Can demons really do all this in those caves? Where Witch Wars succeeds is its rapid fire pacing and it’s attempts to try something different. The show’s tendency to crib from growing trends and current fads bugs, but it makes it a lot more interesting when the show makes these trends its own, and doesn’t just blatantly recreate what we’ve seen elsewhere.
Wrestling With Demons flopped because it copied and pasted an idea into the Charmed world and the result was this embarrassing cross-over between a fantasy drama and WWE. The Legend of Sleepy Halliwell fell into the same trap. Magic School is almost a direct replica of Hogwarts, only without Quidditch and the friendly giant. But Witch Wars takes reality TV and plays with it in a way that doesn’t seem so hacked and transcribed; it’s almost a caricature of the real world.
Witch Wars is action packed, to boot. I’m a huge fan of broken time-line story-telling, a tactic that Alias referred back to a little too much during its run, and I’m happy to see Charmed try it out in such a different and strange way, here. The demon killing, and power stealing was pretty hard-core. It’s nice to see the show have fun with what it can do, and not hold back because of budget constraints.
But then you look too closely, and the whole thing seems a little silly. Flashback 5 years; could you really have seen Prue getting caught up in all of this? Would it even have been possible for the girls to go from vanquishing Rex and Hannah one week, to this kind of craziness the next? It’s one thing to grasp that demons have this whole other hierarchy down there, but do they really have sports bars, and televised tournaments, too? Gideon is still a class fool, as well, but the laughs really on the Halliwells. Game masters are behind the plot to turn Wyatt? For real?
Alas, I’ve fallen into the same trap again. Witch Wars is a lot of fun when you switch off, but up close its chock full of imperfections. Bonus points for Chris getting shot and Phoebe’s killing spree, though.
6/10
You know Panda, I loved what you wrote about this happening in the Prue years. Although this might be my personal favorite episode of the year, that aspect you brought up really put things in a different light. It's a shame how much the show evolved (in a negative manner) because if you think of it, the show became SUCH a different beast during the latter years. The tone changed (we've discussed this a lot), the rules changed, and of course worst of all; the characters were particularly annihilated (the sisters in particular). A true pity.
ReplyDeleteStill I gotta say, I love the premise of this episode. If only the rest of the season was half as ambitious.
That's true, at least there was ambition here, which is why it wasn't a total crock.
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