< Charmed

Charmed/YMMV


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Dr. Williamson
  • Angst? What Angst?: You'd think Victor would be a little more upset that his new bride was actually an evil demon who tried to kill his daughters and kidnap his grandson.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Cole Turner: Misunderstood lovesick anti-hero whose fate was the result of others constantly treating him as something to be feared or to join with for power rather than as a man? Or gradual Yandere who usually just made things worse and couldn't face up to his own mistakes and move on with his life until it was too late?
    • Did the Charmed Ones become selfish in giving up their lives as protectors, let down all good magical creatures, and only become interested in their own pleasure? Or did they simply retire from a thankless life after putting in years of work, losing a sister, and having to look over their shoulders every second of the day without a moment's peace?
  • Broken Base: The infamous feud between Shannon Doherty and Alyssa Milano still causes heated debates among Charmed fans to this day, despite the fact that the two actresses seem to be at peace with one another now.
  • Conflict Ball: In Season 5, the sisters (especially Phoebe) were distrustful of Cole and constantly expressed as much. It didn't matter that Cole was constantly trying to do good, either. The stated reason was because of Cole's turn as the Source of All Evil, but these episodes overlooked that Cole didn't choose to be the Source at all. (Instead, he had been possessed by the old Source and overtaken.) The sisters themselves were even told as much by the wizard near the end of Season 4. Their distrust was rooted in a severe case of Negative Continuity.
  • Creator's Pet: In a season 5 episode (see both Conflict Ball and Derailing Love Interests) Piper tells Phoebe "you don't have a mean bone in your body". There's sisterly love and then there's just plain lying through your teeth. (In this case, though, it was a matter of life or death. With Paige mortally wounded and the only way to save her being to get Phoebe over her fear of being evil, Piper may have been willing to stretch the truth.)
    • Billie from the final season. The often nicknamed "Maggot Neck", "Bimbo", and "Ultimate Retard" was loathed for many reasons - creating useless subplots that were often just rehashes of previous storylines, distracting focus from the titular Charmed ones, threatening the world with a spin-off, getting a character that had been around since season one (and Piper's husband) encased in a block of ice for over half the season due to budget cuts, and breaking canon by having the ability to alter reality with her mind making her and her lisping sister the Ultimate Power - but no reason garnered as much hatred as Kaley Cuoco's inability to express any semblance of humanity that resulted in her character being alienating and just downright unlikable. Being Brad Kern's pet means you can get away with anything.
      • Only when the Charmed Ones are not paying attention.
  • Derailing Love Interests: A unique case with Phoebe and Cole where both lovers were derailed. First was Phoebe at the start of season 5 when she suddenly decided Cole was responsible for everything that was bad in her life and blamed him for all her problems. She even went so far as to try and make a vanquishing potion for him after she had a bad dream. Then the writers realized that Phoebe was meant to be one of the protagonists so her acting that bitchy just wouldn't do. Then Cole out of nowhere decided to become evil again after being rejected by Phoebe.
  • Designated Villain: Cole in Season 5 to some. It was clear the episodes wanted you to sympathize with Phoebe and see Cole as the problem, but many viewers tended to see it the other way around. Cole does engage in a Face Heel Turn halfway through the season - making him an actual villain, but only after Phoebe kept harassing and threatening him without provocation even as his obvious mental disintegration. Unsurprisingly, viewers sympathized more with Cole regardless.
  • Die for Our Ship: Dan, Dan, Dan.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Cole. See page for more details.
  • Ending Fatigue: The Cole story arc, especially in Season 5.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Leo, enought to make him an Ascended Extra.
    • Cole
    • Henry was one of the more popular characters introduced in
    • Chris. His appearance on the show sparked massive fan love in Fanfiction.net. His character can be found under TWO character filters, Chris H. and for some reason, Phoebe's boss Elise R. (this probably because his character became popular before ffnet gave him his own place in the list). Apart from that, the Chris H. character filter generates more pages than anyone else on the series. Though this can be explained by the lack of filter in the earlier days of Charmed, it's pretty impressive for a character who was only a regular for one season. Nowadays, Chris fics make up most of the updates and new stories in the fandom.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Well, Evil tends to have more revealing outfits, anyway. And apparently there exists a Demonic Strip Club.
  • Fan Disservice: Some of the outfits and situations the girls got into in the later seasons (like Phoebe performing for the Egyptian guy) were seriously skeevy.
  • Fixer Sue: A year before the God Mode Sue that was Billie Jenkins, Charmed introduced a Lovable Rogue ex-demon by the name of Drake, played by Billy Zane. Retaining his powers at the cost of his life (Real Life Writes the Plot, as the studio likely couldn't afford to keep Zane on as a regular), he breezed into the girls' lives and, with Kirk Summations and Patrick Stewart Speeches galore, wrapped up all the problems that had plagued the entire 7th season, just in time to go out on a dance. Turns out it was all a part of ex-Big Bad Cole's Xanatos Gambit to make up for past sins.
  • Foe Yay: Prue and Cole. Search your heart, you know it to be true.
  • God Mode Sue: Where to start with Billie Jenkins? She waltzes into the sisters' life with a great deal of knowledge about martial arts and can use her telekinesis far better than Prue could. She immediately gets accepted faster than Paige and Chris despite the fact that Paige is related to them by blood already. She is taking college classes on metaphysics and she's under the legal drinking age. Then she becomes a Reality Warper and a half of The Ultimate Power which was not even discussed before. Even the last episodes are all about how she saves the Charmed Ones by using her power to actually time travel into the past just by concentrating really hard.
    • A candidate during the early seasons: Prue. First she is the only one to get an offensive power, the first to get a second power, to get a love interest and pretty much 80% of the first three seasons are all about the "greater glory of Prue" as Piper puts it in one episode. Prue is even shown to have superior fighting skills to Phoebe who has been practicing martial arts for years. The show even acknowledges this when the sisters get infected with the Seven Deadly Sins but of course it doesn't hinder her at all, it actually makes her even more of a God Mode Sue.
      • Being infected with Pride did hinder Prue; just not in the same way that it affected the others.
        • It's also worth noting that whereas Piper, Phoebe and Leo overcome their respective sins on their own, Prue doesn't.
          • In fact, she doesn't just not overcome it, it would've killed her if Leo hadn't saved her.
            • In regards to the other points listed - Piper receives an offensive power in the third season and her original power is still active, Piper also receives a lover interest in the first season who takes over the next two seasons while Pru's love interest is killed at the end of the season and she never gets a big one after that. Plus, I would say that 80% of the early seasons are actually taken up with Piper's and Phoebe's ridiculous love lives.
    • And then there's Wyatt, who has a ridiculous amount of power even from the womb, so much that he actually uses his powers to teach his parents a lesson. His powers just keep piling up after he's born.
  • Ham and Cheese: The villains, particularly in later seasons.
    • Infamous cases: Any demon portrayed by Peter Woodward.
    • Cole during his insanity spree certainly fell into this:

(Piper instinctively freezes the guillotine)
Cole: (exasperated) Can you at least let me...not die in peace.

  • Harsher in Hindsight: In the pilot episode Prue remarks, "This house is perfectly safe." Piper responds, "Don't say that! In horror movies, the one who says that ends up dying." Poor Prue. May also double as Hilarious in Hindsight, as the exchange seems to be a reference to Scream which co-starred Rose McGowan.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Aside from the Scream reference above, there's "Wrestling With Demons". Think about this: Prue and Phoebe defeated the two guys that would later win tag team championships together as part of the Main Event Mafia.
  • Hypocrites: The sisters, especially Phoebe, towards Cole. She and her sisters turn evil because of some magical factor or some manipulation of their powers, it's just a Halliwell thing. The love of her life turns evil because of some magical factor or some manipulation of his powers, she's contemplating his murder. Seen at least twice.
    • And then there's the thing about whether powers can be inherently good or evil or not. One second the sisters are reassuring a young boy whose power is basically being groomed to be used for the Source that powers have no inherent morality and it's just what you do with them. The next they're mistrusting Cole for his demonic half, and after his possession by the Source, which truly burned Cole more than anyone else, they're downright detesting and fearing Cole, to the point Phoebe pretty much desensitizes herself to him, for the simple fact of his having demonic powers. This only serves to expedite his Sanity Slippage, to the point some fans see his character as little else but Phoebe's Yandere and some others decided in disgust that the show had jumped the shark.
      • In 'The Witch is Back' Melinda Warren explicitly states that the power of 'blinking' (basically teleportation) that the bad guy of the episode has, was stolen from another witch. Then, in 'Bride and Gloom', Piper claims that blinking is something only the evil guys do. Warlocks are outright stated to be known for stealing witches' powers, so if anything, there should be no such thing as evil powers at all, only good powers that were stolen.
    • You know how Prue was quick to speculate that Cole was playing Phoebe into a trap after finding out he was Belthazor and never really trusted him since? Turns out she was the one who felt Phoebe and Cole's love for each other and convinced Phoebe to get with him about a month earlier while she was cursed with a massive dose of empathy.
    • In "Wrestling with Demons," Prue finds out Cole is still alive. She constantly criticizes Phoebe for lying to her and for supposedly risking them all, as well as refuses to listen that the half-human demon could have any good in him. However, in the earlier "When Bad Warlocks Go Good," Prue risked everything to help a half-human Warlock because she sensed good in him. Not to mention how this is the episode where Prue is actively trying to save an ex-boyfriend (who never appears in the series again) from a contract with a demonic trainer while he's only one kill away from becoming a full demon. Unlike the other examples here, Prue is called on this hypocrisy by Phoebe (obviously well-before her own hypocrisy became evident).
      • Although it's later hinted in the final scene of the same episode that Prue was more angry by Phoebe's lying about vanquishing Cole than the non-vanquish itself.
    • How about the girl who felt herself get executed in an alternate future timeline where she used her powers for vengeance against a human being and came back realizing before her older sisters that everything that led up to that execution started with the spiteful use of magic to punish a man for his dog's defecation, being the same girl who years later was met at gunpoint by a mortal she used to be friends with in high school and could've easily told her younger sister to orb the freaking gun away so they could subdue him but instead had said younger sister glamour him into their future nephew so he could get killed by demons? Easily goes under both this, Took a Level in Jerkass, and crosses the Moral Event Horizon. All at once.
      • Additionally, remember the example from "Sam I Am." Phoebe condemned Cole for killing those two criminals in the bar, who threatened to rob it and then shot up the place. Phoebe certainly didn't think he was in the right. She went as far to threaten to vanquish Cole over that - which makes this later event more suspicious.
  • Idiot Plot: The demons know where the sisters live. They can teleport in at any time. They could easily teleport into the house in great numbers at night, when the sisters are sleeping, and kill them in a matter of seconds. Instead they come up with long plots to shame, divide, frame, or otherwise inconvenience the sisters outside the house.
    • An entire season, Paige jumps from temp job to temp job. Like she suddenly forgot she had a law degree and had been a social worker.
      • She did give reasons for it - her witchy duties and social worker job weren't meshing so well, and she noticed that she always landed the temp jobs she got for a magical reason.
    • Many episodes stress The Masquerade, yet everyone teleports in broad daylight and in severely populated areas.
  • Internet Backdraft: If you go on a Charmed forum and bring up which you actress you believe was in the wrong during the whole Alyssa Milano/Shannen Doherty feud that happened 10 years ago, you'd better have a hose with you to put out all the flames you're going to cause...
  • It Was His Sled: Chris is Piper and Leo's Kid From the Future. When the show first aired, his identity and intentions were a mystery for nearly the whole season.
  • Jump the Shark: There is some contention on when, exactly, this happened. Some suggest the 8th season where budget issues meant that a major character had to spend most of an episode invisible, others the episode where Phoebe started hating Cole for being The Source despite the fact that she played a part in it, more still citing the end of the third season after the death of a main character and the creator leaving the show, or even as early as the second season when the Executive Meddling became particularly evident through the hackneyed and ridiculous plots in some of the episodes. Either way the general consensus seems to be that there was a shark at some point and that it has been jumped.
  • Les Yay: The lesbian vampires. Paige gets a couple, like being kissed by nymphs and mentioning how cute Darryl's wife is. Also, there isn't quite as much Sis Yay as you would think (a lot less Sis Yay in Charmed than there is Bro Yay in Supernatural, for example), but there was an episode where Phoebe was channeling a guy's lust towards Piper. Both sisters are a bit creeped out.
  • Protagonist-Centered Morality: Anyone who is against the sisters are declared evil. Except on the occasion where they're just misguided. That said occasionally has the one of the sisters do something stupid or evil and get called for it. The show has a general problem with moral issues, often ripe with Unfortunate Implications. The morality is sometimes exclusively protagonist-centered, sometimes Elder-centered, and sometimes even single-sister-centered. Examples include the Elders forcing Piper through all levels of emotional anguish, suffering and self-sacrifice, Phoebe's infamous glamouring of her boyfriend, and numerous situations between the sisters when an apology that should have gone both ways only went one way.
    • Consider that the Charmed Ones are meant to be one of the most powerful forces of good in existence.
    • Which for some reason is enough to excuse, for example, setting up a bank robber Phoebe once knew to get killed by demons.
  • Recycled Script: How many times did Phoebe have to learn not to give up on love, again? Three times?
    • Especially egregious considering that save for her own idiocy, this probably would've never come up.
      • Season 7&8 in general reused several plots from previous seasons.
  • The Scrappy: Billie Jenkins and Phoebe in the later seasons.
  • Snark Bait: Read the Television Without Pity recaps, particularly from Season 5 onwards.
  • Special Effects Failure: Some of the "valuable" items that come into Buckland's look more like cheap import shop goods than priceless old antiques.
    • Interestingly enough, the visual effects themselves are not all that bad, especially when compared to most of the props. Not only the above-mentioned 'antiques' are often off the mark, but also the magic items. Most egregious examples are the 'Fearsome Plastic Falchion' of the evil Warlord, the hundreds-of-years old 'poignard' with a laser-sharp engraving, and 'Melinda Warren's blessing cup' - a rather tacky piece of coloured glass.
  • Strangled by the Red String: While there's nothing really bad about Paige and Phoebe's eventual husbands, they were introduced extremely late in the game (about one-third through and two-thirds through season eight, respectively), so it was kind of obvious that the writers were just trying to get Paige and Phoebe hitched before the end of the show.
  • Tear Jerker: The deaths of Andy, Piper (just before the Reset Button that killed off Prue instead), Cole (the first and maybe second times), and Christy can easily be this.
    • In the last case she may have been a Villain Scrappy, while Billie herself was just The Scrappy, but it can't be denied that being forced to kill one's own sister after finally getting her back following years of demonic imprisonment would really suck. It was one of the few times Billie's actress did well in her role.
    • Piper's (delayed) reaction to Prue's death in Hell Hath No Fury definitely counts as well.
    • The ending of Astral Monkey.
  • Too Cool to Live: Prue, Cole, and Chris
  • True Neutral: The Hollow, as Zankou and the sisters said. When invoked, it couldn't choose between the sisters' good magic, and Zankou's evil. It went into Leo instead, who while good-aligned, had no more magic.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Brendan Rowe, warlock who wants to turn good. Handsome Anglo boy... until he gets his Game Face on and then he looks like an anti-Semitic caricature. Also, he's the most Anglo-looking character out of the Rowe brothers, and he's the only one who lives and turns good.
    • There's more than that, and not just in this episode, although it does take the cake. There's the moment where Prue sees Brandon change and realizes he's evil, because only Beauty Equals Goodness ; there's the idea of three women being good and supposed to fight three evil men, which is tacky in itself. Then, there's the thing where becoming a priest somehow magically protects from all evil, which begs the questions: a) what is a woman who wants to be protected supposed to do, and b) what of other faiths? (Later on, we see a witch who is also Buddhist, and she says something that amounts to her faith making her stronger. The Monster of the Week promptly shows her she's wrong and kills her) Prue even wears a cross around her neck in this episode, for no apparent reason other than the blatantly-Christian theme. In the second episode Piper takes the fact that she could walk into a church and was not struck by lightning as proof that she's good, as if ethics, morality and just plain thinking didn't exist. Not to mention the black pastor who can only think inside a fundamentalist box. All these probably stem from the Lowest Cosmic Denominator, but they still stand out.
    • In a later episode, an ugly demon who switches bodies with Phoebe to become beautiful also evokes the anti-Semitic stereotype with her huge nose and thick eyebrows.
    • How many episodes focus on the sisters' attempts at balancing saving people with dating?
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic / Jerkass Woobie: Cole Turner is very much this, possibly also Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. This is mostly due to the actor being Julian McMahon who greatly appeals to the predominantly female audience, but even without that his story is a fairly good cause.
  • What an Idiot!: The sisters make Billie stop wearing the wig and sunglasses she used to disguise herself while vanquishing demons. Considering that having one's magical identity revealed can be really a big deal, their distaste for her disguise doesn't make a lot of sense.
  • Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Inverted with Cole. He goes through hell to get back to Phoebe, and all she does is tell him he's evil and try to kill him. Repeatedly.
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