The trigger for tonight's Pee-wee's Playhouse Secret Phrase Screamfest is "signs." Though if you'd like to avoid developing polyps on your vocal cords before the evening's done, feel free to add "signs" to your personal Charmed drinking game. Of course, should you choose the latter option, you'll be suffering end-stage cirrhosis by the first commercial break, but who cares? It's your liver, after all. Cheers!
Previously on Charmed, last goddamned week.
Currently on Charmed, the Manor Morons gather in front of the main bathroom's mirror -- the better for us to catch glimpses of their glamoured disguises in the glass, and the better for everyone involved to bungle ferociously the subsequent required overdubbing -- for a rather efficient round of expository blather regarding their Issues Of The Week: Piper, for entirely inexplicable reasons, is worried about what she's supposed to do in the event that a demon attacks anywhere in the world that day; Raige, for depressingly obvious reasons, frets over The Retarded Bimbo's constant jangling of her Whitelightery hot line; and Phoebe, for characteristically selfish reasons, obsesses over the premonition she snagged from Rex Pexter last week in the elevator. Meanwhile, the Dolt thinks he "should have gone taller" with his new, glamoured identity. No, Dolt, you should have gone prettier, because right now you look like some sort of deranged, heroin-addicted Dutch serial killer. Granted, it's a vast improvement over your regular appearance, but still. Piper, peeved that everyone's talking around and over her while she's trying to establish her own Issue, blasts the bathroom with a shrill whistle before barking out, "Family meeting, now!" and stomping out of the room. Phoebe and the Dolt meekly trail out after her as Muggy McGowan goes into conniptions all over the bathroom sink.
Not!warts, and this does my heart good, indeed. The place remains a deserted shambles after the showdown between Zankou and the Glamorous Idiots in last season's finale. Haas stalks through the darkened main hallway before telekinetically flinging open the charred doors to the ruined library, where he's met by a passel of henchdemons, only one of whom gets to speak because of this godforsaken show's drastically reduced budget. The sassy speaking demonette, whose real name is apparently "synonymous with stardom" in her native Israel if the Internet Movie Database is to be believed, which it most decidedly is not, but whatever, places her hands firmly on her hips and confirms, "It's abandoned. Nobody's here." After a pause to consider this, she amends, "Though they could still be invisible -- this is [Not!warts], after all," and I have no idea if she's referring to the students, the faculty, the ever-useless Elders, or the goddamned Charmed Ones, but I do not care, because this show blows, and I want to die, so let's just get past all that so Haas can deliver his line. "No," he counters, "the magic here is all ours now." And then, to prove his point, he hurls Flaming Ball Of Death after Flaming Ball Of Death around the room, because the FBODs are supposed to...flush out any remaining Nit!wits? Startle the possibly invisible Glamorous Ladies into uncloaking? Pointlessly blow several thousand dollars of this show's rapidly dwindling effects budget for no discernible reason? It's not clear. What we do know is that the resulting explosions make Little Miss Notoriety here all tingly inside, because she shoots Haas a smoldering, come-hither glance once the resulting debris has settled to the floor. Haas flashes his teeth all the way into the opening credits.
Crap. Cuoco lives. And shut up, Brian Krause's Hair.
The camera fades up on the Manor façade. Deep within the center parlor, Piper paces in front of the sun porch's doorway as she shrieks, "Okay, people, we gotta get a grip, here, otherwise what are we doing? We might as well just go back to fighting demons again!" "Even if they think we're dead?" Raige snits from a nearby armchair. "It was a rhetorical question!" Piper stupidly rages, because her IQ has for some reason dropped a hundred points during the summer hiatus. "No," Raige duhs for me, "it wasn't." "I think," the Dolt interjects with his usual amount of uselessness, "the point is we need to take it slow, you know. Be patient." "Tell that to my premonition," hoots Phoebe the selfish hag. "And my stoopid charge," Raige adds, and I suddenly find myself falling in love with Rose McGowan of all people, despite the fact that I happened to pause the tape at the precise moment wherein her manic mugging has transformed her into a seventy-eight-year-old stroke victim. Piper whistles again, and oh, shit. I'd completely forgotten about this part. Well, I forced myself to forget about this part, because it is so mind-bendingly asinine, I'd have ended up in an asylum by lunchtime on Monday had I not put it out of my head. Piper's "going to be late" for the cleansing day of beauty she'd scheduled for herself just because she and Phoebe were watching their third-season Sex And The City DVDs, and you can tell Holly Marie Combs herself detests that aggressively harebrained plot point. Phoebe snatches up the DVDs in question from their exceedingly unlikely yet handy place on the center parlor's coffee table and whines something annoying about Carrie Bradshaw never having to marry guys she didn't know. "Why can't we live our lives like they did?" Phoebe sighs. Oooh! Oooh! I know this one! Because you're not on HBO and you have a writing staff even shittier than theirs was! Am I right? Huh? I am so totally right, aren't I?
"Didn't one of them sleep around a lot?" Raige snorts dismissively, and for one thing, LOOK WHO'S TALKING, RAIGE, and for another, trampy Phoebe would care about that...why, exactly? And also: "One of them"? God, I hate this show. ANY-way, Piper cuts through this amazing pile of bullshit with yet another one of her shrill whistles in order to pass out this evening's marching orders for her sisters. Raige has to "get that [stoopid] charge off [her] mind." How? "Do what Grams said," comes the reply. "Get out there! Ignore the signs of your old life and look for signs that lead you to your new life. Try anything." I get the feeling I'm going to regret you telling her that, Piper, but then again, when the hell did you do me any favors? "And you," Piper continues, wheeling on Phoebe, "you're all about signs -- isn't that what a vision is, anyway?" Piper then goes on endlessly about Phoebe's stupid fucking premonition regarding Phoebe's supposed future daughter, and Piper of all people should know that future daughters have a pesky habit of vanishing permanently for any of a variety of reasons -- like, oh, say, when you sabotage the Utopia that seemed to be a precondition for said future daughter's existence -- and didn't they devote an entire episode to Big Gay Chris nearly disappearing because he'd fucked with the timeline too much, and God, but this show sucks, and where the hell was I? Oh, yeah: Piper encouraging Phoebe to bone Vex Lexter in the elevator at All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me so Phoebe'll get knocked up and shut the hell up about this whole stupid subplot already. In so many words. Piper, having set her sisters on their separate annoying courses for this evening's festivities, books it to her cleansing day of beauty as Raige and the Dolt climb the stairs to the second floor, leaving Phoebe alone in the center parlor to launch herself into -- get this -- the first of tonight's many, many Carrie Bradshaw-esque voice-overs, complete with the breathy, girlish delivery and OH MY GOD WHY DID THEY NOT CANCEL THIS AWFUL, EVIL SHOW LAST MAY? "Maybe Piper's right," muses the Phoebe VO. "I mean, if there's one thing we learned, it's that we're being guided, and signs always lead the way. The question is, where do you start looking for them?" Uh, a far more entertaining second-season episode that already covered this very territory six goddamned years ago, maybe? Just a thought. Also, shut the fuck up, PVO.
Not!warts, and tonight's Nefarious Demonic Plot For World Domination, which is doomed to fail, so why are they even bothering? Whatever. Long story short, Haas and his henchdemons have already set in motion some sort of plan to flush the Charmed Ones out of hiding. "We've lured three teenagers so far," Little Miss Notoriety explains, "turned them all, and yet no sign of the witches!" "They won't be able to ignore the cries for long," Haas insists. "If the sisters are alive, they'll come to the rescue -- it's in their blood." "Unless your plan is too obscure for them," Little Miss Notoriety counters. "Maybe you give them too much credit." I think she just called the Manor Morons idiots. If so: Hee. "Demons have used mortal fairy tales to trap them before," Haas reminds her, and while that bit's true, the part about how "'Cinderella' turned the Charmed Ones into pumpkins" most certainly is not, so shut up, Haas. And Alice In Wonderland is a traditional mortal fairy tale the way this goddamned show is a traditional mortal fairy tale, which is to say not at all, EVER, so this entire Nefarious Demonic Plot For World Domination can blow me, and everyone involved in it needs to die. Especially The Retarded Bimbo. Ooops! Spoiler! "What if they don't take the bait?" Little Miss Notoriety wonders. "What if they live no more?" "Well, then, we mess up a few kids," Haas shrugs before giggling, "and that's fun all by itself, isn't it?" I'll be the judge of that, Bucky. "Time to find our Alice," Haas croons.
"Signs," the PVO, uh, VOs as the shot cuts from Not!warts to the quad where Phoebe nearly booted the Colethazor in the head five years ago, "can be good or bad, but they should never be ignored." Well, maybe I shouldn't ignore "signs," but I can certainly ignore Kaley Cuoco. Mostly. Basically, The Retarded Bimbo and The Retarded Bimbo's Equally Retarded Friend chat about the three teenagers Haas and his minions have lured and "turned" before The Retarded Bimbo's Equally Retarded Friend gets all huffy about people ignoring the concerns of kids today -- and maybe people wouldn't be ignoring your concerns if any of you worthless little shits had gotten off your lazy fucking asses and voted last November, so shut up, Retarded Bimbo's Equally Retarded Friend -- and then she leaves The Retarded Bimbo alone in the latter's palatial dorm room. The Retarded Bimbo, who'd been feigning disinterest this entire time while applying a hundred and fourteen layers of gloss to her slackjawed lips, carefully shuts the door behind her equally retarded friend and then crosses to her desk, from which she extracts her athame along with numerous newspaper clippings regarding the recent spate of disappearances. Yawn. By the way, the most prominent newspaper article begins with a paragraph devoted to the brainless sorority chick who was found earlier in the day, apparently, but the subsequent paragraphs blather on and on about some sort of property tax dispute. Nice attention to detail, Charmed. Not.
"Signs," interrupts the PVO, "don't always mean what we think they do. They can, after all, be confusing, especially in today's world, where we're constantly bombarded by them. Still, it's up to us to interpret them the best way we know how. It's called survival." The inane PVO is going to kill me dead before the first commercial break, isn't it? Though given the fact that one of the upcoming episodes this season is entitled "Desperate Housewitches," which almost certainly means we're in for Phoebe's annoying version of the already cloying MAVO, perhaps death is for the best. The camera's cut over to All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me, by the way, where dimwitted Phoebe has apparently spent the entire morning pushing the call buttons for the elevator in the lobby, hoping to run into Hex Bexter accidentally-on-purpose. Dingbat. "Unfortunately," PVO continues, and SHUT UP, PVO, "waiting for just the right sign to come along can be frustrating, especially when you're in a hurry to conceive, which is why sometimes you have to help make the signs come to you." During the above, Tex Nexter's arrived in one of the elevator cars. They flirt. I vomit. And then, the PVO WHICH WILL NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY butts in to add, "On the other hand, some signs come to you even when you wish they wouldn't," as the camera switches over to...
...a cop, emerging from her prowler to issue Raige a citation for "rolling through a stop sign," and the only thing interesting about this entire scene is Raige's fake ID for her glamoured identity. No, seriously, particularly because "Josephine Bennett" has bizarrely Victorian penmanship for a 22-year-old Amazon from Los Angeles, but most especially because this little encounter is about to push Raige into the most ludicrous and hatefully stupid subplots I think I've ever seen on this show. But more on that later, for just as Raige gets out of her ticket because the cop's got to race to the scene of "a missing person found," we cut over to...
...a pair of notorious Israeli boobs clad in a black t-shirt that reads "White Rabbit" as their owner saunters down a dank and forbidding alleyway elsewhere in the city, followed closely by some gormless and horny twat of a simp named Alastair. "I thought you said we were going to a garden party, or something," Alastair guhs. "We are," Little Miss Notoriety assures him. "You don't want to be late, do you? Because we're very, very late." See what they're doing here? Good. And I hate to admit this, but if they'd cut out all the crap about Phoebe trying to get laid and all the crap about Raige on another goddamned quest for meaning and purpose in her life and all the impending crap about Piper and her stupid normalcy addiction and all the utterly pointless crap about The Retarded Bimbo being a retarded bimbo to focus solely on ripping off Alice In Wonderland, I don't think this episode would have ended up being as miserably bad as it did. In any event, horny Alastair begins to have second thoughts, but The Notorious Israeli Boobs rub themselves all over his scrawny chest as their owner brushes her lips against his, so Alastair's brain drops three feet down into his pants, and that's the end of him. "I promised you an adventure, didn't I?" Little Miss Notoriety smiles. "Well, it's down there," she adds, gesturing towards a sewer grating. Horny Alastair hunches over to examine the thing and is immediately blown into a cloud of horny Alastair bits that find themselves sucked into the hole in the ground. Little Miss Notoriety smirks in triumph for a moment, but then quickly dissolves into a cloud of inky shards and disappears when she hears someone approaching. That someone is, of course, The Retarded Bimbo, in last week's hookerwear and accompanied by that funky Melrose Place beat and so the five seconds of screentime are yanked immediately into the Bleach-Blonde Black Hole Of Suck where they are rapidly torn asunder by titanic forces of badness and evil and HATE and destroyed and we suddenly find ourselves...
...down in the sewer with that gormless and horny twat of a simp Alastair, who's yelling for help and receiving no response. Eventually, he turns to examine his surroundings while wondering, "Where the hell am I?" "Down the rabbit hole!" the suddenly appearing Haas perks as he and Little Miss Notoriety amble on up from the shadows. "Alastair In Wonderland?" Haas muses, shooting Little Miss Notoriety a grin. "Close enough." The three vanish into an abrupt and oddly placed commercial break.
All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me, and this scene is so ridiculously awful and appalling, I just don't know where to begin. Jason Lewis is apparently some sort of artiste who rents out the garret -- the garret -- on the top floor of the building -- the building that only has two floors, the second of which is already occupied by the newspaper -- as studio space, in which he creates "sculptures" that...pain! PAIN! PAIN AND EVIL AND BAD AND THE COOTER TAT. The piece he and The Cooter Tat currently examine consists of a metal circle suspended from a rod that's balanced atop a triangle, and the whole thing's supposed to have been inspired when Jason Lewis "was flying over Africa, looking out the window and painfully aware of the struggles below [him] and yet [he] was up in the clouds feeling peace," and WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? "It's supposed to remind us," he claims, "of the delicate balance between life, good/evil, agony/ecstasy. All that." Jesus H. Motherfucking Christ on a stick. "All my work is," he continues as the shot cuts to take in the entire studio, and I fail to see how that nine-foot-tall, plastic, fire-engine-red hooker pump in the corner is supposed to remind anyone of anything aside from how absolutely fucking stupid and trashy and insulting this program is. I guess I'm not nearly as sensitive and delicate as Vex, here.
I want to die.
So Phoebe almost blows her cover by quoting her own column "verbatim" and Vex is smitten and invites her for coffee and the PVO attempts to rot what remains of my poor little brain but I ignore it and we fall into...
...another pointless and aggravating scene over at P3, where the transformer's blown, or something, and Piper shrills and shrieks and shrews at the hapless electrician and there's the PVO again and now we're...
...at some goddamned police station, which is actually the set for All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me because the WB choked off the financing for this garbage, but we're not supposed to notice that because we're supposed to be totally engrossed in Raige applying to join the police academy because that makes so much sense, and the recruiter is sexist and Raige is a twitchy, collagen-enhanced mess, and then Raige physically flips the recruiter into a wall and because assaulting a police officer on this show is apparently always the right thing to do, she gets to fill out an application, and no, I am not kidding with any of that, and have they cancelled this shit yet? Why haven't they cancelled this shit yet? If FOX can dust Head Cases and UPN can off Sex, Love, & Secrets after two episodes of each, what's to keep the WB from doing the same here? HUH? Yeah, I know it's the eighth season, but you know they could still do it. PLEASE WILL YOU CANCEL THIS NOW?
Dank And Forbidding Alleyway Of Dodgson-Inspired Doom. Some skinny little teenaged dipshit with a voice so high-pitched I'm sure she moonlights as a dog whistle and yeah, that was a really stupid thing for me to type but take a moment to consider, oh, THIS ENTIRE FUCKING EPISODE IN ADDITION TO LAST WEEK'S FESTIVAL OF SHIT and ask yourself, "What's Brad Kern's excuse?" Anyway, the dipshit's following an actual white rabbit as the latter scuttles across the trash-strewn asphalt over to the sewer grating that ate Horny Alastair. Long story short, the rabbit morphs up into Little Miss Notoriety, who then tosses "Alexis" into the sewer. Good fucking riddance. As Alexis's screams echo on the soundtrack, the scene shifts to...
...Piper's Cleansing Day Of Beauty, already in progress. That century-old entertainment cliché, The Overly Chatty Manicurist, hacks away at the nails of one customer in the salon while the mud-masked Piper reclines behind an adjacent curtain, trying and failing to block out The Overly Chatty Manicurist's current monologue regarding the recent spate of missing teenagers who "are coming back like zombies, or something -- vegetables." Like anyone would be able to tell the difference. In the middle of all this, Piper's cell phone rings, and it's the Dolt, and he's locked himself out of the house with the Psycho, who could easily orb back into the house with his father but doesn't, because this is all an asinine, Kern-penned contrivance to amp up Piper's aggravation level by forcing her to cut short her Cleansing Day Of Beauty, and...
...speaking of asinine, Kern-penned contrivances, Raige, who filled out her police academy application five minutes ago, is now standing at attention in full uniform with eleven of her fellow cadets, being lectured by some guy who wanted in The Late Lamented's pants six years ago, and there's that goddamned PVO again, and I quite seriously cannot take this bullshit anymore. Good thing, then, that The Retarded Bimbo chooses this moment to ring Raige's Whitelightery bell, forcing the lippy spastic to flee from her current insulting subplot over to...
...her other insulting subplot. Back in The Dank And Forbidding Alleyway Of Dodgson-Inspired Doom, The Retarded Bimbo flings her athame at Little Miss Notoriety and misses, so Little Miss Notoriety conjures up a series of Flaming Balls Of Death that she hurls at The Retarded Bimbo in rapid succession. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "in rapid succession"? I meant "in a painfully slow series of casual lobs necessitated by the fact that Kaley Cuoco, in addition to being a horrible actress, cannot manage to drag her awkwardly proportioned body through the choreographed stunt work quickly enough." HATE. Raige, still in full uniform, orbs in on the middle of all this, so Little Miss Notoriety quite naturally takes this opportunity to smear on out of there. The Retarded Bimbo and The Lippy Spastic exchange a few remarks that are meant to be tart-tongued, but because one of them is a mentally challenged imbecile and the other is constantly in the throes of a grand-mal seizure, well...you can see where I'm going with that. After this sparkling exchange of witty repartee, the two claw and scratch at each other until Raige quite awesomely pimp-smacks the tatty black nylon wig, the massive pair of black sunglasses, and the simpering yet brain-dead smirk straight off of Kaley Cuoco's head. Hooray! Hit her again, Raige! Hit her again! Unfortunately, The Retarded Bimbo scampers quickly to her feet, telekinetically retrieves her athame from the far end of the alleyway, and clatters out of there on her tipply spiked heels before Raige can do some real damage to the peabrain's worthless ass. Dammit. Raige considers chasing after The Retarded Bimbo but just then, another skinny little dipshit of a teenager emerges from behind a Dumpster to whimper, "Help! Somebody just tried to kidnap me!" Raige jogs straight into the commercial break.
Nonexistent Attic. Raige -- now thankfully back in her regular clothing, and wasn't that little morning-long jaunt of hers into the woefully underexamined world of law enforcement just fascinatingly brilliant? -- diligently scries for The Retarded Bimbo's current location with the latter's tatty black nylon wig as Phoebe burbles into the nonexistent room with a carry-out tray laden with various lattes and mochachinos and such. Phoebe, not surprisingly, is so caught up in her own Issues that she fails to notice the forbidden scrying for about three hours, but when she finally does, you can be certain she chides Raige vehemently about the possible Exposure! and Death To Them All! that The Lippy Spastic is risking and wah. Raige patiently counters that once she successfully deals with The Retarded Bimbo and The Retarded Bimbo's incessant jangling of Raige's Whitelightery alarm system, she'll pack away the scrying crystal for good. Besides, Raige notes, The Retarded Bimbo was actually battling one of the dark demonic forces responsible for the recent disappearances of all those skinny little lazy-ass dipshit teenagers. Phoebe offers to help, but Raige declines, correctly believing that the chances of the Underworld realizing they're not really dead after all will increase in direct proportion to how many of the Manor Morons involve themselves in the current crisis. Just as Phoebe rises to leave, Raige remembers that All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me called for Phoebe's glamoured alter ego, presumably to get a couple of quotes for their planned Phoebe tribute. That's going to make for some compelling reading. Not. The PVO babbles something entirely unimportant about signs possibly leading one into danger just as Raige's scrying crystal slams down on a set of coordinates, and we cut over to...
...Not!warts, of course, because Brad Kern is a lousy writer, and that transition would have made far more sense had we cut over to The Retarded Bimbo's palatial dorm room, but what the fuck ever. Haas and Little Miss Notoriety rehash recent events and come to the half-correct conclusion that Little Miss Notoriety actually encountered two of the glamoured Charmed Ones in The Dank And Forbidding Alleyway Of Dodgson-Inspired Doom. They decide to leave the skinny little lazy-ass dipshit teenagers alone for now and target the Manor Morons, and...that should rate a DUN!, should it not? And yet it doesn't, because this episode sucks even more than the last one did. I wonder what it's like to plow through an entire season of recaps dispensing nothing but well-deserved F grades to each and every installment? I suppose at the rate this year is going, I'll find out soon enough.
Manor. Up in the Bridal Boudoir, Piper has buried herself beneath the duvet on the bed and, as her Dolt of a husband warily eyes the lumpy down-filled mass from the doorway, proceeds to bitch and piss and moan about every single aspect of the normal life she now -- after seven years of whining for it -- has. There follows an entirely misplaced monologue from the shrew in question about how her life seems to be flying past her, or something, and of course Holly Marie Combs sells the hell out of it, especially because of all the metacommentary she's delivering about the lost last seven years of her own, but that's not the point. The point is this could have been an effective little character scene had it appeared towards the end of last season -- or even somewhere in the sixth -- but because they've dropped it into the middle of so poorly constructed an episode with zero build-up to this mini-midlife crisis she's having, she's coming across as a thoroughly ungrateful bitch. God, this show sucks.
In any event, the long-suffering and wrinkly Dolt offers a few soothing words of comfort and advice before lavishing the wife with a stream of compliments that Piper rather amusingly fends off with a too-modest, "Oh, stop." Heh. "You can't sacrifice yourself for so many people for so many years and not expect a transitional period," the Dolt sagely counsels. "You have to be patient." "And what do I do about the guilt?" Piper asks, finally getting to the damned point of this scene. "What guilt?" frowns the Dolt. "The guilt I feel when I know very bad things are happening out there," Piper explains, "and I'm not doing anything about it." And then the Dolt, as is his wont, fucking ruins everything by telling her to forget about all that, because after having paid her dues for so many years, it's now Piper's time to be "selfish." You really want another goddamned Phoebe in the house, Dolt? 'Cause that's what you're going to end up with if you keep dispensing crappy advice like that. Moron.
And speaking of the egomaniacal hag, here she is entering a Vex-occupied elevator at All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me in a scenelet that has absolutely no bearing on anything else in the episode, despite what the vile PVO would have us believe about signs. !
The Retarded Bimbo enters her darkened palatial dorm room and flips on the light to find Raige, avec tatty black nylon wig, awaiting her arrival. "Drop something?" Raige smirks as she rises to her feet. The Retarded Bimbo puckers her overly glossed lips into the commercial break.
Dorm room, aftermath, featuring more scintillating and quick-witted banter from The Retard and The Spastic. Eventually, Raige spits, "This isn't a game! This is real! Deadly real." "Can't use an adverb with a noun," The Retarded Bimbo snots, and that's not a noun, fucktard, and shut up, and drop dead, and shut up some more after you've dropped dead, and then drop dead again, and Brad Kern is A FUCKING IDIOT.
GAH! ANY-way, we get a brief burst of The Retarded Bimbo's backstory -- she just recently noticed she had powers and figured everything out through a couple of books she snagged at Barnes & Noble, and no, I am not kidding with that -- before Raige insists upon learning how The Retarded Bimbo cracked tonight's Nefarious Demonic Plot For World Domination. Simple! Almost as simple as The Retarded Bimbo, in fact. She noticed that all of the missing teenagers had names that came close to sounding like "Alice" -- Allison, Alastair, Alex, etc. -- and when those same teenagers reappeared babbling about white rabbits and mad hatters and "stoned caterpillars" and such, she quickly made the connection to the Lewis Carroll classic. She then -- again, not kidding -- hooked a scrying crystal up to her computer and, using a "GPS system," soon found Little Miss Notoriety and her modern-day rabbit hole, and would someone please shoot me in the head? Please? No one? Damn. You people are far too principled to be watching this garbage. Raige orders The Retarded Bimbo to remain in her palatial dorm room while Raige orbs out to consult with her sisters.
All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me. Vex ambles in from the hall and, long story short, Phoebe's glamoured identity is now writing the paper's advice column, because Vex had a little chat with Elise Rothman, Girl Editor, and Elise decided to hire "Julie" based solely upon Vex's recommendation, despite the fact that Vex is little more than a badly coiffed pantywaist with an enormous mole on his cheek who glues bits of rusted rebar together in a physically impossible garret and calls the results "art," and I hate this show. Just then, a breaking news story splashes itself all over the office's flat-paneled TV, detailing the recovery of one previously missing "Alice Robbins" who was found "mumbling incoherently" about "a path that leads nowhere and smiles without faces." Phoebe immediately understands what's really going on, because she's so smart. She jiggles out of the office to head back to the Manor, but not after promising to phone Vex later.
Manor. Phoebe arrives on the sun porch to share the fruits of her mad deductive skillz with Piper, Raige, and the Dolt, but of course Raige has already filled the others in on this evening's tawdry rip-off. A brief processing summit ensues, after which Raige announces she'll head back to The Retarded Bimbo's palatial dorm room to swipe The Retard's scrying materials, while Piper and Phoebe remain in the Manor to whip up some vanquishing potions. And...scene.
Meanwhile, down in the sewer, The Retarded Bimbo -- once again clad in her ludicrous black hookerwear (and oh, dear Lord. I just remembered she claimed to have bought it all at Saks. Can you imagine? No, neither can I) -- picks her way through the tunnels until Haas and Little Miss Notoriety pop up in front of her so Haas can pimp-smack The Retarded Bimbo forty feet through the air and into a concrete wall. Pause. Rewind. Play. Pause. Rewind. Play. Pause. Rewind. Slow-forward. Haas is the best demon ever! The Retarded Bimbo crumples to the filthy ground with a bloody gash on her cheek as Haas and Little Miss Notoriety advance upon her to make with the threats and such. As he still believes The Retarded Bimbo is one of the glamoured Glamorous Idiots, Haas orders Little Miss Notoriety to "send [The Retard] through." "Then," he sneers, "after her sisters find her wandering the streets and come looking for revenge? We'll. Send. Them. Through. Too." I. Should. Be. Dreadfully. Worried. About. This. Terrible. Development. Shouldn't. I? And. Yet. I. Remain. Utterly. Indifferent. Because. This. Episode. Sucks. But at least we've hit the final commercial break! Hooray!
Nonexistent Attic. Phoebe squeezes the freshly prepared vanquish into a couple of vials with a turkey baster -- and yeah, turkey basters should have no part of an episode so devoted to Phoebe's attempts to get herself knocked up -- as Raige enters from the upper hall with a laptop, a memory stick containing The Retarded Bimbo's supermagical scrying software, and news of The Retarded Bimbo's disappearance. Before Phoebe and Raige can track The Retarded Bimbo down using the latter's supermagical scrying software, Piper halts them to voice her suspicions regarding The Retard: What if the bimbonic black hole of suck is actually working with the demons to draw them all into a trap? Raige and Phoebe gape.
There follows an absolutely horrendous sequence in which The Retarded Bimbo finds herself fleeing from various Haas-induced hallucinations from the pages of Alice In Wonderland, including, as Sars put it in an appalled email to yours truly, "ANTHROPOMORPHIZED PLAYING CARDS?" She then wondered how long the show had been this bad and refused to believe me when I attempted to assure her that this sort of thing has been going on for at least three years. Sigh. ["I still don't believe you. I can't believe you. The fact that Brad Kern received a check for this dreck is suicidally depressing." -- Sars] Anyway, long story short, just as Little Miss Notoriety's disembodied head is about to go all Queen Of Hearts on The Retarded Bimbo's oddly elongated neck with an axe -- no, really -- Little Miss Notoriety's disembodied head suddenly howls and wails and bursts into flames before presumably zipping on down to The Waste Land. Haas, startled, quickly blinks out and presently, the entire Haas-induced hallucination dissolves, leaving The Retarded Bimbo squinting at her own badly manicured hands deep within the bowels of the sewer. "Are you in there?" Raige calls out from one of the tunnels beyond. The Retarded Bimbo answers in the affirmative and wanders around the corner to find Haas cringing on the filthy ground beneath the apparently de-glamoured Glamorous Idiots. "I shouldn't have underestimated you," Haas growls as he pulls himself to his feet. "I knew you were alive!" "Too bad you won't be around long enough to tell anybody," Phoebe rather coldly promises, and with that, Phoebe and Raige fling the remaining vanquishing vials into Haas's torso, and yet another demon go boom. Once the smoke and the flames and the charred shards of demonic flesh have dissipated, The Retarded Bimbo teeters over on her too-high heels to enthuse, "Wow! So you really are the Charmed Ones!" "Whadda we do?" Phoebe asks, referring to The Retard and her newfound knowledge of their true identities. "Blow her up?" Piper suggests. PLEASE do, Piper. If you blow this oddly proportioned slice of trash up right now, I promise I'll never complain about your whinging, your bitchery, or your shrewishness again. Please? Alas, it is not to be. The Retarded Bimbo instead brokers a deal with the Manor Morons in which she will battle any and all dark demonic forces sent from the flaming maw of Hell if the gals agree to teach her everything they know about magic. "All right," Raige assents on behalf of her half-sisters before adding, promo-style, "on one condition: Lose the cheap vinyl outfit." Yeah, you're one to talk, Raige. And you can just shut right the hell up as well, Disapproving Smirk On Phoebe's Face. Piper? Feel free to look disgusted. But only if you toss a couple of those glares at the scantily clad idiots you call family.
Oh, Jesus. There's a minute and a half left in this awful episode, and it's entirely devoted to another PVO. Well, fuck it. Let's get this over with.
As the first light of dawn glimmers on the horizon beyond downtown, the camera pans up and over the Ferry Building at water's edge as the PVO begins, "It's funny sometimes where signs lead you." The shot cross-fades to the Golden Gate Bridge basking in the early morning sunshine while the PVO continues, "Rarely where you thought you'd go, but always where you belong." "In [Raige's] case," we hear as we shoot over to the witch in question making out with the hot cop who'd been leading her one and only training session, "though she realized that being a cop wasn't her cup of tea, being with a certain cop was." Might I remind you all that the time has long since passed for this or any other show to rip off Carrie Bradshaw's voice-overs? What's that? You don't care? Despite the fact that Sex And The City has been off the air for almost two years and this current display of abject assiness on Charmed's part only proves how out-of-touch and utterly useless this show has become? Well, screw you. If I have to keep typing this crap out, you can listen to me bitch about it a few more times.
ANY-way. Cut to Piper, seated at her dressing table up in the Bridal Boudoir, smearing a homemade mud mask all over her face. The PVO adds, "For Piper, the only sign she really needed was the one that reminded her she wasn't alone." And...that wasn't Piper's Issue Of The Goddamned Week at all, you stupid VO. God, Phoebe. Can't you do anything right, you stupid bitch? In any event, the Dolt ambles in to plant a sloppy wet one on Piper's cheek, in the process getting her mud mask all over his lips. In a clearly improvised and somewhat cute bit, Holly Marie Combs at first tries to wipe the gunk off Brian Krause's mouth, but then just snickers and smears some of the goo all over his nose. And in the only shot that made me laugh out loud this week, the camera cuts over to Phoebe's fingers pecking away on her keyboard before pulling a long, slow pan up Alyssa Milano's heavily befurred forearms. HA! Hee hee hee. I'm so busy giggling, that I nearly miss the end of the PVO, which escorts us to episode's close with, "As for me, I discovered that -- just like Alice -- no matter how wild the ride, signs will sometimes lead you right back to where you started from. Changed. Different. But home." The fuck? Since when was the newspaper office ever your goddamned home, Phoebe? She ignores me, because she is a cow. With beaver pelts stapled to her forearms. Phoebe examines her "Julie Bennett" employee ID for a moment before locking eyes with Vex Pexter, who ambles into the paper's main room at that very minute with a pair of NIPPLES all his very own. This criminally stupid episode ends with Phoebe typing -- in 72-point font, mind you -- "and they lived happily ever after..." Wow, this show sucks.
week, Piper gets arrested, but that's not the problem. No, the problem is her aggressive bull dyke of a cellmate. Yes, Brad Kern went there, and yes, Brad Kern should be set on fire for it. I've got the gasoline -- anyone have a match?