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starlightandsunshine · 7 months

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So like I'm back to rewatching Charmed (1998, obviously, yay for like my first fandom ever) again for the umpteenth time, (in a randomised order, of course, because why watch chronologically like a sane person) and I was watching "That 70s Episode" and then looking at additional trivia and episode information as you do, and I came across a comment about how Magic School makes the entire plot of the episode into a plot hole or vice-versa, which just… No.

I'm not going to say that their haven't been some absolute ass-pulls in Charmed that create plot holes in earlier episodes (The cleaners vs "All Hell Breaks Loose" is technically one even though I have Thoughts on that) but the existence of Magic School is really not one of them for quite a lot of reasons that I can't be bothered to go into rn because this post is about "That 70s Episode".

Time travel in Charmed happens in an essentially fifty-fifty split between time travel that intentionally changes the past (like "A Witch in Time" and the whole s6 arc with Chris) and closed time loops/predestination paradoxes that essentially mean the whole thing was one long foregone conclusion from the start (like "All Halliwell's Eve" and also "Imaginary Fiends" if you take it from the time traveller's perspective and not like Piper's). "Forever Charmed" and "Morality Bites" are exceptions to this that sort of hang about in their own bubble for Reasons but literally every other incident even tangientially related to time travel is one of those two (time travel in Charmed is maybe something that I've put a bit too much thought into but that's a different post)

(all my thoughts on "That 70's Episode" as a closed time loop under the cut because it, uh, got really very long)

Now admittedly, I may be coming at this from a slightly different perspective since the first time I watched Charmed I did it out of order and saw a couple of the later seasons first before I watched s1, which means I already knew about magic school and was elbow deep in the shows mythology (specifically relevant here: whitelighters, which iirc hadn't really been delved into at all - I can't remember if the episode w Phoebe finding out about Leo and the little witch boy called Max was before or after this one but either way they don't really start building on whitelighters until "Love Hurts" and s2). But literally the first thing I actually thought about here was that it was a closed time loop where they basically contributed to causing the whole thing in the first place (and hey, I just remembered that there's a different time travel ep in s1 where a warlock comes from the future to change it in the truth episode, so in hindsight I was probably like "oh cool they're showing two different ways it works already").

But I mean really, lets take the time travel out of the picture for a second:

If the sisters don't travel back in time at all, how does this situation play out? Like, Patty gets threatened by a warlock into blessing a ring to give him immunity to her daughters powers and presumably goes home and tells her mother about it and then they bind the girls' powers after Phoebe is born and don't? do? Anything? About the situation. Like in the threeish years between being threatened and dying Patty never tries to do anything about this warlock that is almost definitely going to try and kill her babies? (lets be generous and say that she didn't want to do anything while pregnant, that still leaves thirteenish months between Phoebe being born and Paige's conception, and sixish months between Paige's birth and Patty's death, and even then she doesn't have to actively be doing anything to be figuring out a way to track him down and vanquish him or whatever) Penny "Battleaxe Grams" Halliwell doesn't ever go after him or try to do anything about him and for twenty-odd years just twiddles her thumbs about the situation while he visits every year??? (the very same woman who had a relationship with and then vanquished the freaking Necromancer!) Neither of them ever tell their whitelighter Sam about the whole thing (which, you know, is part of his job description), they never reach out to other witches about this dangerous warlock running around (like say the multiple canonical witches that the Charmed Ones meet that worked with one of them), they never go to the canonical magical school that presumably has plenty of competent magical beings on staff or to the Elders like "Hey you know those prophesised Charmed Ones you've been waiting for? Yeah we had to bind their powers to save them from this one warlock, if you want them to ever be able to use that power you need to help us find a way to get rid of him, K thanks"?? Like I know they're not the Power of Three babes, but come on, they're still Warren Witches and plenty powerful and competent in their own right. They've both gone after tougher opponents alone and it's not like they couldn't work together (and if your argument is "what about the sisters", like it costs zero money to ask Sam or even Victor to watch them for like an afternoon while Patty and Penny go and vanquish the active and real threat to their lives) And like after all of that, after not hunting this warlock down or telling anyone about him or doing really anything at all about the situation for over twenty years, Penny, after being diagnosed with a heart condition, doesn't then ever think, "oh hey, when I die, this one warlock's going to come after them in like twelve months at most because he keeps popping by once a year, I should do something about that, like write a note in the Book or make an addition to my will about it or something"???

Uh, no. They would not do that. That is incredibly out of character for the Halliwells that we know and love. They'd probably have spent the nine months Patty was pregnant with Phoebe figuring out how to vanquish him and destroy the ring , and then if he didn't show up right after Phoebe was born they'd have asked Sam or maybe a couple of other witches they know to keep an eye on the sisters for a couple of hours while they summon Nicholas and vanquish him while he's off guard. The whole situation is over and done with by the time Phoebe turns one and the sisters' powers don't need to be bound at all.

But when you take the time travel into account, the whole lack of proactiveness on Patty and Grams' part makes a whole lot more sense. Because after having to bless the ring and then telling her mother about it, Patty remembers the other people who knew she was pregnant, and being the very much not stupid witch she is goes "hmm, maybe there's something going on there". And then like the plot of the episode happens they steal back the ring blah blah, and lets say that when Patty unblesses it she does it with like a time delay when its first used or it uses the powers of the girls to undo the blessing or even it takes a hot minute to take effect bc like Patty said they didn't have time to test whether or not the unblessing worked or whatever - its magic, we've handwaved way worse in canon - so that Nicholas still has the two minutes of being able to blindside the girls when he first attacks them and they can't use magic that prompts them to cast the time travel spell.

The girls then get sent home and Patty gives the unblessed ring back to Nicholas without letting on that she's unblessed it, fine. But because the girls have now time travelled, Patty and Penny realise that they have to preserve the order of events that led to them time travelling in the first place. Which means that when Phoebe is born they have to bind the girls' powers. Ok fine, they do that. They raise the girls with no knowledge of magic. Except, they're not stupid, they saw how the three girls looked at Patty and how they talked about Grams but not really about their mother, and they put together that Patty dies young. So Patty puts some entries in the Book, some messages for her daughters that she's not going to get to see grow up. Information that she'd rather give them in person but that need to be recorded somewhere for them because she won't be able to - like the Demon of Fear entry, or about magic around babies and so on. She doesn't know when she dies, but she figures it's got to be before Prue is a teenager because there's a different way you look at a parent you lost in your teens to a parent you lost as a child and because if Prue was a teenager then Phoebe was at least seven or eight and the girls would have something to say about her that proves who they are rather than just the wistful looks. And Penny keeps on raising the girls and doesn't do anything about Nicholas even though he keeps coming by, and she puts the vanquishing spell in the Book for when they need it, right by the spell they'd use to go back in time. And events play out like in canon.

The time travel being a closed time loop also neatly provides a further answer that isn't just "we were afraid" for why Patty gave up Paige rather than say, binding her whitelighter powers (like she did canonically) and pretending that she was the child of someone other than Sam (like maybe a one night fling with Victor, which, hey, that's how Phoebe was conceived, it could be true for Paige too!) or even just pretending that she was adopted from a different witch. Because the sisters clearly didn't know she had trouble with pregnancy and aren't very practiced witches, they came back in time to change the past and they didn't once mention a younger sister. There was no fourth daughter that time travelled, so either the three older daughters just left their younger sister behind when trying to stop Nicholas (which, unlikely), or they don't know she exists. So Patty takes the harder option of giving Paige up rather than the selfish one of keeping her and endangering all of her daughters because as previously mentioned, she's a very smart witch and figures out that this is a choice that she already made in the future her daughters travelled from.

But what about Grams wanting to strip their powers in "Pre-Witched"? You ask. Well that's easy, Grams knows she's ill, she looks at her granddaughters who look very much like the three time travellers she met and are about the same age as them too, and figures out that she's going to die soon. Now remember, she met the sisters after they'd already been Charmed for a while and only saw them as a united front that supported each other and were a pretty good team. She didn't see all the difficult growing pains they went through at first or how it took them a minute to get their shit together as a team. So she looks around at her granddaughters, who are not just a mess, but also cannot keep it together for five minutes, or even long enough to take a picture. And she comes to the conclusion that she must have messed up somewhere, that she changed something by accident and stopped them from becoming the tight-knit sisterhood that she saw in her past and she lets her doubts take over and stop her from listening to Patty, who has faith that they'll still pull together. And then, before she can go through with it, destiny strikes, and she dies, which kicks off the events that lead to Nicholas coming to the house and finding her dead and trying to kill her granddaughters who go back in time to stop him and end up causing the whole chain of dominoes that lead to them growing up without their powers and having to time travel in the first place.

Ta-da! Closed time loop. I'm probably forgetting some things, but this was basically a rant post about how not everything big and new about magic in the back half of Charmed is a continuity screw up or ass-pull ft. one of my favourite s1 episodes

…there's also a bunch more thoughts I have about Halliwell's time travelling in general and also specifically them meeting their parents/ancestors when they're young/not yet born and how there are a bunch of repeating patterns that keep popping up surrounding it, but again, that's a different post.

#charmed #that 70's episode #1x17 #patty halliwell #penny halliwell #grams halliwell #charmed ones #time travel #meta post #maybe also slightly a rant #i have so many thoughts on time travel in charmed #but also like this episode in particular bc like #this episode is literally the thing that kicks off the stuff in the start of the show #bc without it they wouldn't only be coming into their powers now!#and there's something about closed time loops thats just #i cannot describe how much i love this episode #and how much of the stuff that happens in this episode can be linked back to later #but also don't come in here and tell me that magic school is an ass-pull bc of this episode #bc this episode answers the q of that in and of itself long before magic school was invented #i can and will happily die on this hill istg #this episode is basically a love letter to the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies #that cause the very action they tried to prevent #which #there's also a really interesting thing about how phoebe's power links in to that #but that's a different post

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