WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Charmed Season 3, Episode 10, “Bruja-Ha,” which aired Sunday on The CW.
Although Maggie is a skilled empath, actively studying psychology, she’s only recently started tapping into her emotions. In Season 2, Maggie confronted the truth of her anxiety disorder, but now, Season 3 forces her to learn to live with mental illness. While Maggie’s learned some coping methods to center herself — like breathing techniques from her crush Jordan and meditation — the latest episode showed she’s still struggling to find balance with magical and real-world stressors, leading her to self-medicate with magic.
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Once the Charmed Ones learn that many monsters are afoot in their dimension — since their escape from the Tomb of Chaos — they start a monster-hunting rotation amongst themselves. The sisters take turns pulling all-nighters to catch rift creatures, leading to 183 slain monsters.
However, this constant work is taking its toll on Maggie, who admittedly failed a psych test after staying up all night monster-slaying and neglecting her studies. Instead of telling her sisters this truth — that she needs a break, that she’s still in school and her career is important — she chooses to use her new empathy power of creating emotions and gives herself both confidence and drive. All her fears and doubts and exhaustion are still there but become buried deep underneath her outward, magical expression of kicking butt.
Fittingly, while on the hunt for a rift creature, Maggie finds one that feeds off of doubt and fear — a doppelganger. Although she tries to attack it, it seemingly just grows stronger and stronger around her, suggesting that it can still feel her deeply buried feelings.
Shadow selves is a concept in psychology that was popularized by Carl Jung and is built on the belief that no matter what someone does, there’s never a way to escape or get rid of the emotions that humans hate to feel, like envy, regret, sorrow, doubt, fear and anger. No one wakes to say, “Man, I’d love to feel sorrow today!” However, the insistence and push to want to be happy even when we’re actually not can easily make someone repress their true feelings. Jung believes that giving room and time to speak with your shadow self can actually allow one to feel through it, process its meaning and move on to other informative feelings.
Maggie doesn’t listen to the feelings that are telling her something important — she needs rest. It takes the embodiment of her darkest, angriest and terrifying self to jolt her into seeing that the more and more she avoids her dark feelings, the more they have power over her. Ultimately, she’s saved by her sister Mel coming into battle with her and confusing the doppelganger (that can only attack in 1:1 situations), but the experience shakes Maggie enough to realize there’s no need to run from the darkness. At the end of the episode, Maggie decides to call a counseling hotline to speak with a therapist, shedding light on the fear inside her.
Charmed stars Sarah Jeffery, Madeleine Mantock, Melonie Diaz, Rupert Evans, Jordan Donica, Poppy Drayton, Mareya Salazar and JJ Hawkins. New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
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