws, Season 5 isn’t completely terrible; it's actually quite good and had a few great moments thrown in here and there. Sadly though, it’s where Charmed started to show its cracks.

Best Episode(s): 'A Witch in Time', 'Cat House' and 'Sense and Sense Ability' all stand out.

Worst Episode: 'Lucky Charmed' is one of Charmed's biggest disasters.

Best Character: Piper, I enjoyed watching her become a mother.

Worst Character: Phoebe, if solely due to her complete lack of understanding for Cole.