Victor was always kind of a question mark, mainly down to the writers. He is, in essence, one of those ancillary characters that isn't important enough to give a consistent personality. It's a little like Buffy Summers' father, originally shown to be pretty low-key and protective, then written as a heartless, child-abandoning sociopath when the scripts called for it. The same happens on Charmed. Played by a different actor here, Victor is depicted as a sleazy, heartless abandoner; something entirely flipped in later appearances, Victor eventually appearing worlds away from the kind of person who would ditch his entire family at one point or another.There's a big missed opportunity here in regards to Victor's possible allegiance with the shapeshifters. Not only the idea of Victor working with them, but it would have been pretty fun if the Victor depicted here wasn't Victor at all: maybe a shapeshifter impersonating him to get close to the Halliwell's. There's a lot of potential there, and the writers didn't totally utilize that.
Speaking of the shapeshifters, lord they blew. Bad acting all round, weirdly inconsistent characters... ugh. Charmed was never known for its dynamic antagonist characters but yeesh they were pretty appalling when the series first opened.
Some of the sisterly banter feels a little contrived here, the dialogue is pretty bad ("Last week we had no Dad -- now we have two!!??") and a lot of the episode is rendered useless by the time Victor resurfaces in season three, but generally Thank You for Not Morphing isn't quite as awful as I remembered it being. It's certainly not good, but it's pretty acceptable for episode three of the series. And you can't fault the show for at least attempting to explain why Prue is so damn angry all the time... C
Credits
Guest stars Markus Flanagan (Marshall); Eric Matheny (Fritz); Mariah O'Brien (Cynda); James Dineen (Mailman); Brian Krause (Leo Wyatt); Tony Denison (Victor Bennett)
Writers Chris Levinson, Zack Estrin Director Ellen Pressman
I always thought that when they changed actors for the rest of the series they should have found out that this version wasn't the real Victor (I greatly prefer the other Victor, by the way). They could have had to call Grams on to identify him.
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