I will go into a lot more detail about Charmed Season Nine in future posts, but right now I want to talk about the new powers of the Halliwell sisters. Piper, Phoebe and Paige have all received new abilities this season, giving them even more magic to explore individually and more chances to use their personal magic in unison.
The first sister to develop a new power this season is Paige. Paige's primary power is moving things with the mind. Because she is part witch, part whitelighter, she does this incorporating the whitelighter power to orb. Paige has more powers than Piper and Phoebe combined, however up until this season, she's only had one power from her witch side. This is something I was always well aware of and not so keen on with Paige. She developed her telekinesis (or telekinetic orbing to be specific) at the start, but then went on to discover more and more of her whitelighter abilities. The last power we saw Paige develop in the show was her power to heal; a power that she had channeled when with other whitelighters previously, but never used solo. This was a big deal and a huge moment for her relationship with would-be spouse Henry. However I was very pleased that Paul finally recognised that Paige needed a new witch ability. In season 9, Paige's telekinetic abilities advance and allow her to create an "Orb Shield", the orbs are incorporated the same way as with her telekinesis. Now Paige can generate spheres of orbs and telekinetic energy around her to repel attacks and demons as well as protect or contain things. This power development reminded me a lot of Jean Grey from "X-men". Jean is another telekinetic character who is able to focus her power into forcefields. Many people have also likened this to Wyatt's shield and that does make a lot of sense, since Wyatt is another hybrid with telekinetic powers. It's good to see Paige with more focused telekinetic abilities. It's also cool to see her throwing more bad guys with her powers and getting her power on much more in general.
Next is my favourite sister, Piper. Long overdue for a new power. I know, I know, her explosion power makes her much more powerful in a fight and gets used a lot more, but I was still happy to see some new developments for her. Piper's powers seem to develop more with what is going on in her life at the time; not that her sisters' powers don't do the same, but it seems more clear with Piper. She starts off as the panicky, awkward middle sister, who freezes the room when things get too much to handle. Then she becomes much stronger; taking on the Elders in order to marry, much more willing to fight for her happiness and gets the offensive power to cause explosions. In season 9, Piper is finally starting to get her life in order, finally opening up her restaurant and achieving her dream; so it made sense for her to get a greater control of her power. Piper's magic works by manipulating the speed of molecules: slow them down to freeze, speed them up for an explosion. Piper's latest power is a more controlled aspect of the latter. Piper reveals this ability, melting the street that the Source stands on. People weren't too sure about the power at first, under the impression that that was all it could do, melt things, however it was soon shown to do a lot more. By speeding up molecules without an explosion, Piper can melt things, set fires, heat things in general and at one point even moves Paige's shield by speeding up the air molecules. This was a very smart move in my opinion. Paige's power gets more defensive and Phoebe's gets more offensive, but with freezing and exploding, Piper already had it pretty good both ways; so making her power more versatile made much more sense to me. Fans have named this power "Molecular Acceleration".
Finally, we have Phoebe Halliwell. We knew the power that Phoebe would be getting, or...we knew what it looked like at least, since it was shown in the season 2 episode "Morality Bites". Phoebe had recently just got back her Levitation and Empathy, having only regained her Premonition before this. Watch "Crimes and Witch Demeanors" in season 6 to see why Phoebe had such a lack of power up until then, I won't get into it right now, but it was a greatly flawed and frustrating story line in my opinion. Anyway, in Morality Bites, we saw Phoebe stand behind a man and generate what looked like some kind of electrical energy from the palms of her hands that shot into either side of her victims head. People had came up with Electro-Mental Ignition, based on Phoebe's line "What did I do, Premontion the man to death?". The idea was that Phoebe overloaded a person's brain with visions of the worst parts of their life (past and future). However it turned out to be an advanced stage of her Empathy, which allowed her to reflect his emotions back onto him (anger in this case) as well as making him feel the emotions of his victims. So people were right about the "brain overloading" part, but Phoebe does it with emotions rather than visions. It is also important to bare in mind that Phoebe must channel the emotions before she projects them back (it is an Empathy extension after all) so she could be overwhelmed if she tries to take on too much, as we saw in The Charmed Offensive. I call this power Empathic Projection . Others have called it 'Pathokinesis' or simply 'Advanced Empathy'. It's good to see Phoebe's power get more offensive. Her empathy always gave her the potential to be an incredibly powerful witch and we can really see that coming through in season 9. I'm sure we all hope to see more of that in the future.
So that is what I think of the latest powers in Charmed. It seems like we will see much more of these abilities in the future and I for one am very much looking forward to it.
Blessed be x
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