Loveday Writing

Morality Bites premise:

After Phoebe has a premonition of being executed ten years in the future, the sisters travel to the future to find out why she is being executed and change her fate.

The Ripple Effect:

On the Charmed Wikia page, this episode is described as a prime example of the Domino Effect as “the sisters used their magic for petty vengeance, which in turn causes Phoebe’s death.”

While that is a valid point, there are other Domino Effects taking place in the episode. Therefore I feel that this episode was a prime example of the Ripple Effect as opposed to the Domino Effect.

The Ripple Effect has been described on Wikipedia as an effect that occurs “when an initial disturbance to a system propagates outward to disturb an increasingly larger portion of the system, like ripples expanding across the water when an object is dropped into it.”

This analysis will explore how the Ripple Effect is present throughout the episode based on one seemingly innocent choice the sisters make in regards to using their magic on another person, based on their personal morality.

Pebble in the water:

The episode kicks off with Piper telling Prue and Phoebe that she stepped in dog poo left on the Manor’s front steps by an inconsiderate neighbour, who has been letting his dog go to the toilet on their front steps on a regular basis. When they hear the dog barking, and see the dog and their neighbour standing by the front steps, Phoebe encourages Prue and Piper to use their powers to teach the neighbour a lesson, which they do. Afterwards, Phoebe sits down on the couch and channel surfs until she finds the news, where the newscaster is reporting on a baseball player named Cal Greene. This triggers a premonition of her being executed ten years in the future.

While it would be easy to assume that Phoebe’s premonition or Piper freezing the inconsiderate neighbour, then Prue telekinetically moving the dog poo under the neighbour’s shoe is the pebble, I realised that the pebble in the water is actually Phoebe encouraging her sisters to use their powers to teach the neighbour a lesson.

While Prue and Piper are initially reluctant to use their powers to teach their neighbour a lesson on why he shouldn’t let his dog poo in front of the Manor, Phoebe goes to a lot of effort to convince them why they should, and is ultimately successful. Moments after Prue and Piper act on Phoebe’s encouragement, she gets the premonition about her execution, which leads to the sisters travelling to the future and discovering the various ripple effects that their choice, based on Phoebe’s encouragement, has caused.

“If I die tonight my tombstone will read ‘Here lies Prue, she worked hard’” – The ripple effect on Prue’s life:

After the sisters arrive in the future in their future bodies (rather than observing their future selves from the sidelines like they thought, due to their previous time travel experience when they travelled to the past and saw themselves as children), Prue arrives at the Manor via limo, where Piper is outside after seeing her daughter, Melinda, off to school. Prue gets out of the limo with long blonde hair and an entourage fussing over her. She informs Piper that she woke up at Bucklands, which she now owns.

After realising that they have arrived in the future hours and not weeks before Phoebe’s execution, Prue and Piper go to the attic to look in the Book of Shadows for answers, only to find that the Book is gone. Prue panics, which leads to her using her powers, which have grown to the point that she can destroy an entire room with a wave of her hand. In the mess, Piper finds the key to Prue’s wall safe at Bucklands and deduces that the Book must be there.

When Prue and Piper go to Bucklands, a group of employees surround them trying to get Prue’s attention. Prue’s personal assistant, Anne, walks in and tells the employees Prue will meet with them later and takes Prue to her office (forgetting Piper). When Piper walks into the office, it’s revealed that Anne doesn’t know who Piper is. Anne also informs Prue that she never married due to becoming a workaholic, and has become a ruthless business woman who fires employees without a second thought. After Prue has Anne leave her office, she laments to Piper about how her life has turned out and asks what has happened to her. As they don’t know their future selves, Piper can’t give her an answer.

Later, after Piper decides that she can’t bind Melinda’s powers, Prue tells her that she has realised that if they die today she has no-one to say goodbye to, due to her workaholism.

When the sisters return to the present, Prue informs Piper and Phoebe that she won’t be going into the office that evening to work, she has decided to spend time with them to avoid becoming the ruthless and lonely workaholic that she saw in the future.

While there was no mention of Prue having to go to work in the present day, prior to Phoebe’s premonition, Prue’s workaholism has been addressed in previous episodes and was even used against her by a demon in the season one episode, Dream Sorcerer.

This episode shows Prue the ripple effect of her workaholism over a decade, which leads to her making more of an effort to balance her work and personal lives.

“Were we happy? Just for a little while were we happy?”  – The ripple effect on Piper’s life:

Shortly after Phoebe receives the premonition of her future execution, Leo comes to see Piper to let her know that he has the day to spend time with her, as the Elders have assigned him to work in the evening. However Piper tells him she can’t due to Phoebe’s premonition (although she doesn’t really provide him with many details on the situation) and the Elders call Leo away at that same moment. Leo then orbs into the attic to open the Book of Shadows to the page where the time travel spell is that the sisters need to cast to travel to the future.

After the spell is cast, Piper wakes up in her future body on the couch in the Manor. She wakes up to hear a young girl yelling out to her, calling her ‘mommy’. The young girl gets herself ready for school, when another mother arrives to take her to school. The mother informs Piper that she will take her daughter to her ex-husband’s house later like she asked. As her daughter is walking out, she whispers to Piper that she won’t use her magic again like she promised. Shortly after her daughter leaves, Prue arrives, and they watch a news report of Phoebe’s impending execution, which reveals that they have arrived only hours not weeks before, as intended.

Later, when she and Prue are on their way to Bucklands to find the Book of Shadows, Piper instinctively freezes someone who is about to spill their coffee on another person, only to find her powers have grown to the point where she can freeze an entire outdoor area. Leo confronts Piper, reprimanding her for using her powers in public. During the confrontation, Leo reveals that he is her ex-husband, father of their daughter, Melinda, and that they agreed not to use magic again for her sake. When a woman enters the scene and sees everything and everyone is frozen, she cries out “witch”, pointing at them. Leo tells them to run away before the witch hunters find them.

Later, Leo takes Prue and Piper to a hideout to show them the amount of people that have had to hide there as a result of being falsely accused as witches, due to Phoebe’s exposure. He also informs them that Phoebe killed Cal Greene, after he killed a friend of hers and was released from prison on a technicality. By murdering Greene, Phoebe crossed the line from protecting the innocent to punishing the guilty. Leo provides them this information after Piper finally convinces him that they are from the past and have no memories of the last decade, by passionately kissing him “like she used to”.

Later, Piper goes to Leo’s house to bind Melinda’s powers as part of their future selves’ plan to free Phoebe. When Piper looks through a window and sees innocent Melinda playing, Leo orbs in behind her, and calls her out on her inability to go through with casting the binding spell. He tells her that she doesn’t have to go through with it as they agreed he’d take care of her. Piper then asks Leo about their relationship and if they were happy. He doesn’t provide too many details – informing her that he didn’t clip his wings on her request, and their relationship ended up failing due to the nature of their magical obligations, but they were very happy for a while. Piper then walks away, not having bound Melinda’s powers.

At the end of the episode, when the sisters have returned to the present, Leo comes back to the Manor and Piper tells him that she still wants to make their relationship work, despite the magical obstacles.

This episode shows Piper the ripple effect of the obstacles magic have thrown in hers and Leo’s relationship over a decade. Despite being aware of the possibility of the relationship failing, she still wants to make it work.

“What did I do, premonition the man to death?” – The ripple effect on Phoebe’s life:

This episode revolves around Phoebe and the crime she commits in the future. As Prue and Piper have arrived in their future bodies, she has also arrived in hers, which is in a prison cell.

District Attorney, Nathaniel Pratt, who discovered and outed Phoebe as a witch six months earlier, visits her in prison. He informs her that she murdered a man, she will be burned for it, and he is on a mission to wipe out witches.

Later, Leo visits Phoebe in her prison cell and informs her that she needs to face the consequences of crossing the line from protecting the innocent to punishing the guilty, so the persecution of witches can end. However Phoebe still refuses to believe that she killed someone as her premonition power is passive. Leo then gives her a newspaper clipping of Greene’s body being found, which triggers another premonition, this time showing Phoebe killing Greene, using an electricity-based power she has acquired at some point over the decade.

 “The wrong thing done for the right reason is still the wrong thing” – The ripple effect fading and lessons learnt:

While flipping through the Book of Shadows to think of another way to get back to the present, Prue finds that certain pages of the Book are marked and some have potion pouches attached, along with a map of the prison. Prue and Piper realise that their future selves had a plan to break Phoebe out and flee.

Prue and Piper follow through with the plan, against Leo’s advice, and find Phoebe moments before she is about to burn. However Phoebe tells her sisters that she has accepted her fate. Prue and Piper try to talk her out of it, arguing that Greene deserved what he got, but Phoebe points out that doing the wrong thing for the right reason is still the wrong thing. Prue offers to kill Pratt, but Phoebe stops her and begs her not to become another murderer. Prue and Piper concede and Phoebe is executed.

Prue and Piper then find themselves back in the present, unsure of how they got there and frantically call out for Phoebe. Phoebe walks into the room and they embrace. When they question where they are in time, Piper turns on the TV and the news report of Cal Greene plays again – they are right back where they started. When they question why the Elders brought them back to this point in time and not the day when Phoebe killed Cal Greene, they hear the neighbour’s dog barking again.

Prue and Piper plan on teaching their inconsiderate neighbour a lesson again, only for Phoebe to point out that they haven’t learnt their own lesson. She believes they were sent back to this moment as it was the first time they used their magic for revenge. Piper tells her this act is harmless, however Phoebe points out that once they break the small rules, it’s only a matter of time before the big rules are next. Prue looks out the window again to find that the inconsiderate neighbour is Nathaniel Pratt. The sisters then realise that their choice to use magic to teach him a lesson may have led him to believe they are witches and seek out his own revenge. Now that they have chosen not to get their revenge, he won’t seek out his own.

Final thoughts:

One feature to note about this episode is that it didn’t contain demons, warlocks or any other supernatural evil. Rather than battling a demon or other evil being, the sisters were ultimately having a moral battle within themselves. Prue ultimately sums up the lesson they learnt at the end of the episode by telling her sisters that they can still make the good things  they saw in the future happen by making the right choices in the present.

This episode perfectly executed the ripple effect by showing multiple types of the ripple effect on each sister in a personal, moral and supernatural way, and by showing that choices have consequences that can last for years, with major but also unknown impacts.