Charmed
Title: Charmed
Created by: Constance M. Burge
Genre: Supernatural, Fantasy, Drama
Episode: “The Eyes Have It” - Season 5, Episode 6
Directed by: James Marshall
Written by: Laurie Parres
Original Air Date: October 20, 2002
Characters: Phoebe, Paige, Piper, Ava & Lydia Nicolae, Teresa, Orin, Cree
Setting: San Francisco
Keywords: Romani people, Shuvani, witchcraft, spells, divination, The Evil Eye
Synopsis:
While consulting a fortune teller, Phoebe finds out that a Gypsy Hunter is killing Shuvani Gypsies and taking their eyes to his father, who had been struck blind by them.
Analysis:
The episode explores similarities between gypsies and witches, drawing parallels between the Warren Line of witches and the Nicolae clan of gypsies, emphasizing the bonds between the women and how important it is to embrace your heritage.
The Shuvani are the high priestesses in Romani clans, keepers of knowledge, equipped with the power to bless or curse, to heal or to bring sickness. In this episode, a member of a Shuvani family, Madame Teresa, works as a fortune teller. She is portrayed as having genuine powers, dukkering (fortunetelling) for Phoebe and accurately sensing her magical powers, although she is surrounded by such clichéd paraphernalia as crystal globes, which the viewer is used to associate with hacks.
No one speaks in the Romani language, but two of the characters speak Romanian, though surprisingly not with each other. When one of the Shuvani women warns another of the impending danger, she talks to her in English on the phone, while the second woman contacts her niece, Ava, to warn her and uses Romanian, which her niece has not spoken in years and can’t understand. Ava is a doctor who has renounced her legacy, choosing, in her own words, to “save lives using medicine, not magic”. She is a skeptic who believes that the Romani customs and stories are just superstitions, as consequence of her mother dying after refusing chemotherapy and relying on “herbs and spells”.
We witness a funeral scene for the deceased Teresa, where her friend Lydia leads the chant of “Doamne miluiește”. The main characters do not understand the words, but remark that the “symbolism is beautiful”. Other practices such as covering the pictures of the deceased, surrounding the casket with things the dead might need in the next life and having a “pomană” (Romanian burial feast) are also mentioned.
The episode ends with the defeat of the hunters, with Ava calling upon her ancestors’ power: “Marina, Teresa, Lydia...Nicolae Gypsies stand strong beside us, Vanquish this evil from time and space.” She chooses to accept the legacy of the Shuvani women and vows to continue “helping out gypsies who don't have health care”. Paige takes this moment to talk about the Romani folk remedies, stating that: “Some of them are even better than western medicine.”
It seems that overall the show has opted for a positive portrayal of a foreign culture. We are lead to understand that the Shuvani are benevolent, and the curse of blindness put on Orin, the man who is hunting them, was to protect their own people, and not out of malicious intent.
