TV Show Analysis – Charmed & Neutrality: Why neutral beings in Charmed fail (The Cleaners)
Charmed (the original series) revolved around three powerful, sister-witches known as the Charmed Ones who use their powers to fight against evil. In fact, Charmed as a whole is about the ongoing cosmic fight between Good and Evil.
However life and magic are not completely black and white, there are shades of grey, including in Charmed, in the form of neutrality, specifically neutral beings.
Definition of Good and Evil according to Charmed:
According to the Charmed Wiki website, Good and Evil is a set affiliation, as if they are political parties of the supernatural world, not a matter of perception or a label for a particular pattern of behaviour. Each side has a hierarchy, agents and an agenda.
Definition of Neutrality according to Charmed:
According to the Charmed Wiki website, neutral beings are “not aligned with either Good or Evil, and do not participate in the eternal struggle between them. Instead they perform other functions in maintaining the Grand Design, or are free to pursue their own agendas.” The website also stated that it should be noted that neutrality is not an affiliation; it only indicates a lack of affiliation with Good or Evil.
This definition perfectly sums up neutral beings, why they exist, and why they are needed in the Charmed universe. This four-part analysis will look at three types of neutral beings: the Angel of Death, the Cleaners, and the Avatars. This part will look at the Cleaners.
The Cleaners
The Cleaners in Forget Me…Not:
The Cleaners make their first appearance in the season six episode, Forget Me…Not.
Interestingly, this is one of few episodes to begin in media res (in the middle). The episode kicks off with the sisters orbing to the Manor on the run, desperately trying to figure out what to do in a so far unidentified situation and saying that they “can’t let them take Wyatt.” Two male figures in white suits materialise in front of them. Piper begs them not to take Wyatt and promises not to let it happen again, but they take Wyatt anyway and tells them they won’t remember anything and erase the sisters’ memories and items connected to Wyatt.
The next day the sisters are starting their day as normal, although there are subtle hints that something is amiss. Piper is hearing a baby cry and is unintentionally making Phoebe’s breakfast the same way one would make breakfast for a child, something unknown to her until Phoebe points this out to her. Paige notices a blouse of hers has a coffee stain on it and doesn’t know how it got there, and Phoebe gets an angry phone call from her boss, Elise.
When Paige goes to work she discovers a workmate of hers, Flo, has been fired because she refused to give into their boss’ sexual harassment. Paige tells Flo she would have helped her if she had asked, and Flo tells her she did ask for her help yesterday. Meanwhile when Phoebe gets to work, she finds The Bay Mirror office in shambles and her workmates with various injuries staring down at her. When she goes into Elise’s office, Elise reprimands her and asks her what came over her yesterday. Phoebe genuinely can’t remember nor answer her question, so when Elise grabs her by the shoulders in frustration, Phoebe has a premonition of her participating in a brawl in the office. She pretends to be sick and leaves. Meanwhile, Piper is going about her day and assists a dad struggling with holding diapers and his crying baby. She picks up his diapers for him and gives him advice on how to calm down his baby, he then remarks she must be a terrific mother to know how to calm a baby and she says she doesn’t have kids. Leo visits her and tells her that he has also been hearing a baby crying.
The sisters eventually meet up and talk about the fact that they also experienced important events yesterday that they can’t remember and that something demonic or magical is behind it. They cast a spell to “fill in the blanks”, which ends up rewinding the day, which leads to Wyatt coming back and Piper discovering that she is in fact a mother.
To explore the issues further, Paige suggests that they live out the day to figure out what happened and why their memories of the day and Wyatt were erased. Piper leaves Wyatt in front of the TV watching a children’s show, although he changes the channel to a dragons show, which leads to him conjuring a dragon out of the show and into the real world. Phoebe goes to work and finds out that she was the one that started the brawl as she was channeling a workmate’s anger towards Elise through her empathy power and punched Elise, which led to a domino effect of her workmates fighting each other. When Paige goes to work, she offers to help Flo and a workmate of hers sees the dragon flying across the city, running into Paige and spilling his coffee on her in shock. Her workmate tells her about the dragon. Paige then orbs to Phoebe’s office to tell her about it and orbs her away from the brawl. Meanwhile Wyatt orbs Piper to a tunnel, revealing the dragon’s existence to her.
When the sisters reunite at the Manor and discuss the issue, the two male figures in white suits materialise in the Manor and introduce themselves to the sisters and the audience as the Cleaners.
The Cleaners explain they are neutral beings whose job is to cover up magic when it’s exposed through any means necessary. When Piper realises this means taking Wyatt and making the sisters forget about him, she tries to blow them up to no avail. The Cleaners give the sisters a chance to clean up the mess and leave. Moments after they leave, Phoebe tells them they have an advantage as they know they are reliving the same day and the Cleaners clearly don’t.
After telling Leo about the dragon and Phoebe feels the pain of innocents being attacked by the dragon in the city, the sisters orb to where the dragon is and Paige telekinetically orbs a scale off of it to make a vanquishing potion, but Piper comes up with another idea. Piper yells out to the dragon to come after her so Wyatt can vanquish it and he does. However the Cleaners show up moments later and tell them that they didn’t get rid of the exposure risk and that they are going to take Wyatt. Paige says they can’t and orbs them out. The scene from the beginning of the episode replays, with the Cleaners taking Wyatt with one difference – the sisters remember everything that happened.
To get Wyatt back, Piper comes up with the solution to draw the Cleaners out by exposing magic on live television. This plan succeeds with the Cleaners coming to them and the sisters threaten to continue exposing magic until Wyatt is returned. The Cleaners threaten to get rid of the sisters but Piper points out they can’t as it would tip the balance of power in Evil’s favour, which isn’t being neutral. The Cleaners agree to return Wyatt to them.
The Cleaners in Crimes and Witch-Demeanors:
The Cleaners appear again in another season six episode, Crimes and Witch-Demeanors.
At the start of the episode, Phoebe and Paige are following up on a premonition Phoebe had about a robbery. Darryl shoots the robber and Phoebe throws a potion, which reveals that the robber was possessed by a phantasm. Paige raises a wand to trap the phantasm. Phoebe and Paige leave the scene, Paige noticing a car that wasn’t in the street before, and unbeknownst to them, Inspector Sheridan is in the car and has been recording them the entire time.
The next day, Sheila comes to the Manor crying and tells Phoebe and Paige that Darryl has been arrested for the murder of the robber. When Phoebe and Paige meet up with Darryl, he tells them that he doesn’t remember the robber shooting at him. His attorney shows them Inspector Sheridan’s tape, however the events shown are not the events that played out the night before. The sisters confront Sheridan, but she denies faking the tape.
Phoebe and Paige orb to a crowded marketplace, clearly intent on exposing magic, so the Cleaners will come to them. The Cleaners admit to faking the robbery scene and Phoebe tells them that they thought they resolved things the last time they tried to intervene and that they clean up their own messes. The Cleaners point out that they didn’t know about this mess, Paige says they would have fixed things somehow, and Phoebe threatens to keep exposing magic, but the Cleaners tell them they are under strict orders from the Tribunal not to negotiate with them.
Leo and Gideon explain that the Tribunal are Council made up of Good and Evil beings that monitor the use of magic, so that magic isn’t exposed, and influences but doesn’t take over free will. Gideon takes the sisters to the Tribunal to plead Darryl’s case and a court session ensues, where time is accelerated and Darryl only has 24 hours until his execution.
I won’t go into all the details of the court session, at one point Barbas (the Demon of Fear and opposing council) summons one of the Cleaners as a witness. Barbas asks him about the involvement of law enforcement, specifically Andy, Inspector Davidson, and Agent Jackson, in covering up magic and the results of their involvement. When Barbas makes a remark of how lucky the Charmed ones were to have a demon clean up one magical mess to the Cleaner, the Cleaner refuses to not only agree with Barbas but refuses to answer the question. The Cleaner ends his testimony by saying that there will always be another Sheridan, the exposure risk has to end with Darryl.
It’s eventually revealed that Barbas set the sisters up using phantasms, with one possessing Inspector Sheridan. Chris and Leo prove this by orbing Inspector Sheridan to the Tribunal, showing that she is possessed and this led to her investigating Darryl and the sisters, and the taping at the beginning of the episode. Chris raises a wand to trap the phantasm and Gideon begs the Tribunal to reverse their decision before Darryl is executed. The Tribunal agrees at the last minute, having Darryl wake up at his desk believing it is a nightmare. However, when Darryl hugs Sheila at the police station, he sees one of the Cleaners looking at him. The Cleaner waves at him and disappears, making it clear to Darryl that what happened was indeed real.
How Neutral were the Cleaners?
Overall, I felt that the Cleaners mostly lived up to their neutral status, however less so than the Angel of Death. In their first appearance, they clearly state who they are, their purpose to the sisters, and why they have made the decision to erase Wyatt and their memories of him. However, they were more aggressive in their approach to fulfil their objectives, going as far as to threaten to erase the Charmed ones from existence if they continued to purposely expose magic. The fact that Piper had to remind them that erasing them would tip the balance of power from Good to Evil is not being neutral, and that they were shocked by this reminder, hints that although they are supposed to be neutral, they are not immune to bias or perhaps even human moments when the situation presents itself.
In their second appearance, they reveal to the sisters that they are under orders from the Tribunal, which means they don’t operate entirely independently. The fact that they are under orders from the Tribunal does bring their neutrality into question, as the Tribunal is a Council consisting of Good and Evil beings that may act neutrally but they are not neutral themselves. The fact that the Tribunal and the Cleaners share the same purpose, but the Tribunal outrank the Cleaners raises the question of why the Cleaners are needed in the first place.
In Vaya Con Leos, Paige suggested asking the Cleaners for help when her spell to protect Arthur Casey backfired, however it was revealed that the Cleaners have made it clear that due to their previous interactions with the sisters, they refuse to help them in that current as well as future situations. One could argue that their refusal to help the sisters but no clarification if they would assist any Evil beings means that they are not neutral anymore.
The next part of the Charmed & Neutrality analysis series will be released next week and will focus on the Avatars.
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