Episode Report Card Owen: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT How To Make A Quilt Out Of Americans
By Owen | Season 2 | Episode 17 | Aired on 04.05.2000
Stairwell. Prue defends Gail for being "like family. We love her -- she's a second Grams to us." Piper thinks "something about her story is not right." Why is she the only one who's noticed bodies getting dug up and skinned all over town? Phoebe deems Gail's story "funky," but adds, "What can we do? Say no?" Instead of replying, "Hell yes! We say NO!" Piper pitches into a rant about demon-hunting becoming "never-ending" for them. The Ps have "no lives." And she doesn't "have the time to break up with Dan properly." She could win the argument on that last point alone.
Attic. Gail flips through the pages. She finds a page containing both the "To Separate a Witch from Her Powers" spell at the top and the "To Call a Witch's Power" incantation at the bottom. Shouldn't they be placed the other way around? And "Her Power"? Wasn't the kid with whom Prue was kidnapped to rob that bank last season a good male witch, so perhaps the BoS should be gender-neutral? Whatever! Gail, all perfidious, tears the page out of the book and puts it in her purse.
Stairwell. The lazy Ps gang up on Piper, reasoning that Santa Costa's "right over the bridge" and they can be back "by tomorrow night." And that's the final word on the matter, because just then Gail bounds down the stairs, so obviously making a break for it. Prue tells her that they'll arrive at Gail's house at nine the next morning. Phoebe asks Gail if she'd like to spend the night. Gail explains that she must go home to "feed her cats," being the stereotypical elderly spinster and all. Then she adds: "Thank you. Heh, heh, heh. You'll never know how much this means to me." Gail adds a shit-eating grin that scarcely conceals her villainous betrayal, and books out of the manor in a big suspicious hurry.
Sidebar. Whatever! Sure, Gail is an alleged trusted family friend, but how stupid are the lazy Ps supposed to be in this episode? And wasn't it established in this season's premiere that Grams was watching over the BoS and flipping the pages? Wouldn't it have been fitting for her ghost to come out and raise a ruckus over her friend's duplicity in the attic? And as funkyD noted on the boards, why is Gail allowed to take a page of the BoS out of the house when there are supposedly strict rules concerning its removal that were mentioned in the Abraxas ep last season? Not to mention Gail's "what a drag it is getting old" reasoning behind the backstabbing of her best friend's grandchildren, which feeds right into my thesis about the unpleasant portrayal and patronizing of the elderly in this series. Luckily, Aaron Spelling has made a pact with the Devil to live forever and he won't ever age, so there's no hypocrisy here on his part. None. At. All. Um, not.