Episode Report Card Demian: C+ | 10 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Forever CANCELLED!
By Demian | Season 8 | Episode 22 | Aired on 05.20.2006
Chez Victor. The gentleman in question sits in his robe at the dining room table, steeping a teabag in a mug while gazing bleakly at a toy chicken, but I'm not really paying attention to anything that's going on in this scene because Drew Fuller's name just appeared in guest scroll at the bottom of the screen. Big Gay Chris! My husband returns! Joined by TEETH!! And Grams! And Boring Jesus! Hooray! In any event, while all that is going on, there's a knock at the apartment's door. Victor leaps over to answer and finds his sole surviving daughter standing in the hall with her freshly unfrozen husband. Piper -- who's cleaned up rather nicely since last we saw her, like, what happened to the enormous scorch mark on her forehead, show? -- delivers the bad news, and Daddy Dearest is predictably stricken. I'm sure I'd find it all very touching, but we all know Phoebe and Raige aren't going to stay dead for very long, so let's move this along, shall we? Victor, trying desperately to come up with a way to bring his youngest daughter and her lippy bastard of a half-sister back to life, starts babbling about the Stoopid Magikal Kommunity and eventually blurts out Stoop's name. Piper, thinking fast, remembers that Stoop once took Phoebe on a time-traveling jaunt to revisit her past loves and quickly determines he'll be doing the same for them. "[Stoop]?" she calls out. "If you can hear me, I need to talk to you now." Stoop hearts in immediately. Piper rather bluntly informs him of Phoebe's death before getting down to business: She'd like his chunky Cupid ring, and she'd like it now. Stoop, also predictably stricken, hesitates, but eventually slides the thing off his finger and hands it over. "Okay, wh-what do I do?" Piper stammers before sighing in frustration and asking, simply, "How does it work?" Stoop, getting a little misty-eyed himself, explains, "You just think about that person and, um, how much you love them," before warning, "I gotta tell ya, it doesn't always work the way you want it to, though, 'cause love -- love isn't practical." Uh. Thanks? For all but ensuring a final spate of Wacky Wiccan Hijinks in this, the last episode ever? Not. Shut up, Stoop. As Piper places the ring on her own finger, the Dolt darts over to her side, vowing, "I'm going with you -- I'm not losing you again." Piper beams at him as Stoop offers one final bit of advice: "Keep it simple. Just follow your heart to one of them." Piper nods in acknowledgement then, clasping the Dolt's hands in her own, closes her eyes to breathe, "Phoebe." The dark walls of Victor's apartment glow pink and morph into...
...the sun-drenched and lace-curtained windows of the Manor's front boudoir. Piper and the Dolt, visibly puzzled, glance around briefly before Piper eyebrows, "This isn't right." By the way, this bit is shot so that the frame's cutting off Piper's lower body at her waist, the better to disguise the fact that Holly Marie Combs is, by now, one hundred and thirty-seven months pregnant. In any event, forest noises assault their ears at this moment, and Piper swivels her head around to find a "younger" version of her father canoodling in the boudoir's bed with her mother. Piper, understandably sickened and repulsed, clutches her nonexistent pearls and gags, "Oh, my God!" Patty, startled by this, snaps her head up and hisses, "Demons!" before flinging out a freeze that affects only the Dolt. I'm going to assume this means that Stoop's special method of time transport allows Piper not to lose her powers in the past, because this is the Last! Episode! Ever! and I don't feel like launching myself into a rant about the stupid fucking lack of continuity on this stupid fucking show now that it's been CANCELLED! and I am thirty-five minutes and forty-two seconds away from freedom. FREEDOM! "Why didn't she freeze?" Victor wonders. By the way, they've slapped a dark brown wig on James Read's head for these scenes in the past, but somehow neglected to address the matter of that thicket of grey hair sprouting from his pasty chest. God, I hate this show. They're also filming these scenes with the sort of soft-focus lens previously used only on La Milano when the latter was suffering through particularly dreadful patches of skeletal emaciation, but there's no masking the fact that James Read is fifty-three and Finola Hughes is forty-six, and they both look every single damn day of it. Whatever. CANCELLED! In response to Victor's question, Patty stutters out a confused and panicky "I don't know" before Piper cuts through the crap with a "Probably because I'm your daughter!" that's positively dripping with disgust at the fact that these ancient relics are naked in bed with each other. Ew. Victor and TEETH! gape and goggle and such while Piper flaps a grossed-out hand around in the air before eventually using it to cover her eyes. Heh.