still stuck in that old good vs evil morass
i uh ??? watched all of season six of charmed??? ok that's a lie. i decided i wanted to write my ur-fic, which is chris halliwell/wyatt halliwell, because i wanted to title it from my fave mountain goats song up the wolves; have you ever heard anything more about chris and wyatt than 'our mother has been absent, ever since we founded rome'? so i watched chris-crossed and wept. (then i wrote fic.)
i imprinted h a r d on christopher perry/halliwell. c'mon: there's no resisting a boy who travelled back in time from an apocalyptic future to stop his big brother, king arthur's heir, from turning evil and taking over the world. a boy who is then ignored by his family even when he's trying to help, lives in a back room, and basically torments himself for a year straight before eventually biting the bullet and dying in his dad's arms. charmed is a show about three sisters who are witches and save the world and have sisterly bonding and yet here i am, weeping over their one-season wonder, a sullen twenty-two year old with martyr issues.
the weird thing about charmed is how little they did with chris? like, it still baffles me to this day. he is maximal woobie, the entire internet imprinted on him, the episode where he gets dragged back to the future is charmed's highest rated ever, and they killed him off and then brought him back like, one time????? like, i get that drew fuller is a terrible actor but it's not like the standard on that show was high. i shudder to think what would have happened if tumblr had been around for charmed, and by that i mean, chris perry would have his own show. it would be supernatural all over again.
i have pined over this character since two thousand and four. like, what the hell. that's like a junior hockey player, right there, of my love for chris. anyway, i rewatched my fave episode and fell into a pit, so now i am going to tell you about it probably while weeping, because chris is so well designed as me-bait, i imprinted so fucking hard. judging by the amount of 100k+ fanfiction about chris' life, i'm guessing i'm not the only one. like, objectively, this show is bad and this character is ridiculous but give it to me forever.
chris-crossed is chris' centric episode: it's season six, episode ten. up until this point, chris is a sullen, manipulative, workaholic jerk, who kills people, doesn't tell anyone the truth, and constantly admonishes them to tell him the truth. sure, drew fuller is a really good looking twenty-three year old, but chris is still kind of a tool. he's told everyone he's here to save eldest sister piper's baby son wyatt from something that will hurt him, but mostly he's just a pain in the ass. he sleeps in the back room of piper's club and looks irritated constantly.
in this episode, everything changes.
a hot lady (marisol nichols! you're so beautiful marisol nichols, marry me) in very ugly leather stabs her hand into chris' chest and he sort of lies there, limply, staring in horror slash betrayal, and then piper blows her up and asks who the hell that was and he lies to her face!!! NOBLY!!! BECAUSE HE IS MADE OF NOBLE SUFFERING. chris is like, a wooden ball of suffering. he is a perfect woobie. everything about him is designed to make me want to clutch him to my bosom and also keen.
like, this show is fundamentally a show about women and that's great, even though the charmed ones themselves super bore me by this season, but there are a lot of fundamentally feminist aspects of it, as a show, and you can see that in bianca. she's a one-off character but there's so much hinted depth to her. bianca is an assassin witch of the clan name phoenix, because they !!! rose!!! from the ashes of salem!!! they don't take sides between good and evil!!! SHE CHOSE CHRIS IN AN EVIL FUTURE EVEN THOUGH HE'S GOOD AND ALSO USELESS AND PUSHED AROUND BY HIS OLDER BROTHER. he is so concerned that she will turn evil but he doesn't care because he loves her anyway and she in turn loves him so much she was convinced to join the side of good. i love you forever, b.
a lot of shit happens with the sisters trying to figure out what tried to kill chris - assassin witches! bless the phoenix - and then they bitch about not wanting to live with each other anymore and also to get laid, which is fair but also boring. chris tries to distract everyone from his ex(?? does stabbing your fiance through the heart count as a breakup???) fiancee and because he's The Worst they all do it wander off to have sex with a variety of actually cute dudes, good job @ charmed casting crew.
more importantly, bianca, my best girl in her terrible leather, stalks around chris' memories and he proposes to her!!! in a RUINED GARDEN in a HELLSCAPE of future san francisco where they are stalked by flying camera things, because chris' obnoxious older brother slash the ruler of the world wants to know where he is!!! what a nice guy. i mean, obviously, you know, not. the proposal is actually very cute but only because it fits v happily into my fave het trope which is Dangerous Girl Redeemed by the love of a Good Pure Kind Boy. (i mean, chris is a jerk, but compared to like, everyone else? literally perfect. top notch sense of right and wrong.)
they complain about how they have to save the world. they don't complain. they're super noble about it. honestly, their chemistry sucks but i don't care because i love them. they have this dumb plan about how chris is going to go back in the past, because obviously the future is too ruined to save.
(the future is very unconvincingly ruined. there's an intact museum but the golden gate bridge has been sawed in half???? it's really. not well built. BUT IT'S A BAD FUTURE. everybody loves bad futures. by everybody i mean, me. god, i imprinted so hard on this. NOBLE SACRIFICING. CHILDREN FROM THE FUTURE. why is this episode so perfect and yet so poorly made.)
chris and bianca go hide out in a museum to the charmed ones. it's kind of a shitty museum???? everything outside is apparently Chaos And Disaster but everyone in the museum is chill and then probes scan you, dystopically, to figure out if you're a witch. (but if you're a witch with telekinesis you can just gently move the probe out of the way???? thanks, christopher.) bianca kills a demon guard like, no big. chris stares at her in brief horror because he's loser and like he doesn't kill demons all day every day. bless that little hypocrite. (again: bianca is my Dream Girl. she feels bad about killing people! but not super bad about it!!! she could do with her fiance maybe giving her less shit about it since they're trying to save the world and all???) they bang in the basement, as a goodbye. which is gross. their chemistry sucks. but get it, bianca, your boy is very cute in the face.
(sidebar: charmed is so fucking weird about demons. like, sometimes they are totally sentient and interesting people who have good chats with you, other times you just stab them and they die because that's the responsible thing to do??? if i was a demon i'd be like, bro, stop this. i would organize the shit out of a resistance. i mean, also, don't necessarily be evil all the time? but they are sentient and a bunch of them make good decisions, so really the responsible actions from the charmed ones would be rehabilitation of all demons for better integration into a moral lifestyle supported by the rest of existence.
okay i'm done.)
meanwhile, in the present, chris lolls about being injured. everyone continues to hate him. he's SO MISUNDERSTOOD. god it's so good. his parents talk shit about him, his aunts talk shit about him, everyone thinks he's lame. NOBODY UNDERSTANDS THE IMPORTANCE OF HIS MISSION. catnip. catnip. teens love a martyr whose family utterly reject him even though he !!! only!!! wants !!! to!!! save !!! the !!!! future!!!! i fucking adore chris perry. (later on in the season everyone knows who he is and loves him for his sacrifices and it's way less emotionally satisfying, you know? like. give me everyone telling chris he's human garbage while he cries and continues to sacrifice himself. that's the good shit.)
bianca collects him, through a spell about releasing charmed ones' inhibitions. the sisters fuck off to get laid. there's a really good bit with bianca meeting her mother from the past, where she snaps, "when i ask you what it's like to kill, don't lie to me. don't tell me you don't feel a thing." i love her!!! she's so bitter!!! her assassin family suck but it's not like the rest of the world is battering down the door to tell bianca she's the best (she is an assassin witch, okay, fair) so she gets ??? chris. who saves her, ostensibly. (a hundred percent, chris offers bianca an alternate option, and she takes it. but she calls it saving me, and that's fine. sometimes you need to let someone else in.)
give me the show about bianca and chris and LIVING AGAINST EXPECTATIONS. (fanfiction.net loathes bianca, for reasons everyone can see coming. seriously, what the hell??? she's perfect.) chris is the spare to wyatt's heir! he's good at magic but not like, the heir to king arthur good! bianca is a witch assassin who decides to not walk the neutral path anymore! THEY FALL IN LOVE AND FIGHT CRIME!!! (and i guess wyatt can come too.)
eventually bianca is like, "i made a deal with him so he wouldn't send back murderers to kill you" WHICH IS LIKE VERY MUCH ALSO UP MY ALLEY, hello, betraying people you love to save their lives, what a good trope!!!! it's like exes!!! only better because you don't fuck around with both of them hating each other, you know they're in love!!!! but the external circumstances are SO DANGEROUS. chris is obviously unimpressed, which is fair because it's a totally bad plan - they'd be much better off building a bunker and killing whatever assassin wyatt sends back for them, because they're like ??? very competent and have the charmed ones??? - but he lets her strip his powers.
there's an awkward bit where the charmed ones show up and try to stop him, bianca puts a knife to piper's throat and chris Very Obviously is all "if you kill her People Won't Exist In The Future" aka me, i won't, i'll be dead. this show is so stupid. sorry, show.
eventually bianca takes chris through into the future and i like, swear to god, this almost killed ten year old me, i did NOT see it coming, because i was fucking ten. "et tu, chris," says a large evil man with very bad hair who is like, a foot taller than chris and just made of muscle and looks like he could crush chris, and chris says, "hello wyatt" and we cut to commercial and okay, even at 23, i sobbed a little, because KIDS. (sidebar: a thrilling thing about wes ramsey is not his acting, which is poor, but how much less threatening he looks as good wyatt; good wyatt is a dorky weed of a nerd who is an eager puppy about EVERYTHING. wild. side sidebar: when wyatt was first named - from leo's last name, wyatt - my mom and i spent literally half a season cackling about it. we were so unamused.)
in the present the sisters use a creaky floorboard to hide a spell to get chris his powers back. it's a lame plot point that doesn't understand time travel at all, but charmed doesn't understand time travel at all either so i don't care about it. (sorry charmed. i understand that at one point the storylines about the sisters were interesting but you dangled chris before me like attracted wounded bait and i sprung like a hungry cat.)
chris and wyatt have a frankly very lame conversation but i don't care. i literally know all the words to this episode. i taped over my mom's favourite animal show with a rerun of this episode when i was ten; it is up there with the covenant at the centre of my embarrassing fannish heart. (the covenant could also use more "bad guys win and bang the good guys" fic. the bad guy is sebastian stan. get on it, fandom.)
wyatt dismisses his demon bodyguards because his baby brother and his fiancee are no threat to the heir to king arthur slash ruler of the world slash twice blessed. "if anyone else did what you did, i'd kill them on the spot."
chris bitches about wyatt being destined to be good and wyatt, like adult me, rolls his eyes. i'm sure ten year old me had her heart in her mouth and was crying. (seriously, i loved this episode. i printed out transcripts and read them with my best friend. fucking formative media.)
bianca was supposed to turn chris. wyatt is so goddamn pissed at her and chris is furious that wyatt would turn on her!!! their dynamic as a trio is also important to me - bianca the foot soldier, the elite weapon who is redeemed by the black sheep little brother; wyatt, the centre of the universe, who loves chris and is beloved in turn even though they're completely at odds; chris, who doesn't matter at all except for how he does, because he's the most important person in wyatt's world, and wyatt will even forgive bianca, who has BETRAYED HIM, which is the opposite of her one job as cannon fodder, if that means he might get his little brother back.
chris and wyatt have a very embarrassing telekinesis fight which wyatt handily wins because his powers are much, much stronger. wyatt spends a lot of time going "are you fucking stupid" to which the answer is, yes, of course he is, he's a fucking halliwell. wyatt does look very much like he'd happily kill chris, which is sort of unfair, but i definitely believe that once he super injured chris wyatt would be down with healing chris and then angrily convincing him to come back to the fold.
again: formative. BROTHER VS BROTHER. one on the side of good! one on the side of evil!!! (wyatt: "i've surpassed good and evil." bullshit, buddy, san francisco is in ruins and it's your fault. you're definitely not a nice person.) loving someone so much you can't bear to see them do harm! but it's your family so you're responsible for them! bless.
eventually bianca sticks her hand in wyatt's back, which stripped chris' powers but wyatt is a bad ass so it just sort of temporarily immobilizes him while chris digs out a spell to get his powers back. (power of the witches rise / come to me from across the skies / restore my powers, give me back / all that was taken from the attack. yeah, i did that from memory. yeah, i was ten. shut up.) wyatt gets back control and chucks bianca onto a broken table leg; chris loses his shit and briefly manages to knock wyatt into some wood where he lies. then chris goes to bianca and she laughs at him, this really sweet sad "i'm dying and i love you" laugh, and gives him back her engagement ring and tells him she hopes they'll be together again. I CRY BROKEN TEARS. LET'S JUST BE HORRIBLE TO CHRIS FOREVER. WHY WOULD HE WANT ANYTHING GOOD EVER. in retrospect i realize this was fridging and am incensed about it. god, fuck the writers.
(also, bianca was the shit??? would it have killed them to have wyatt heal her and send her back against chris again??? no it would not it would have been GREAT thank you very much.)
chris bails on the future to go back to the past, taking the spell to get back with him (this is dumb because wyatt is the one who developed a two-way version of it AND ALSO IT'S A RHYME, wyatt could absolutely make his own!!!!); wyatt throws an energy ball at him looking greasy and furious; when chris gets back to the present nobody is nice to him though they are less outright mean. it is so good because chris suffers and refuses to disclose his reasons for being distressed. SUFFER NOBLY IN SILENCE AS YOU ARE RIPPED APART, SWEETHEART. then chris tells baby wyatt that if he cannot save him he will stop him. it is beautiful. BEAUTIFUL.
the thing that gets me is that so many cool things were set up here!!! wyatt trying to undo chris' actions in the past, the existence of the phoenix as morality-neutral assassin witches, THE BAD FUTURE as poorly-established as it is. (in a later episode leo is all, "we gotta send chris back to the future" which is great for his persecution complex. like, they totally could have!!! and then made the sisters go there to get him back when they felt guilty!!! it would be GREAT.) bianca herself. wyatt himself! WHY DIDN'T EVIL WYATT COME BACK AND AS CHRIS DIED TURN GOOD BEFORE HIS EYES BECAUSE CHRIS HAD SUCCEEDED. the temptation for chris to just give up and live in wyatt's future, where he'll be safe even if nobody else will.
what did we get? chris turning into a spider and complaining his dad never loved him, and phoebe on a vision quest. god, this show. so goddamn useless.
still!!! it is EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER LOVED. this was probably my first real Bad Future story; i think chris was probably my first Hella Persecuted Martyr. he's so goddamn sad. he's the kind of sad that's so, so good. there are even exes!!! what a good trope fest. why wasn't tumblr around for this episode of television???? if tumblr had been around, i bet i would be watching the charmed sons on tv and laughing about how shit it was.
ANYWAY I CARE A LOT. the fic of my heart is chris and wyatt in the evil future but honestly it is all dissatisfying. there is so much potential good fic! wyatt loving chris, chris loving wyatt; wyatt coming back to stop chris; bianca coming back to help chris; chris and wyatt remembering their bad future selves in the good future. a NOVEL about bianca.
god, how do i still have so many feelings? this episode aired in TWO THOUSAND AND THREE. i guess you never forget your first.
i imprinted h a r d on christopher perry/halliwell. c'mon: there's no resisting a boy who travelled back in time from an apocalyptic future to stop his big brother, king arthur's heir, from turning evil and taking over the world. a boy who is then ignored by his family even when he's trying to help, lives in a back room, and basically torments himself for a year straight before eventually biting the bullet and dying in his dad's arms. charmed is a show about three sisters who are witches and save the world and have sisterly bonding and yet here i am, weeping over their one-season wonder, a sullen twenty-two year old with martyr issues.
the weird thing about charmed is how little they did with chris? like, it still baffles me to this day. he is maximal woobie, the entire internet imprinted on him, the episode where he gets dragged back to the future is charmed's highest rated ever, and they killed him off and then brought him back like, one time????? like, i get that drew fuller is a terrible actor but it's not like the standard on that show was high. i shudder to think what would have happened if tumblr had been around for charmed, and by that i mean, chris perry would have his own show. it would be supernatural all over again.
i have pined over this character since two thousand and four. like, what the hell. that's like a junior hockey player, right there, of my love for chris. anyway, i rewatched my fave episode and fell into a pit, so now i am going to tell you about it probably while weeping, because chris is so well designed as me-bait, i imprinted so fucking hard. judging by the amount of 100k+ fanfiction about chris' life, i'm guessing i'm not the only one. like, objectively, this show is bad and this character is ridiculous but give it to me forever.
chris-crossed is chris' centric episode: it's season six, episode ten. up until this point, chris is a sullen, manipulative, workaholic jerk, who kills people, doesn't tell anyone the truth, and constantly admonishes them to tell him the truth. sure, drew fuller is a really good looking twenty-three year old, but chris is still kind of a tool. he's told everyone he's here to save eldest sister piper's baby son wyatt from something that will hurt him, but mostly he's just a pain in the ass. he sleeps in the back room of piper's club and looks irritated constantly.
in this episode, everything changes.
a hot lady (marisol nichols! you're so beautiful marisol nichols, marry me) in very ugly leather stabs her hand into chris' chest and he sort of lies there, limply, staring in horror slash betrayal, and then piper blows her up and asks who the hell that was and he lies to her face!!! NOBLY!!! BECAUSE HE IS MADE OF NOBLE SUFFERING. chris is like, a wooden ball of suffering. he is a perfect woobie. everything about him is designed to make me want to clutch him to my bosom and also keen.
like, this show is fundamentally a show about women and that's great, even though the charmed ones themselves super bore me by this season, but there are a lot of fundamentally feminist aspects of it, as a show, and you can see that in bianca. she's a one-off character but there's so much hinted depth to her. bianca is an assassin witch of the clan name phoenix, because they !!! rose!!! from the ashes of salem!!! they don't take sides between good and evil!!! SHE CHOSE CHRIS IN AN EVIL FUTURE EVEN THOUGH HE'S GOOD AND ALSO USELESS AND PUSHED AROUND BY HIS OLDER BROTHER. he is so concerned that she will turn evil but he doesn't care because he loves her anyway and she in turn loves him so much she was convinced to join the side of good. i love you forever, b.
a lot of shit happens with the sisters trying to figure out what tried to kill chris - assassin witches! bless the phoenix - and then they bitch about not wanting to live with each other anymore and also to get laid, which is fair but also boring. chris tries to distract everyone from his ex(?? does stabbing your fiance through the heart count as a breakup???) fiancee and because he's The Worst they all do it wander off to have sex with a variety of actually cute dudes, good job @ charmed casting crew.
more importantly, bianca, my best girl in her terrible leather, stalks around chris' memories and he proposes to her!!! in a RUINED GARDEN in a HELLSCAPE of future san francisco where they are stalked by flying camera things, because chris' obnoxious older brother slash the ruler of the world wants to know where he is!!! what a nice guy. i mean, obviously, you know, not. the proposal is actually very cute but only because it fits v happily into my fave het trope which is Dangerous Girl Redeemed by the love of a Good Pure Kind Boy. (i mean, chris is a jerk, but compared to like, everyone else? literally perfect. top notch sense of right and wrong.)
they complain about how they have to save the world. they don't complain. they're super noble about it. honestly, their chemistry sucks but i don't care because i love them. they have this dumb plan about how chris is going to go back in the past, because obviously the future is too ruined to save.
(the future is very unconvincingly ruined. there's an intact museum but the golden gate bridge has been sawed in half???? it's really. not well built. BUT IT'S A BAD FUTURE. everybody loves bad futures. by everybody i mean, me. god, i imprinted so hard on this. NOBLE SACRIFICING. CHILDREN FROM THE FUTURE. why is this episode so perfect and yet so poorly made.)
chris and bianca go hide out in a museum to the charmed ones. it's kind of a shitty museum???? everything outside is apparently Chaos And Disaster but everyone in the museum is chill and then probes scan you, dystopically, to figure out if you're a witch. (but if you're a witch with telekinesis you can just gently move the probe out of the way???? thanks, christopher.) bianca kills a demon guard like, no big. chris stares at her in brief horror because he's loser and like he doesn't kill demons all day every day. bless that little hypocrite. (again: bianca is my Dream Girl. she feels bad about killing people! but not super bad about it!!! she could do with her fiance maybe giving her less shit about it since they're trying to save the world and all???) they bang in the basement, as a goodbye. which is gross. their chemistry sucks. but get it, bianca, your boy is very cute in the face.
(sidebar: charmed is so fucking weird about demons. like, sometimes they are totally sentient and interesting people who have good chats with you, other times you just stab them and they die because that's the responsible thing to do??? if i was a demon i'd be like, bro, stop this. i would organize the shit out of a resistance. i mean, also, don't necessarily be evil all the time? but they are sentient and a bunch of them make good decisions, so really the responsible actions from the charmed ones would be rehabilitation of all demons for better integration into a moral lifestyle supported by the rest of existence.
okay i'm done.)
meanwhile, in the present, chris lolls about being injured. everyone continues to hate him. he's SO MISUNDERSTOOD. god it's so good. his parents talk shit about him, his aunts talk shit about him, everyone thinks he's lame. NOBODY UNDERSTANDS THE IMPORTANCE OF HIS MISSION. catnip. catnip. teens love a martyr whose family utterly reject him even though he !!! only!!! wants !!! to!!! save !!! the !!!! future!!!! i fucking adore chris perry. (later on in the season everyone knows who he is and loves him for his sacrifices and it's way less emotionally satisfying, you know? like. give me everyone telling chris he's human garbage while he cries and continues to sacrifice himself. that's the good shit.)
bianca collects him, through a spell about releasing charmed ones' inhibitions. the sisters fuck off to get laid. there's a really good bit with bianca meeting her mother from the past, where she snaps, "when i ask you what it's like to kill, don't lie to me. don't tell me you don't feel a thing." i love her!!! she's so bitter!!! her assassin family suck but it's not like the rest of the world is battering down the door to tell bianca she's the best (she is an assassin witch, okay, fair) so she gets ??? chris. who saves her, ostensibly. (a hundred percent, chris offers bianca an alternate option, and she takes it. but she calls it saving me, and that's fine. sometimes you need to let someone else in.)
give me the show about bianca and chris and LIVING AGAINST EXPECTATIONS. (fanfiction.net loathes bianca, for reasons everyone can see coming. seriously, what the hell??? she's perfect.) chris is the spare to wyatt's heir! he's good at magic but not like, the heir to king arthur good! bianca is a witch assassin who decides to not walk the neutral path anymore! THEY FALL IN LOVE AND FIGHT CRIME!!! (and i guess wyatt can come too.)
eventually bianca is like, "i made a deal with him so he wouldn't send back murderers to kill you" WHICH IS LIKE VERY MUCH ALSO UP MY ALLEY, hello, betraying people you love to save their lives, what a good trope!!!! it's like exes!!! only better because you don't fuck around with both of them hating each other, you know they're in love!!!! but the external circumstances are SO DANGEROUS. chris is obviously unimpressed, which is fair because it's a totally bad plan - they'd be much better off building a bunker and killing whatever assassin wyatt sends back for them, because they're like ??? very competent and have the charmed ones??? - but he lets her strip his powers.
there's an awkward bit where the charmed ones show up and try to stop him, bianca puts a knife to piper's throat and chris Very Obviously is all "if you kill her People Won't Exist In The Future" aka me, i won't, i'll be dead. this show is so stupid. sorry, show.
eventually bianca takes chris through into the future and i like, swear to god, this almost killed ten year old me, i did NOT see it coming, because i was fucking ten. "et tu, chris," says a large evil man with very bad hair who is like, a foot taller than chris and just made of muscle and looks like he could crush chris, and chris says, "hello wyatt" and we cut to commercial and okay, even at 23, i sobbed a little, because KIDS. (sidebar: a thrilling thing about wes ramsey is not his acting, which is poor, but how much less threatening he looks as good wyatt; good wyatt is a dorky weed of a nerd who is an eager puppy about EVERYTHING. wild. side sidebar: when wyatt was first named - from leo's last name, wyatt - my mom and i spent literally half a season cackling about it. we were so unamused.)
in the present the sisters use a creaky floorboard to hide a spell to get chris his powers back. it's a lame plot point that doesn't understand time travel at all, but charmed doesn't understand time travel at all either so i don't care about it. (sorry charmed. i understand that at one point the storylines about the sisters were interesting but you dangled chris before me like attracted wounded bait and i sprung like a hungry cat.)
chris and wyatt have a frankly very lame conversation but i don't care. i literally know all the words to this episode. i taped over my mom's favourite animal show with a rerun of this episode when i was ten; it is up there with the covenant at the centre of my embarrassing fannish heart. (the covenant could also use more "bad guys win and bang the good guys" fic. the bad guy is sebastian stan. get on it, fandom.)
wyatt dismisses his demon bodyguards because his baby brother and his fiancee are no threat to the heir to king arthur slash ruler of the world slash twice blessed. "if anyone else did what you did, i'd kill them on the spot."
chris bitches about wyatt being destined to be good and wyatt, like adult me, rolls his eyes. i'm sure ten year old me had her heart in her mouth and was crying. (seriously, i loved this episode. i printed out transcripts and read them with my best friend. fucking formative media.)
bianca was supposed to turn chris. wyatt is so goddamn pissed at her and chris is furious that wyatt would turn on her!!! their dynamic as a trio is also important to me - bianca the foot soldier, the elite weapon who is redeemed by the black sheep little brother; wyatt, the centre of the universe, who loves chris and is beloved in turn even though they're completely at odds; chris, who doesn't matter at all except for how he does, because he's the most important person in wyatt's world, and wyatt will even forgive bianca, who has BETRAYED HIM, which is the opposite of her one job as cannon fodder, if that means he might get his little brother back.
chris and wyatt have a very embarrassing telekinesis fight which wyatt handily wins because his powers are much, much stronger. wyatt spends a lot of time going "are you fucking stupid" to which the answer is, yes, of course he is, he's a fucking halliwell. wyatt does look very much like he'd happily kill chris, which is sort of unfair, but i definitely believe that once he super injured chris wyatt would be down with healing chris and then angrily convincing him to come back to the fold.
again: formative. BROTHER VS BROTHER. one on the side of good! one on the side of evil!!! (wyatt: "i've surpassed good and evil." bullshit, buddy, san francisco is in ruins and it's your fault. you're definitely not a nice person.) loving someone so much you can't bear to see them do harm! but it's your family so you're responsible for them! bless.
eventually bianca sticks her hand in wyatt's back, which stripped chris' powers but wyatt is a bad ass so it just sort of temporarily immobilizes him while chris digs out a spell to get his powers back. (power of the witches rise / come to me from across the skies / restore my powers, give me back / all that was taken from the attack. yeah, i did that from memory. yeah, i was ten. shut up.) wyatt gets back control and chucks bianca onto a broken table leg; chris loses his shit and briefly manages to knock wyatt into some wood where he lies. then chris goes to bianca and she laughs at him, this really sweet sad "i'm dying and i love you" laugh, and gives him back her engagement ring and tells him she hopes they'll be together again. I CRY BROKEN TEARS. LET'S JUST BE HORRIBLE TO CHRIS FOREVER. WHY WOULD HE WANT ANYTHING GOOD EVER. in retrospect i realize this was fridging and am incensed about it. god, fuck the writers.
(also, bianca was the shit??? would it have killed them to have wyatt heal her and send her back against chris again??? no it would not it would have been GREAT thank you very much.)
chris bails on the future to go back to the past, taking the spell to get back with him (this is dumb because wyatt is the one who developed a two-way version of it AND ALSO IT'S A RHYME, wyatt could absolutely make his own!!!!); wyatt throws an energy ball at him looking greasy and furious; when chris gets back to the present nobody is nice to him though they are less outright mean. it is so good because chris suffers and refuses to disclose his reasons for being distressed. SUFFER NOBLY IN SILENCE AS YOU ARE RIPPED APART, SWEETHEART. then chris tells baby wyatt that if he cannot save him he will stop him. it is beautiful. BEAUTIFUL.
the thing that gets me is that so many cool things were set up here!!! wyatt trying to undo chris' actions in the past, the existence of the phoenix as morality-neutral assassin witches, THE BAD FUTURE as poorly-established as it is. (in a later episode leo is all, "we gotta send chris back to the future" which is great for his persecution complex. like, they totally could have!!! and then made the sisters go there to get him back when they felt guilty!!! it would be GREAT.) bianca herself. wyatt himself! WHY DIDN'T EVIL WYATT COME BACK AND AS CHRIS DIED TURN GOOD BEFORE HIS EYES BECAUSE CHRIS HAD SUCCEEDED. the temptation for chris to just give up and live in wyatt's future, where he'll be safe even if nobody else will.
what did we get? chris turning into a spider and complaining his dad never loved him, and phoebe on a vision quest. god, this show. so goddamn useless.
still!!! it is EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER LOVED. this was probably my first real Bad Future story; i think chris was probably my first Hella Persecuted Martyr. he's so goddamn sad. he's the kind of sad that's so, so good. there are even exes!!! what a good trope fest. why wasn't tumblr around for this episode of television???? if tumblr had been around, i bet i would be watching the charmed sons on tv and laughing about how shit it was.
ANYWAY I CARE A LOT. the fic of my heart is chris and wyatt in the evil future but honestly it is all dissatisfying. there is so much potential good fic! wyatt loving chris, chris loving wyatt; wyatt coming back to stop chris; bianca coming back to help chris; chris and wyatt remembering their bad future selves in the good future. a NOVEL about bianca.
god, how do i still have so many feelings? this episode aired in TWO THOUSAND AND THREE. i guess you never forget your first.