Summary
Charmed Episode 13, “Manic Pixie Nightmare”, is silly, but it is to be expected with the subject matter in a surprisingly good chapter.
Episode 13 of the new rebooted Charmed was no match for last week’s surprisingly good episode, but it seems to have found its rhythm. The characters are consistently natural. “Manic Pixie Nightmare” begins with a couple doing a live stream. The girlfriend seems to bewitch the boyfriend and encourages him to “fly”, which results in killing himself.
Maggie (Sarah Jeffery) gets invited to the memorial by her ex-boyfriend/half demon/half human Parker. He suspects something is suspicious about the death of the man, and chirpy Harry (Rupert Evans) agrees, despite Maggie’s reluctance of taking help from Parker.
“Manic Pixie Nightmare” continues the story involving Macy (Madeleine Mantock) and Parker’s mother investigating the demon cells and whether they can remove them from a human body. Macy is much more relaxed as a character now that she understands her history.
The Charmed Ones end up attending the memorial, which celebrates the man’s filmmaking achievement. They find out the woman who bewitched the man is not a student. After musing around the memorial barely investigating, they found the woman is a pixie by seeing dust. Harry excitedly gets out a dumb, large pixie spellbook, which is infectious pixie-happiness. The key to episode 13 is figuring out why a pixie would kill someone.
As usual, Charmed convolutes the story with all the side plots, but I am used to it by now. Galvin believes he has the solution for Macy regarding the demon side of her. He has an exorcist theory based on his dead grandma. They meet a spiritualist to speak to her, which reveals that Galvin is much more aware of the magic world than he let on. His grandma harshly tells him that he has to go through a deadly test before they can take the demon out of Macy.
Maggie concludes that the pixie is only targeting “white guys”, which kind of demonstrates how silly “Manic Pixie Nightmare” is – but it is about magic dust and s**t after all, so it isn’t meant to be taken seriously. The pixie briefly bewitches Parker, but Maggie manages to use her mind spells to prevent him from being under her powers.
In the end, the Charmed Ones trap the pixie, but her happiness fools them, and she uses Harry to help her by using her dust. In the end, they manage to find out why she was killing men. She is getting controlled by a man who has stolen her heart, and he is using her, so he gets accepted into a film scholarship. The story is dumb and whimsical, but Episode 13 manages to pull it off. Mel (Melonie Diaz) illegally uses magic learned from Jada to get the culprit to confess to murdering the victims.
To conclude a steady episode, “Manic Pixie Nightmare” sees Maggie rekindling her romance with Parker and Melanie agreeing to meet Jada’s parents – that’s before an unknown group of people attacks them.
You can check out our thoughts on the next episode by clicking these words.
