Episode Report Card Owen: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Pardon My Past
By Owen | Season 2 | Episode 14 | Aired on 02.16.2000
Campus. Lecture hall. The camera pans over to Phoebe. Okay, get this -- it's my favorite non-verbal revelation of Phoebe-as-moron all season (so far). Alyssa Milano is writing in her flimsy blue examination booklet, not on a desk or any hard surface mind you, but by holding the book up in front of her face with one hand while she scribbles on it with the other. Um, honey, they're called desks. You might want to master their use, since you're in college now and all. Anyway, Phoebe suddenly throws her booklet down and grabs her throat while gasping for air. An unseen force lifts Phoebe up and she's flung backwards into the aisle. A girl shrieks as Phoebe struggles on the floor. Prue, outside, hears this and books inside the hall. She kneels down to Phoebe and asks her if she's okay. The attack has ended.
Halliwell Manor. Parlor. Piper brings the Book of Shadows into the room for the Halliwells to peruse. Leo is there also, telling the sisters to look for "'past lives' spells, potions [or] incantations." He prattles about souls and pasts and reincarnation and evolution of the spirit. Phoebe wonders why her "past life" is trying to kill her. Leo thinks her past is "trying to warn" her, because she's able to receive premonitions. Phoebe quips, "Where is Shirley MacLaine when you need her?" I believe the answer is "at the end of a particularly long career skidmark, but not so down-and-out that she'd accept the offer to be stunt-cast in a Charmed episode for sweeps," but I may be wrong. Piper says, "We don't need her." She's found a "past life" spell in the BoS. It's written in the first person, so Phoebe can -- nay, must -- perform it alone. Prue worries that Pheebs might get "trapped" in the past where "something awful" will happen to her. Pheebs reasons that something awful is already happening to her in the present, and she must "take this chance." She recites the Hallmark verse: Remove the chains of time and space/ And make my spirit soar/ Let these mortal arms embrace/ The life that haunts before. Phoebe falls into a deep trance on Piper's lap.
1920s Halliwell Manor. Day. We start these scenes in sepia-toned POV shots of Pre-Phoebe getting out of a car in front of the manor. The manor had valet parking then. Pre-Phoebe walks up to the house past men in period tuxedos and women in vintage evening gowns. A woman thanks Pre-Pheebs for her "love potion." Pre-Phoebe approaches a doorman, who lets her into the manor. The place is packed with extras dressed like gangsters and flappers, all smoking and drinking and listening to jazz. Phoebe checks herself out in a mirror. She looks quite stunning in a Marseilles-waved black bobbed wig, diamond headband, red slip dress and matching feather boa.