Nerding Day: Charmed's "Twice in a Blue Moon" (Patreon)

It's officially that time of year again: horny witch TV show seasons. On your yearly journey through the valley of sexy witches, don't forget to stop by Charmed's most ridiculous episode, "Twice In A Blue Moon," the one where the charmed ones think their periods have turned them into werewolves.

If you're not familiar with Charmed, it's a show produced by Aaron Spelling, the guy who made Charlie's Angels and The Love Boat, as an attempt to capitalize on Buffy The Vampire Slayer's popularity and become its sister show on the official horny paranormal network, The CW. Spelling took the basic concept of Buffy, an ass kicking female demon hunter, and cross-bred it with a Cathy comic. The three lead characters fight demons every episode but mostly as a side plot to their complicated dating lives. It imagines a world where women can fight demons, but they don't like to because it interferes with their boy kissing time.

Charmed is the Whose Line Is It Anyway of sexy witch shows because all the rules are made up, and the characters do not matter. From season to season, and hell, even sometimes episode to episode their personalities and desires shift so wildly and inconsistently it's like they're doing an improv show, but every suggestion from the audience is, "horrible woman, no worse, the worst woman you can imagine. She doesn't want to save that little girl because she'll miss her breakfast date with Nick Lachey from 98°!"

It couldn't even begin to explain the lore of Charmed to you. There are angels and demons in it, but they're called whitelighters and darklighters, and even though they're already dead, they can die, and also fuck, and have children. Sometimes they can heal people, and sometimes they can't, depending on what the plot calls for that week. There are also boss angels called elders, demons which are different from darklighters, cupids, leprechauns, mermaids... Charmed has desecrated them all.

The charmed ones were supposed to be special because they were three witch sisters, and three is a magic number, but then Shannon Doherty didn't get along with the other two sisters, and they killed her off between seasons and revealed a fourth secret sister so they could still have the power of three. Anyway, it was wild, and sometimes Alyssa Milano wore a shirt made of pants which I think says a lot about the confusing direction of the series. They didn't even care enough about the character to check and see if her shirt was actually pants.

By season seven, Charmed was running out of ideas of things for the sisters to fight. One of the main villains for the season was the floating head of the great and powerful Oz, and the CGI was only marginally better than the 1939 version. So, when someone had the audacity to pitch a period werewolf episode, the producers scratched the butt sucking turtle demon off the schedule and greenlit it immediately.

The episode begins with the charmed ones, Piper, Paige, and Phoebe, complaining about PMS in the most stereotypical way possible. They're teleporting ice cream to themselves and being all cranky. Piper tells them that her husband, Leo (he's an angel, it's whatever) was tricked into murdering a boss angel, and they don't even care because they're so grumpy from all of the period.

The boss angels are a little suspicious of Piper's murdering husband and decide to fire him from his job as their resident angel, replacing him with TJ Thyne, who you might recognize from all 47 seasons of Bones. TJ Thyne's promotion is short lived as he's fired by the charmed ones in the traditional way, being mauled to death by a mysterious force in a public park.

The boss angels think it's a little suspicious that all of their friends keep dying around Leo, and since Leo is Piper's husband, the charmed ones care about the mauling thing. They are, however, weirdly cranky. And their powers are all misfiring, and even though we are seven seasons into this show and it's never happened before, they decide it's probably period stuff. You know, because periods attract bears and detract telekinesis. That's a well known period fact for you!

The charmed ones set a trap for whatever mauled their new whitelighter, and they end up catching themselves and almost mauling beloved character actor John Ross Bowie to death. Man, the cameos in the period werewolf episode of Charmed are first class! Q from Star Trek is also in this episode, AND Nick Lachey. So many actors that you kind of almost know from another thing are bringing their very worst work to the maxi pad episode of Charmed.

When they wake up captured by their own trap with John Ross Bowie bleeding to death a few feet away, they come to the logical conclusion that even though they're adult women who have experienced PMS probably around 216 times, it must have finally werewolfed them. "I know we all get a little bit testy this time of the month, but that's ridiculous," Paige says to a stunning lack of laugh track as she further delays taking John Ross Bowie to get healed by crackin' wise.

Leo tells the charmed ones their monster problems are probably stemming from the blue moon. Now, the episode is called "Twice In A Blue Moon," so immediately, that seems correct. However, Charmed has a long tradition of giving terrible pun names to episodes that don't necessarily mean anything. Past episode titles include "Cheaper By The Coven," "Womb Raider," and "Astral Monkey," which I don't think is a pun, but there is a monkey that can astral project in that one!

I'm pretty sure the title of this episode came first, and then they shaped all other content around it without bothering to look up what a blue moon actually is. The expression "Once in a blue moon" has nothing to do with the moon's color but an extra full moon in a lunar cycle that happens once every 2-3 years. You can remember it because it's one third of a witch's menstrual cycle. But look, I don't expect Charmed to hire Neil deGrasse Tyson to advise on a show mostly about angels and demons who fuck, but they could have at least made the blue moon magic somehow? They say it's a natural phenomenon that once every 50 years, there are two blue moons in one year, and that means that the moon literally turns blue, and apparently, that makes the charmed ones into werewolves.

I've never seen less writing done on a TV show to explain an issue. It's almost impressive how Charmed managed to yada yada so much of the plot of this episode. They never explain why the charmed ones become werewolves when there are two blue moons, and they never do anything to prevent it from happening again in the future. Nick Lachey has distracted these women far too much from their werewolf concerns.

Phoebe immediately goes from learning she mauled a man as a werewolf to a coffee date with a former boy band member. She spends way more of the episode bummed about getting dumped by him than she does being bummed about committing several maulings.

Leo gets possessed by a random no-name demon and is forced to attack the council of boss angels who are already suspicious of him. He's acting insane, so the charmed ones follow him to the very not Harry Potter magic school where the boss angels live. I don't know why Heaven is a knockoff British boarding school, but it's the only place we see the council of elders for that entire season.

Even though the charmed ones are fully aware that they're going to turn into werewolves again because there's one more night of the blue moon, they follow Leo to the elders and, of course, end up turning into werewolves and attacking them as soon as they get the demon out of Leo. The elders accuse the charmed ones of turning into demons, and Pheobe says, "That wasn't demonic that was…you know, that time of the month." It's like they hired a vaudeville comedian for this episode but neglected to hire the man who shows up with a big cane to yank the girls off screen when they say these things.

The elder just…accepts their period werewolf excuse? They never actually figure out why they kept turning into werewolves during the double blue moon. It will happen again in fifty years, but they have no concerns about that. They only mauled two men, neither of whom are ever seen or heard from on the show ever again, so it's probably not a big deal, right? Piper makes a crack about how they'll only be able to terrorize their nursing home in fifty years, but maybe do more than just blindly hope menopause cures lycanthropy?

Blaming periods and the moon on women's behavior is such classic sexism; it's vintage Salem witch trial, 1600s sexism, which is why it's wild that three women wrote this episode. Three adult women were willing to attach themselves to the Charmed period werewolf episode, and they are all still working in Hollywood today. The best line in this episode was "Arrrrgggghhh," and they still have careers. In a way, I think that makes this the most inspiring episode of television I've ever seen.

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