While fighting the horsemen, they managed to send one of them to a nether region—but accidentally sent Prue as well. Joined together, the four horsemen could destroy anything. With breaking hearts, Piper and Phoebe made the difficult decision to sacrifice Prue rather than let her and the horseman both return—because they knew that was what she would have chosen.
That nobility was enough to turn the tide. The master of all evil destroyed the horsemen because evil betrays its own servants when they fail. It has no honor, and to trust it is a fool’s decision. Those who will betray a foe will betray a friend also. The cause is immaterial; it is the nature of evil to deceive and to use and to destroy. That core is part of the violence of existence: it is necessary for evil to exist in order for good to exist also. That essence cannot be vanquished.
At the end of the story the sisters were asked again, would they save one sibling or five strangers? And without hesitation they said, “Five strangers.” Honor won over personal love, and it was enough to save everyone, at least until next time.
In “How to Make a Quilt Out of Americans,” a favorite aunt, now old and ill, sought them out to steal their powers by trickery in order to bribe a demon who could restore her youth, beauty and, above all, health. The price, as always, was her soul.
She explained to the sisters that for some the “golden years” could be mostly regret for that which was lost or wasted. She only wanted another chance.
In this visual, appearance-obsessed age, how many of us would trade honor for the youth and beauty we believe will make us loved? We all want acceptance—but at what price? We are so afraid of death, fearing the unknown that lies beyond it.
A normal fear, and a very human one. This aunt learned hideously the price of giving into it and of doing business with demons.
A similarly themed episode, “My Three Witches” from season six, showed the energy contained in unfulfilled desire and how it can be used against us. And yet balancing that risk is the knowledge that without desire there can be no passion, no life and, in the end, no joy either. What use is the sweetest fruit on earth if there is no hunger? It leads to deeper thoughts of the nature of joy. Is heaven not so much a different place as a greater ability to see, hear and taste the glory that there is everywhere? To borrow from William Blake: “to yearn for eternity and find it in an hour, to hunger for infinity and see it in the sky, heaven in a wild flower, to cease to be alone in the touch of one hand.”
Perhaps hell is to have no hunger, to be incapable of that soaring happiness of touching the stars.
Another episode, “Love’s A Witch,” featured Phoebe given wildly enhanced powers of empathy, reading other people’s thoughts in alarming detail and showing her more of the future than ever before. It was a painful demonstration of how intensely we all need privacy for our own dreams and mistakes, time to deal with them where others do not see our battles. We also need the protection of not knowing those of others. Sometimes we cannot even function properly if we know what other people think of us, good or bad. We cannot cope with knowing everything. Living with the unknown requires a great deal of knowledge and faith in order for us to go forward, head high, but an overload of knowledge is paralyzing. Some things need to be thought alone. Some events need to be met only when they happen. We are given such limits to our vision for good reason.
Threading through all the individual episodes are the unfolding stories of the main characters. Prue fell in love with a mortal man, and it cost him his life. She later died as well and was replaced by a half-sister, Paige, who has so far not found a lasting love.
Phoebe fell in love with and married a man half-mortal and half-demon. For many episodes he struggled to become fully his better self, and in the end he lost. Was it ever possible that he could have won? I don’t know. For me the jury is still out on that. Perhaps any redemption is possible, but so is any loss. Is there a depth from which one cannot rise? That’s not any human’s right to judge.
Certainly there is no height from which we cannot fall. And that brings us to the most thought-provoking stories of all. Piper fell in love with Leo, a Whitelighter—in effect, the sisters’ guardian angel. They had a baby, Wyatt.
For a while life was happy, then virtue brought its increased power, responsibilities and a price. Leo was promoted from Whitelighter to Elder, one of the supreme order in the progress of natural beings. Leo, like anyone else, could not deny the calling. No matter what the cost, Piper also could not stand in the way of his progress. At one point she accused him of refusing to tell her the truth because he knew it would hurt her. Her anger, confusion and terrible loneliness is easy to understand. She cried out that sacrifice was not fair. “Sacrifice never is,” he replied.
And for her there was more to fear because their child, Wyatt, had powers, even as a baby, that outstripped both of his parents’ as well as a destiny to become one of the most powerful of all beings. Now Piper faced bringing him up almost alone while protecting him from the demons eager to destroy him in his infancy, when he was most vulnerable.
With Leo gone, another Whitelighter, Chris, was appointed as their guardian angel. He had come from the future especially to save Wyatt from the demons who threatened him. But what the sisters did not know, and Chris did, was that it was not death that was the danger to Wyatt, but seduction to the side of evil. One possibility for the future was that his immense power would corrupt him, as all power tends to and absolute power almost always does.
The potential for the greatest good is also the potential for the greatest evil.
To ease some of Piper’s pain at being left, Leo magically dulled much of her memory of their time together, a sort of emotional anesthesia. The ability to have one’s painful memories removed is an intense temptation. But the story that followed raised a vast new field of thought. How much of our own character and xx springs from what we remember? Without memory, character and instinct remain, but what of whole areas of morality that come from experiences of guilt and remorse, the need to forgive and be forgiven? From knowledge of suffering, and therefore pity? Compassion is feeling with; without one’s own lifetime to draw on, without the knowledge of cause and effect that living brings, what wisdom is there? What growth built upon understanding?
What is perhaps even more frightening, and with consequences every bit as great, is that if you escape pain by detaching the mind from the knowledge that caused it, you are also escaping reality. It is a matter of proportion and degree, but carried to its extreme, is that not what madness is? We build a framework of reason from good and evil, joy and pain, light and darkness. When we refuse one, we deny the other. Only by accepting them both, and with the capacity to choose and to learn, to feel and remember, can we grasp the beauty of truth and moral reality.
It is the courage to feel that is the core of life.
Recognize your demons, give them names and face them!
In the Greek myths the gods are personifications of qualities of good and evil, or great natural forces which are neutral, such as fire or water, and can be either according to their use. When they symbolize great passions, unfaced and ungoverned, then they are the elements of classic tragedy. That is why they have lasted for millennia, and why we use them now in our own stories to explain the enormity, the magnificence and the fears and griefs of our own lives.
Fairy stories paint pictures of the strongest of our common experiences, heighten them and make the familiar new and amazing. We see with a greater clarity and understand more deeply. In our wildest moments, the ones that most stretch the imagination, we are least alone in our journey. We are hearing the voice of every man who has sat around the fire at night with the same terrors and same dreams since the days of the caveman, and who always will, even if we tread the stars.
Anne Perry is the best-selling author of several historical detective series, including the Thomas Pitt series and the William and Hester Monk series. She has also written two fantasies, Tathea and Come Armageddon. Visit Anne on
the Web at www.anneperry.net.
WHY ARE THE ELDERS SUCH JERKS?
OR, THE BAD PORTRAYAL OF GOOD IN CHARMED
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RICHARD GARFINKLE
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The neat division of the Halliwells’ world into Good and Evil has a few narrative flaws, Richard Garfinkle says. The Evils are all petty jerks. Unfortunately, so are the Goods.
WHY DID THE ELDERS try to prevent Piper and Leo’s marriage? Why, all through the series, do they come across as insufferable twits? What accounts for the abuse Leo’s character has taken in the last two seasons? Why can’t he or any other Whitelighter handle a simple crisis of faith? In short, why are the “good guys” so annoying when they are good and so prone to falling toward the bad when adversity strikes?
While stated in terms of Charmed, I do not think these questions can be fully answered within the context of the series. However, the show does give excellent illustrations and illuminations of what seems to me a large-scale problem in modern writing. The examples above are symptoms of a difficulty present in nearly all modern literature and certainly all pop culture. That difficulty is this: Modern writers appear to have an extraordinarily hard time depicting transcendental good. This trouble is partially rooted in the nature of writing, but even more so in modern views of people and what makes them good and interesting.
“Good” and “evil” are terms thrown around with reckless abandon in shows such as Charmed, but what they mean—indeed, what it is to be good or evil—are fuzzy concepts for both the creators and the audiences of such shows. Sometimes it seems that good and evil are nothing but t-shirts that mark out which side is which. There is a video game psychology in this: As long as the target is wearing the correct t-shirt you can blow them up with impunity.
Generally a moral code is outlined that declares whom you get to blast and whom you must leave alone. But this morality is usually racist, speciesist or dimensionalist (the humans-good/other-dimensional-creatures-bad prejudice). Charmed shares with Buffy the Vampire Slayer the concept that killing demons is good and killing humans is bad. This is regardless of the actions the demon or human takes. In Charmed there was the classic case of Prue’s contempt for Cole when he killed a human who was trying to kill him (this showed Cole descending back into “evil”). It is true that the human could not have hurt Cole, but if he had vanquished a demon too weak to harm him, Prue would not have blinked a mascara-ed eyelash.
It might be argued that this black hat/white hat simplicity is necessary for the purposes of an hour-long drama, since good and evil are complex concepts. I don’t agree. It seems to me that there are simple definitions of good and evil that fit most people’s ideas of these concepts and which hold up even in the rarified reaches of Heaven and the pits of Hell:
GOOD: Seeking to reduce unnecessary suffering.
EVIL: Seeking to create, or not caring about the creation of, unnecessary suffering.
In other words, a good person or entity would work to cut down the amount of suffering in the world. An evil person or entity would either seek to increase suffering or simply not care about the suffering of others.
These two definitions also illuminate the inherent opposition between good and evil beings. A good being would oppose the actions of someone who created suffering, regardless of whether the action was deliberate or through indifference. An evil being who sought to increase suffering would oppose a good being’s attempts to alleviate it. An evil being who was indifferent to the suffering of others might—might—oppose one who works against such suffering, assuming there was some other reason to do so.
Indifferent villains may sound wimpier than actively evil ones, but some of the best nasty characters (as well as the worst nasty real people) come to their evil through indifference. A well-known example is Ebenezer Scrooge, who created suffering by not caring about the fate of the poor.
This opposition between good and evil also exists within each human being. Nearly all of us have desires to ease the suffering of others. But we also have desires to create suffering in those we hate and are often indifferent to the pain of others, particularly if they are far away from us or not the “right” sort of people. This internal battleground is the source of the mythological conflicts between good and evil, the struggle for the human soul.
Stories that take this internal struggle and paint it across the real world are as old as storytelling itself. The major point of such stories is the overcoming of evil or the effects of failing to overcome it. The former tales are hero/saint stories; the latter are morality plays.
In the process of overcoming evil, a hero or saint transforms himself—or herself— individually and the world universally. One of the basic principles of such spiritual tales is that a person who defeats the evil within becomes capable of helping others overcome that evil. This kind of story is almost never shown on TV. The last example I can think of was on the show Northern Exposure in the shamanic education of Ed.
Shows like Charmed are necessarily set on the battlefield of such conflicts. The characters are the warriors of good and evil. Traditionally, such characters would be allegories for virtues in the forms of gods, demons, etc. The demons and other nasties (warlocks and Darklighters, in Charmed’s case) would represent particular dangers to the human soul. The gods (or, here, their witch and Whitelighter analogs) would stand for particular human and divine capacities that could overcome the dangers. The means of defeating them (that is, the plots of the stories) would illuminate processes by which people could free themselves from those ills in the real world. In other words, such tales are instruction manuals that exist to aid people in living good lives.
In Charmed, however, allegory has been supplanted by butt-kicking and spell-chucking. The dangers are dramatic, the heroes are . . . well, we’ll get to the heroes later, and the means of defeat are clever and visually exciting but rarely enlightening.
This kind of cool but meaningless conflict takes us away from these instructive stories and puts us into the realm of the modern superhero story. The ongoing conflict between good and evil is watered down into an episodic battling between nice and nasty. The characters on Charmed are much like the postmodern superheroes who populate today’s comics. The characters on Charmed are cool to look at; they kick butts and take names, are vaguely concerned with good and are on the whole nicer than their opponents for a given value of “nicer,” but most of the fundamental distinctions between good and evil have fallen by the wayside. Instead, good and evil are separated by distinct special effects (Whitelighter orbing versus demonic fading), costumes (demons have funny-looking heads) and occasional bouts of motivation (we save innocents, they harm them).
The transformative character of the allegories is completely lost. People in Charmed do not become better for overcoming evil. The Charmed Ones did not attain any greater goodness for their defeat of the Source (which in an allegory would generate sainthood). Nor have they gained any control over themselves for all the evils they have vanquished. They have grown some as human beings over the course of the series, but there is no correlation between that growth and their triumphs and tragedies.
A lengthy but worthwhile example of this failure to transform can be seen in Phoebe, who presented an opportunity for a story great in goodness. Phoebe, who began as the most airheaded of the Charmed Ones and who went through the messiest interactions with evil (i.e., Cole), could have been a source of fascinating tales illuminating many elements of human life.
Phoebe’s basic power was to see the future, allowing her to act to prevent the dangers she foresaw. Given this great gift, she griped that she couldn’t blow stuff up. But suppose instead of complaining she had embraced her power, let it into her soul and, delving deep into forethought, developed an understanding of the consequences of actions both human and spiritual. She could have learned from her gift, could have come to understand how people affect other people and how good and evil work in the world. She could have become a larger force
for good if she had realized she had the greatest of the Charmed Ones’ gifts. She could have guided her sisters, the Whitelighters, other witches, even the Elders themselves in their conflict with evil.
Okay, you might say, so Phoebe becomes a great oracle. What then? Doesn’t that end her plot line since she now has no flaws or conflicts?
No. Now Phoebe, who sees so much, would have to deal with her physical limitations. She would see more suffering than she could act to prevent. How would she chart the course of doing good while always knowing more suffering than she could affect? That is a long-term, complex character arc that can last for seasons without once falling into maudlin wallowing.
Furthermore, when this Phoebe discovered (as she would have) that she was married to the Source but that Cole still existed inside it, her true task would unfold. She would have a titanic struggle ahead of her, to help her husband overcome what had been placed in him and to make him master and subjugator of the Evil Source. This Phoebe would have had a fascinating magical and moral challenge. A battle would have ensued between her and the Source for Cole’s soul that could have had a place in an entire season’s worth of episodes.
Instead, we were presented with Phoebe having a crummy marriage, being manipulated by the Source, losing the child she never really had, losing Cole, etc. All perfectly normal soap opera stuff, nothing charmed about it. And her foresight, her great gift, has done nothing but push her into being a watered-down oracle: an advice columnist.
The Charmed Ones’ battle against evil is not really a conflict with evil, because no evil is truly overcome. Rather than there being any deeper meaning to their conflict, the characters are relegated to the roles of foot soldiers in a magical war. Instead of Phoebe’s struggle being to win Cole’s soul back from evil, it was to survive the emotional tragedy of losing her husband to evil. Phoebe’s growth and changes have come about because of her attempts to retain her humanity despite her place on the front lines.
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