Prue Halliwell
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 Shannen Doherty as Prue Halliwell |
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Prudence "Prue" Halliwell, is a fictional character who appeared in the first three seasons of the WB television series Charmed, and was played by actress Shannen Doherty.
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[edit] Background
Prudence Halliwell was born on October 28, 1970; the firstborn child of Patty Halliwell, a witch, and Victor Bennett, a human. As a witch, Prue developed the magical power of telekinesis, which allowed her to move things with her mind. On March 24, 1975, she was visited by a future version of herself. Also on that day, Patty signed a pact with the warlock Nicholas to make him a ring that made him immune to her daughters' powers.
In November 1975, after two of her three sisters had been born, their grandmother Penny bound their powers to keep Nicholas from killing them and taking their powers. The memory of having had powers was erased by their grandmother.
In high school, Prue was a very popular A-list student, president of the Student Council and a cheerleader. At some point, she also became rebellious, but it did not stop her from learning how to be responsible and protective of her family. She longed to be a professional photographer when she was young, perhaps as a psychic echo of her past life in the 1920s as one of Penny's aunts. At age 21, she got into a car accident and blamed herself for hurting Phoebe, who was hospitalized after the incident.
When they went to college, Piper and Prue moved into an apartment together in North Beach. Prue took up History and was a serious student but still became popular in college, as she dated the captain of the football team (who later trains to be a demonized human), Tom. The two girls stayed in North Beach until 1997 when Penny became ill and they moved back in with Grams and Phoebe at the manor. Prue became engaged to her boss Roger and she asked Piper to be her maid of honor. Roger kept coming on to Phoebe secretly, then claiming Phoebe was after him so Prue dumped him. About this time, Penny took a picture of the three of them together in front of the manor. Penny planned to use a potion to bind the girls' powers forever against Patty's wishes, but Penny died before she could do it.
[edit] Revelation as a Charmed One
Prue came into her power with a mixture of shock and anger at her sister Phoebe, whom she blamed for her introduction to the Craft. Out of the three sisters (and even later compared with Paige) Prue struggled with her powers and her destiny, especially when dealing with her mother's past and death. However, when Prue did embrace her destiny, she did so with all of her energy.
Prue originally has the power to move objects with her mind or telekinesis. Her telekinesis was originally focused by squinting her eyes; later, she learned to channel the ability with her hands. As her powers developed, she later acquired the skill of astral projection, the ability to project her mind from her body in a tangible state on the physical plane. In this state, the original Prue becomes unconscious while her mind projects into a concrete body. This power is triggered when she wants to be at two different places at the same times. Prue's astral projection self is identical with herself except that she doesn't have the telekinesis power. It's also been seen that injuries sustained by Prue do not appear on her astral self. When a stalker rendered Prue nearly blind by thrusting her face in photographic developer, her astral self showed no signs of the injury or the impairment, which were obvious on Prue's actual form.
The limits of Prue's telekinetic powers were unclear, but she appeared to be able to move up to 400 pounds (180 kg) with her mind, sufficient to lift and throw two normal sized adults. She very seldom used her powers in complex manipulations, and never when affecting adult human-sized objects, preferring to simply lift and throw. Like her sisters, her powers were linked to her emotions. In Prue's case, the trigger was anger. Once, while frustrated by a crowd obstructing her passage to the hospital to transport the mortally wounded Piper, she telekinetically hurled several people out of the way, up to two at a time, in rapid succession. This incident also marked the first and last time she employed her power on innocents. Prue's telekinetic powers depended on a direct line of sight, or at least an intimate knowledge of the object's location in order to be manipulated. She could not telekinetically move an object if she didn't at least have an idea of where it was. In any case, she had to be in the object's immediate vicinity.
It should also be noted that Prue's telekinetic powers were not the strongest in the family line. An ancestor of hers, Brianna Warren, reportedly was able to telekinetically move a sword (belonging to one of the Lords of War, Gabriel) "hundreds of miles," a feat which Prue admitted she probably couldn't do. Penny "Grams" Halliwell, believing them to be warlocks, was able to move Prue, Piper and Phoebe in a complex path to expel them from the manor. Prue has never demonstrated such fine control over human-sized objects.
In a trip to the future ("Morality Bites"), Prue blasted out an entire wall of the attic, showing her future self's telekinetic powers to be several times more powerful than she had ever displayed up until the time she died.The destruction of the attic was an accident brought on by a fit of pique, and not necessarily indicative of her limits. It is unknown how much Prue could have moved had she made a deliberate effort to test her powers.
In contrast to the limits on her telekinetic powers, she could astrally project herself several miles away and didn't need to know anything about the destination. She once projected herself to Cole's side without intimate knowledge of his location. While kidnapped by Bane Jessup, she could astrally project herself to the manor to alert her sisters, without knowing the direction and distance. Phoebe, when using a spell to simulate Prue's astral projection powers, once projected herself to the underworld to provoke demons. Prue had never tried such a feat.
While Prue's astral projection generally produced an intangible form. She used this to her advantage when she projected herself into the "unstoppable" demon Vinceres.
Prue, being the eldest sister, saw herself as the head of the household; she was conservative, cautious and disliked surprises, and it was often left to the middle sister Piper to arbitrate between Prue and Phoebe, whom Prue regarded as immature, irresponsible and unpredictable. Their destiny as Charmed Ones drew the two sisters closer together ("The Power of Two"), as well as Phoebe's intimate knowledge of the Book of Shadows.
[edit] Romantic life
Once Prue came into her powers, she invariably became involved in criminal cases involving murdered, missing, or otherwise harmed innocents. This led her to reunite with her highschool sweetheart, Andy Trudeau, who had become a detective with the SFPD. Their feelings apparently rekindled, they decided to begin dating-starting off hot-and-heavy and then trying to slow it down. The relationship was turbulent - Prue's secret witchcraft caused a lot of difficulties. She was regularly late or a no show for dates and appointments with Andy, much to his frustration, and even more frustrating for Andy was Prue's inexplicable involvement in his cases, causing him to start a file containing his own hypothesis which were startlingly accurate.
Eventually, Prue cast a truth spell on Andy without his knowledge, whereby 24 hours later, he would remember nothing from the past day. She used this to tell him the truth about herself to see if he could accept it. In the three minutes, he could not tell her that he could overcome it because he wanted a normal family, and so she called the relationship off, though she would eventually be forced to admit who she was. Things looked hopeful, but at the end of Season One Andy dies to save Prue, which sends her into an emotional tailspin.
After Andy's death, Prue dated a coworker, an immature very anti-Andy character who helped her loosen up and stop taking herself so seriously, but when his lack of morals and immaturity did not match up to where Prue wanted to go with her life, she broke it off with Jack. Another involvement, though not a relationship, was with crime boss Bane Jessup under the guise of being an assassin, and later when he kidnapped her to get her to help him clear his name ("Ms. Hellfire" and "Give Me a Sign"). The relationship was based on sexual attraction and short-lived, more of a flirtation than anything else.
[edit] Professional life
Prue first worked at the Museum of Natural History in San Francisco right after college, where she met Roger, who became her fiancé and then her boss after a nasty break up. Realizing the working relationship was as doomed as their romantic relationship, Prue accepts a job at "Buckland's Auction House", unaware that it is actually run by two demons posing as humans (Rex Buckland and Hannah Webster) who are determined to destroy the Charmed Ones. When they fail at that, Buckland's is in dire financial straights, and the bank comes in. Prue is invaluable in saving Bucklands-while saving the world-and all seemed fine. However, after a second takeover where profit became more important than honesty or ethics (they want to sell a fake Monet), Prue handed in her resignation to pursue a career in photography, something she had put on hold to pay the bills at home. Her renewed interest was probably sparked by Phoebe's revelation that in a past life, Prue had been a successful photographer ("Pardon My Past"). She joins 415 Magazine, and becomes one of their top photographers, fulfilling her true dream before she died.
[edit] Charmed life
Prue had trouble with the right balance of work and play during her entire life as a Charmed One. Prue spent a lot of time and energy becoming a more powerful witch, referred to sometimes as the "superwitch" and "Wicca Wonder" of the family. This is probably because when they were very little and their mother died, Prue was the one who took care of Piper and Phoebe, though she played more of a fatherly role than a maternal role, with little patience for Phoebe in general for much of their lives until Phoebe turns it all around for herself.
The warlock Zile kidnapped Prue and was married to her by the dark priestess, Dantalian. Because of this dark bond, Prue became evil and turned on her sisters. When Zile was vanquished by the Charmed Ones, the evil hold on her was released.
In the Season 3 premiere "The Honeymoon's Over" Prue first displayed martial arts skills on-screen while battling a court room full of demonically-possessed humans.
In the episode "Primrose Empath" of Season 3, she had her first battle with a demon without using her powers and performed highly skilled martial art feats due to her temporarily acquired empathic powers. Although Prue's martial arts skills were a talent introduced earlier on in the beginning of Season 3, their progression as the season went on garnered speculation on how her skills became superior even to the martial arts skills of Phoebe, who by then had more than two years of training, in such a short period of time. Another skill of Prue's that the series never revealed how she acquired or mastered was her gunslinger techniques performed in "The Good, the Bad, and the Cursed".
Prue also seemed to have magical troubles, even with non-magical beings. She was kidnapped by former gangster Bane Jessup, to help him fend off against the Ordo Malorum. On another occasion, Prue started having recurring dreams of a dangerous man named T.J. that hung out in a nearby bar, without knowing that her astral form was being used by her repressed emotions to get away from her responsibilities. After a murder outside the bar was blamed on Prue, the police started to look for her. At Piper and Leo's wedding, the police came after Prue, and T.J. crashed the wedding on a motorcycle to rescue her. Phoebe talked Prue into getting herself together and Darryl, Leo and Cole found the real killer.
As if those other troubles weren't enough, Prue was affected by some of her sisters' own spells, which caused her to be transformed. Once, when Phoebe started to get hot flashes linked to visions of men being killed, the sisters learned that a Succubus was hunting in San Francisco. They cast a spell to attract the Succubus, which turned Prue into a man ("Manny"). Prue was then able to lure the Succubus to her doom. Also, when the sisters discovered a Banshee demon was killing people who were grieving, they cast a spell to track the Banshee, which ended up turning Prue into a dog.
Even after her death, Prue continues to be the "Superwitch" with whom Paige especially feels that she must compete against.
[edit] Death count
During the run of the series and her life as a Charmed One, Prue died 3 times.
| Episode | Episode Name | Cause Of Death | Revival |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1x20 | "The Power of Two" | She kills herself to be able to destroy a ghost. | Andy practices CPR on her. |
| 2x22 | "Be Careful What You Witch For" | Killed by the dragon demon. | Phoebe wished on a genie for her to be alive again. |
| 3x22 | "All Hell Breaks Loose" | Killed by Shax. | She has never been revived. |
[edit] Prue's death
Prue's death was the eventual consequence, in the show's third season finale "All Hell Breaks Loose", of a series of events that involved magic becoming exposed, time being turned back, and the sisters being tricked by the Source of All Evil. After a battle between Piper, Prue, and the demon Shax next to the Manor was caught on tape by a television crew filming in the street, magic, and both the world of witches and demons was exposed to the general public, something which was to be avoided by both good and evil at all costs.
After Piper was killed by an aggressive witch-wannabe, and Prue was ordered to be shot by special forces, there was no other choice for Leo, Phoebe and Cole than to try make a deal with the Source of All Evil, which was attempted by Cole. The Source agreed to authorize the demon Tempus to turn back time by one day on Earth. The Source's trick was that while Prue and Piper, defending an innocent, were attacked by Shax just like previously, Phoebe, Cole and Leo were stuck in the underworld. When Leo and Phoebe eventually escaped from the underworld, they arrived in time to heal Piper, however, they were too late to heal the more seriously wounded Prue, who was already dead.
[edit] Afterlife
After Prue's death, she did not appear again to the sisters. According to Penny in the episode following Prue's death, Prue was still adjusting to being in the afterlife. Also, if Piper was able to see her like she intended, that would not let her move on and accept Prue's death, and that is why she has not been seen since. However, her spirit was called upon, along with the other witches of the Warren-Halliwell line, by the new Power of Three to vanquish the Source twice, both in his original incarnation and his successor Cole Turner.
In the season seven finale "Something Wicca This Way Goes?", the sisters cast a spell that allows them to utilize Prue's astral projection power. This is indicated by Piper saying "Thank you, Prue," after the spells effect is over. Also, continuing the tradition of Charmed finales, season seven closes the manor door with a chime sound associated with Prue's telekenesis. Prue closed the door with her power in the finale of seasons one and two. In the season five finale, Piper's son Chris closes the door, showing he has Prue's power of telekinesis. Likewise, in the series finale (season eight), Piper's granddaughter also uses it to close the door.
[edit] References
| Charmed |
|---|
| Main: Season summaries | Episode guide | Broadcasters, DVDs & other media | Terms | Trivia |
| Locations and Artifacts: San Francisco Bay Area | Halliwell Manor | Magic School | The Nexus | Book of Shadows |
| Good beings: Charmed Ones | Close friends | Family and friends | Whitelighters | Elders |
| Evil beings: Darklighters | Warlocks |
| Neutral: Avatars | The Hollow | Firestarters |
