Episode Report Card Demian: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT You were expecting a Seuss joke here, weren't you?
By Demian | Season 5 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.16.2002
Smash-cut to a vertically-challenged actress intoning, "Sorry. I don't cook." Huh? Was that supposed to be a joke? "Duck!" "I don't cook." The hell? Jesus. Anyway, the vertically-challenged actress is, of course, portraying one of Piper's supernatural nannies. She's identified in the closing credits as an elf, but those freakish lime-green contacts in her eyes make her look like an iguana. So, Piper and the Dolt lounge in the wicker loveseat on the sun porch, giving the iguana woman the third degree. Iguana Woman rather snippily asks if she's "expected to protect the baby from the incessant demon attacks." Just as Piper claims that demons rarely attack in the Manor, Raige orbs into the parlor with Sam as Raoul materializes over by the dining room. Iguana Woman glares. Oh, Iguana Woman, please don't glare. Your freakish green eyes frighten me so. Raoul lets fly with a poisoned arrow that digs deep into Sam's shoulder. Piper leaps to her feet and flings out her Hands Of Discontent. Raoul's left arm explodes into a cloud of black goo. The bloody stump drips gore and smokes as Raoul howls and wails and shimmies on out of there. Meanwhile, Phoebe has jiggled into the dining room from the kitchen to yodel. Freaky Tiny Iguana Woman spins on her heel and snits, "Consider my application withdrawn." She hoists her enormous purse onto her shoulder and flares out in a huffy haze of green. Piper cries, "Dammit!" and crosses to Phoebe as the Dolt warns Raige not to touch the arrow. Why Raige was reaching for it in the first place is beyond me. She's only known about the damn things for the last nine months. Piper and Phoebe get a good look at Sam's face and realize who he is. They do not, however, blurt, "I thought he was dead!" The Sam-kebab grimaces and wheezes and hacks part of his lung into the commercial break.
Back on the sun porch, Phoebe delicately snaps the feathered end off the Sam-kebab skewer and yanks the rest of it out of his back. Piper, Raige, and the Dolt, all with "Whitelighter blood" coursing through their veins, cower in the distance, sniping at each other. Raige can't believe The Ever-Useless Elders would assign her a fallen Whitelighter without first giving her the relevant facts. Piper snides that The Elders left out other pertinent information as well. Phoebe interrupts the argument so that the Dolt can apply the tingly touch to Sam's gaping wound. Once he's done so, Piper sends Raige to the attic on some hastily-manufactured Book of Shadows mission so that she and Phoebe can rip Sam and the Dolt a couple of new ones in private. Sam glances guiltily at Piper and Phoebe and greets them by name. Phoebe wonders what he's doing back on earth. Sam whines that after he hooked up with Teeth! in the afterlife, The Elders stepped in and made him a Whitelighter again. Bullshit! The Elders offered you the position again, and you accepted it, right? Right. Needless to say, Sam screwed up once more, and although details of his latest failure are thin on the ground, he blames it on having to surrender his daughter to a nun the day she was born. I hate when that happens. Piper and Phoebe clue him in on Raige's identity as Cole silently smears into the parlor to eavesdrop. Sam gets mouthy as Piper snarks at the Dolt, "You knew about this supernatural Jenny Jones reunion, didn't you?" The Dolt dorks that he was sworn to secrecy. Sam sneers that none of it matters because he's leaving and everyone should just leave him the hell alone and why did The Elders get Raige involved in the first place? Cole listens intently. The Dolt exclaims that Sam left the idiots in charge with no choice -- once he stopped using his powers, he "dropped off the radar" and could only be found again by a blood relative. My, but that's contrived. Good thing Raige has complementary abandonment issues to resolve by the end of the hour; otherwise I'd be wondering why The Elders didn't just send one of Sam's New York relatives after him. Phoebe insists that Sam remain in the Manor for Raige's sake. Sam looms over her and mopes something about having his daughter find out her father's "a two-time loser and a drunk." Cole, having heard enough, quietly smears away. Sam apologizes, but repeats his desire to be left alone. He orbs out just as Raige hits the stairwell landing with the Book of Shadows. Piper and the Dolt awkwardly babble something about Sam's disappearance and how Raoul is actually one of the higher-level Darklighters known as Trackers before suggesting that Phoebe and Raige work on a Tracker vanquish while they look for Sam. Phoebe nods vigorously. Raige wonders who made her birth family smoke crack.