There's a huge sense of 'what's the point?' in regards to this episode. Phoebe's adventures as a jury member were promising, and it could have allowed for some interesting attempts to prove the validity of her outlandish claims if she were to, say, experiment with low-level 'magic', or try and convince the jury of the possibility of the defendant being innocent. Instead, we get an elaborate 'summoning the murder victim' scene, and everything getting undone in the end via some convenient memory dust. It's a really patronizing story.The messy script issues continue to the end of the episode, with the jury storyline dropped ten minutes before the end and a clumsy 'Rat Demon' vanquishing and kidnapping tagged on, presumably to fill time. And was it really such a great idea for Phoebe to immediately converse with the defendant right after the verdict is announced? Couldn't that open up a huge can of worms? Yeesh.
Paige's subplot with Glenn is annoying, principally because his characterization is so awful. There's 'sensing something is weird about your best friend', and then there's 'being aggressively invasive of your best friend's privacy and snooping around their house to dig up dirt'. Ugh. And the spell-gone-awry was pretty underwhelming, too, casually disappearing after one or two scenes. Strangeness. I don't know if the script just didn't come together with Trial by Magic, but the episode really felt like one big mess. Filler junk. D-
Credits
Guest stars Jesse Woodrow (Glen Belland); Peter Siragusa (Juror); Patrick Fischler (Foreman); Cleo King (Tanya); Kathe Mazur (Prosecutor); Lou Giovanetti (Andrew Wilke); John Thaddeus (Stan Provazolli); Shannon O'Hurley (Angela Provazolli)
Writer Michael Gleason Director Chip Scott Laughlin
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