On tonight’s episode of Buffy, three long dead witches possess the bodies of Buffy, Willow, and Anya and they wreak havoc all over Sunnydale as they continue their quest for ultimate power. Oh wait, I’m sorry, wrong show.

On tonight’s episode of Charmed, Phoebe, Piper and Paige are forced to use the power of three for evil as their bodies are taken over by a trio of witches from the past.

Oh wait! No, I was watching Smallville tonight. No one would know it though, based on the storyline. The only clue that suggested it was indeed an episode of Smallville was the opening credits.

In trying to describe this episode, the word preposterous comes to mind. Nonsensical, absurd, gawdawful and ridiculous also seem to fit the bill. One could easily question the sobriety of the writers when they wrote this episode, which was only mildly entertaining simply because it was so amazingly horrible. It was interesting to see how far they could take it. And, oh did they take it far.

We start with a little flashback as three witches are about to be burned at the stake. One of the witches is obviously Lana, but she’s really the Countess at this point in time. Before she is tied to the stake and burned, she spits blood into some leatherbound magic book and casts one final spell. She cackles something grandiose about coming back for revenge while her little cronies whimper like the little witches that they are. Burn, babies, burn!

Cut back to Sunnydale, err Smallville, and Lana is showing the leather bound magic book to Jason. She touches the bloodstained page and suddenly the Countess Isabel has taken over her body. Countess Isabel is kind of, well, slutty. Everything she does or says has this “sexy” vibe to it. It’s not so bad at first, but it gets old really fast.

To bring back her two friends, Isabel busts out a cauldron and an old recipe. For the necessary wine she goes to Lex, who somehow displeases her and she forces him to play the piano infinitus. Oh, did I mention Isabel speaks a lot of Latin?

Fortunately for Isabel, she doesn’t have to look far to find suitable bodies for her two old friends. Lois is in town throwing Chloe a surprise birthday party in Clark’s loft. The two drink Isabel’s potion and become possessed.

Since they had all been dead for so long they decide to go to Chloe’s party and live it up a bit. There will be plenty of time to hunt for the stones afterward. They show up dressed like a trio of strumpets and cast some spell that has everyone taking off their clothes. Even Clark is affected. Like John the Savage, he joins in the half naked fun. Nice abs, Clark.

This sounds bad, right? Well, it only gets worse and thus, brevity becomes our friend as far as the rest of this review is concerned. Clark goes to see Lex and finds him still playing the piano. Clark pushes the bloodied piano away and Lex tells Clark about Lana. Clark dashes to Lana’s apartment just as she uses her powers to throw Jason out the window because he had discovered her true identity. Clark saves Jason.

Isabel and company show up at Clark’s to kill him. He’s able to fend off most of their attacks, but Isabel does some little trick where she magically takes his powers. How exactly does that make sense? Who knows, and more importantly, who cares? This episode is not about making sense.

They hover over his half naked body like the brides of Dracula and talk a bunch of drivel. At some point he ends up hanging, chained from a beam. I don’t know why, but at least it looked really nice. Using magic, they learn from Clark that one of the stones is in the caves.

The brides scamper off to the caves and Clark is rescued by Jason. Clark sends Jason off to the school to look for the witches and Clark goes to the caves with a shotgun. Yeah, that’s really going to help.

Isabel grabs the stone, but for some reason it makes her scream instead of giving her the power to be a goddess among men as she had initially thought. She drops the stone and Clark grabs it. Upon touching the stone he regains his power. Why? How? Shhh! Just don’t ask! He then uses his heat vision to burn the magic book in Isabel’s hands.

Next thing you know, they all wake up on the ground of the cave. Lana, Lois, and Chloe are restored with no recollection of what happened. And here we can all breathe a sigh of relief because it’s over. This absolutely terrible episode is finally over. Acta est fabula, plaudite!

On the bright side, I don’t think the show can get any worse. The writers have reached rock bottom and as long as they don’t choose to go sideways, they can only go up from here.

Honda Dimitriu