Episode Report Card Demian: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT This is the way the season ends
By Demian | Season 4 | Episode 22 | Aired on 05.15.2002
Bruce scrambles across the grass for his gun. He hoists it in Phoebe's direction as Cole flares in unnoticed off to the side. Bruce squeezes the trigger, and we slip into bullet-time to watch the tiny missile first tear away from Bruce, then slowly approach Phoebe. Cole raises his right hand in real time to twist his wrist around with his fingers outstretched as if screwing in a light bulb. Bruce and Phoebe's blurry outlines rotate around an invisible central axis in time for Bruce to take his own bullet in the chest. He gasps and drops dead in a woefully anticlimactic finish to his guest spot. Phoebe looks up to find her supposedly deceased husband staring her in the face. "I couldn't very well let you die," he says, ambling over. Phoebe stammers. Cole airily explains that he "picked up a few powers lately. Quite a few, actually." Phoebe gapes. Cole swaggers towards a stand of trees before turning one last time to announce, "I'm not giving up on us, Phoebe. Ever." For what it's worth, I'm willing to give scary psycho stalker Cole a chance. Just don't drag the damn thing out for another two seasons, okay guys? Cole shows Phoebe his back, flares up a bit, then wipes out of the clearing to dissolve through the bushes. Phoebe turns her head away in disbelief to gaze across the bonfire at Piper. Raige scampers off for an ambulance as Piper and Phoebe eye each other silently.
The next afternoon, Piper and Phoebe enter the Manor to find an impatient Dolt pacing the hallway, awaiting their return. "How'd it go?" he asks. "Well," Piper replies, "it looks like we got away with everything so far." Phoebe adds that Selena swore to their version of events. One problem is that the FBI "can't figure out how [Bruce] shot himself from twenty feet away." Another is that Piper's worried the whole thing will just start up again when another agent stumbles across their files. The Dolt sheepishly assures her that this won't be happening. "I sorta orbed them into a volcano," he admits. Piper grants him a grateful peck on the lips for services rendered. As Raige staggers through the front door, that metallic vacuuming sound whoomps through the Manor once more. Raige whines, "The door's stuck," and oh, shit.
Way to dress to explain your involvement in an FBI kidnapping, Raige, and with less than a minute to go in the finale, no less. They're doing this just to piss me off, aren't they? It's Eilish's hateful, Satanic parting shot before hiatus, is what it is. Raige is wearing a sleeveless, over-aggressively ruffled pink tuxedo shirt over a skimpy pine-green mini that together conspire to make her look anorexic, but that's not really what's so horrific about her appearance. Not at all. In what might rank as the worst hairstyle of the season, Raige's locks have been swept up into two sloppy buns on either side of the top of her head, with wispy tendrils of hair trailing down the sides of her face. It's like Darlene from the original Mickey Mouse Club grew up to be a crack-whore smack-addict porn star who specializes in those five-hundred-man gangbang videos you hear so much about from time to time. It's sick, it's wrong, and it's thirty-five seconds to the end of the season, so we'll just leave it at that and keep moving.