Charmed season 2 episode 13 review: Break the cycle

This week’s Charmed episode finds the sisters learning more than ever about their connection with the history of magic while Harry ventures on his own.

When we last saw the Charmed Ones, Macy had teamed up with Abigael to strip her demon powers in an effort to restore her magical powers. The team also learned that Harry’s darklighter is still alive.

This week, we kick off with the return of none other than Sexy Harry, leather jacket and all! It’s Harry’s turn for a disturbing yet arousing, dream featuring none other than himself. Sexy Harry appears to him, telling him to meet him in Maine in an hour.

When Harry wakes up, the green darklighter poison is coursing through his veins. This isn’t ominous at all. Thankfully, Maggie is an empath and senses that something is going on with Harry before he has the chance to ghost them. While they want to come help, Harry insists they stay behind.

But he isn’t going alone. Before he leaves, he goes to Abigael and asks her to kill him as a backup plan if he can’t trap the darklighter back in his bottle. As offended as she is, she agrees if they can spend one night together, so he takes Abigael with him to Maine.

Meanwhile, Macy has been excavating under Elder HQ to find more of the black amber sap in an effort to get back her powers. Unable to help Harry, Maggie and Mel join Macy in the digging party and accidentially strike — the opposite of gold, hitting something that causes the command center to go into lockdown.

Suddenly, Mel and Maggie lose their powers, and all of the technology in the room goes dead, trapping them inside.

Desperate to escape, because it’s 2020 and no one has time for this nonsense, the Charmed ones reach for and touch the Book of Elders at the same time, revealing new pages. Macy frantically asks the room for help and triggers some kind of Siri in the room, a Guardian the Elders left behind.

They read the pages and realize they have to tell their secrets to unlock the room as it was done for the previous Charmed Ones.

It seems like this is supposed to be a big revelation–that they aren’t the first Charmed Ones. But the show has very clearly been setting up the origins and lineage of magic so that it only makes sense that they would be the most recent in a long line of the Power of Threes.

Mel asks the Guardian voice about the other Charmed Ones, but it triggers a secondary trap, encasing the charmed ones in lasers. Macy assumes it’s a test like when Mel was on the astral plane and Maggie says they have to “speak the unspoken” to get out per the Book of Elders.

They begin to spill any and all secrets as the lasers move in. Maggie confesses she feels guilty about Parker’s death leading Macy to finally tell her that she shouldn’t because he’s still alive.

But the lasers keep inching in, leading them to confess more and more. Maggie says she actually felt relieved when Parker died because it was easier than dealing with what he’d become, and the Charmed symbol appears in front of them, glowing part of the way.

They realize they’re supposed to be confessing deeper secrets, and Mel tells them she’s tired of being the responsible one. (But isn’t Maggie the one with the job?) Macy shares that her drawing of Sexy Harry was actually of Harry after all, and that she’s afraid of letting people in.

The symbol fills in more but it’s still not enough. Finally, Macy confesses that she is so used to going it alone that she’s still having a hard time being part of a threesome and wishes she could be alone again sometimes.

The symbol fills in and they’re released from the laser trap revealing a big black amber tree, glowing with magic in some sort of sacred magical reflection area.

The leaves grow green with the darklighter’s poison and there’s a drinking pool of the black amber sap. Before Macy can drink to restore her powers, the Guardian appears to them, telling them she’s going to protect them from what happened to her–and her sisters.

She warns that it always ends the same way:  one of them will die. She tells them their sisterhood, and the Power of Thre, is being tested. They have to take time to discover themselves individually before they can restore the Power of Three and possibly break the cycle.

Ultimately, the sisters decide they can face whatever is to come after all the insanity of the lockdown and confessing their deepest, darkest secrets to each other. And Macy decides she doesn’t want to go it alone as she drinks a goblet of the black amber sap, restoring her powers at last!

Once Abigael and Harry orb to Maine, they find everyone in the town is frozen in place. Hearing a radio, they follow it and find a magic detector in the back of a van, and use it to find Sexy Harry but come across something else instead.

Abigael and Harry track down a little girl named Cassie who turns out to be a witch who froze the town when protecting herself.

Abigael has solidly set herself up as the do-gooder who’s willing to do wrong à la Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Mystique from the X-Men. Because of her moral ambiguity, she pushes Harry and the Charmed Ones to further define their ethics, making for a hell of a fun ride.

Plus, we got to see her newly developed (stolen from Macy) fire powers set upon a troop of demon gangsters, the same guys who are kidnapping magical beings and selling and trading on the black market, and turn them all to ash. Honestly, what’s not to love?

Abigael is also the only strategic one of the bunch and points out that Sexy Harry is nowhere to be found. Therefore, what is the end game?

Once Abigael does away with the bad guys, Harry shows Cassie how to unfreeze the town and he and Abigael head back home. She tells him since Sexy Harry was a no show, he’s off the hook, and rips him apart for making her do his dirty work all the time. Rightfully so. She is only half-demon after all.

Harry goes back to the attic at the house and inhales a concoction of the green darklighter poision, which apparently allows him to commune with Sexy Harry in his mind.

And again, it comes back to endgame. Sexy Harry asks Harry to help free him from the control of the talisman. The people who are kidnapping magical creatures are using him and are trying to steal magic along the way. But to what end?

What did you think of this week’s episode of Charmed? Let us know in the comments below.