Piper Halliwell is a fictional character from the WB fantasy comedy-drama series Charmedand its subsequent spin-offs. The character is portrayed by actress Holly Marie Combs, and appeared in every episode of Charmed from its 1998 pilot episode to its 2006 series finale. Piper was conceived and developed by Charmed creator Constance M. Burge as the middle of three sisters, until the death of elder sister Prue Halliwell (Shannen Doherty) at the end of the third season. After the discovery of her long-lost half-sister, Paige Matthews (Rose McGowan), Piper becomes the eldest of three sisters for the remainder of the series' run.
In Charmed, Piper is one of the show's titular characters, the prophesied Charmed Ones, powerful good witches who fight against the forces of evil. Her storylines revolve around her attempts towards a normal life despite her supernatural abilities, overcoming obstacles in her romantic relationship with guardian angel Leo Wyatt (Brian Krause), and saving their eldest son Wyatt from becoming evil. Piper began the series with the ability to place objects and individuals in stasis, but later developed the power to incite molecular combustion as the series progressed. After the series' eight season run, Charmed comic books are set to publish from 2010, following Piper's life subsequent to the television series.
Combs was cast as Piper after initially auditioning for the role of Prue. Outside of the television series, the character has appeared in spin-off material, including the novel series, the video game, and the board games. For her role as Piper, Combs has won a Best Lead Actress in a Science Fiction Series award in the 2003 RATTY Awards, and a Best Television Actress award in the 2005 Series Magazine Awards. She has also been nominated for a further three RATTY Awards. In 2008, AOL Television named Piper the third greatest fictional witch in television history after Samantha Stevens from Bewitched and Willow Rosenberg fromBuffy the Vampire Slayer.[1]
In the first season of Charmed (1998–9), Piper discovers she is a Charmed One in series premiere "Something Wicca This Way Comes" when her sister Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) reads a spell in a magical Book of Shadows in their attic, awakening the powers they and their sister Prue (Shannen Doherty) were born with; Piper's main magical ability is the power to freeze things. From this point on, Piper and her sisters become a target to evil warlocks and to demons who wish to kill them and/or acquire their abilities; as such, Piper discovers that her boyfriend, Jeremy, (Eric Scott Woods) is in fact a warlock when he seizes upon the opportunity to kill her, forcing she and her sisters to vanquish him. Piper later discovers that the handyman at their family home, Leo Wyatt (Brian Krause), with whom she has fallen in love, is in fact her Whitelighter (a witch's guardian angel) and that their love is forbidden. In "That '70s Episode", the sisters travel back in time to discover the reasons behind their mother Patty (Finola Hughes) and their Grams (Jennifer Rhodes) binding their powers at a young age. It is only in the season finale that the sisters come under a direct attack from an assassin sent by the Source of All Evil and Tempus (David Carradine), a time-manipulating demon. In the second season (1999–2000), the sisters further their resolve against evil. Piper glimpses her future in "Morality Bites" and discovers she is mother to a little girl and has been married to Leo, and in "P3 H20" confronts the demon that killed her mother, and learns of her mother's affair with Whitelighter Sam (Scott Jaeck), paralleling her own with Leo. Leo breaks the rules to use his powers to heal Piper from a deadly virus in "Awakened", though giving up on Leo she begins a romantic relationship with her neighbor, Dan (Gregory Vaughan). By the season's end, she has chosen Leo over Dan in spite of the rules of his superiors, the Eldersand ascends with him to the Heavens to see his world in the second season finale.
Piper returns after several months away in the season three (2000–2001) premiere with little memory of the events, due to the Elders' interference. In "Magic Hour", she and Leo attempt to secretly marry but the Elders punish them by removing Leo from Piper's life. They later successfully marry, however, in "Just Harried"; the ceremony is presided over by the spirit of her deceased grandmother (Rhodes), and her mother's spirit (Hughes) attends, where she reconciles to some extent with the girls' living father,Victor (James Read). The sisters come under fire from the demon Belthazor (Michael Bailey Smith), who turns out to be Phoebe's boyfriendCole (Julian McMahon); because she loves him, Phoebe fakes Cole's death to prevent Piper and Prue from killing him. She acquires her second active ability, the power to cause explosions, after arguing with Leo during the episode "Exit Strategy". The season finale "All Hell Breaks Loose" ends with Piper and Prue both heavily bleeding following an attack by the Source's assassin, Shax. Season four (2001–2) begins with only Piper having survived Shax's attack, leaving her the most devastated by Prue's death. She tries many spells to resurrect Prue, but her mother and grandmother insist that she cannot even communicate with Prue's spirit due to the need to grieve properly. Piper and Phoebe discover their younger half-sister Paige (McGowan), a product of her mother's affair with Sam, and become Charmed Ones once more; with Paige's help, they get revenge on Shax. In "Hell Hath No Fury", Piper's transformation into one of the demonic Furies is prolonged by her inability to grieve over Prue properly. With Paige's help, the sisters are able to properly avenge Prue by killing the Source (Peter Woodward) himself. Piper is betrayed when Phoebe leaves the fold to become Queen of the Underworld, after Cole is made the new Source, but eventually wins Phoebe back to rejoin the sisterhood and defeat Cole together. In the series finale "Witch Way Now?", Piper contemplates an offer from the Angel of Destiny (Dakin Matthews) to live a normal life without her powers; he also informs her after she declines her offer that she is pregnant.
In season five (2002–3), Piper's pregnancy makes her indestructible. Initially, the baby makes her self-healing, and later protects her with aforce field. The child is born, to everyone's surprise a boy, and named Wyatt Matthew Halliwell; because he is the most powerful magical being of all time, he attracts even more demons to the sisters' lives. In the season finale, a Whitelighter from the future named Chris (Drew Fuller) arrives to assist the sisters against the ancient Titans of mythology; after the Elders are forced into hiding by the Titans, Chris manipulates events so that Leo has to become an Elder, causing he and Piper to separate. Piper is so angry that she initially refuses to give up her temporary powers (those of Demeter, Goddess of Earth), though Leo uses his newfound powers to artificially alleviate her pain. In season six (2003–4), Piper again clings to goddess powers when she finds temporarily becoming a valkyrie a better alternative than living with pain; her sisters use a spell to cause Piper to reacquire her feelings of loss. She begins dating men again after beginning to get over Leo, though Chris (in reality, Piper's second son from the future) later tries to stop this from happening; he is able to temporarily reunite Piper and Leo in "The Courtship of Wyatt's Father" in order to ensure his conception; Piper's second on-screen pregnancy was written in to tie-in with Combs' real-life pregnancy, and subsequently a time lapse of six months after Chris' conception is used. Chris informs the sisters that his true mission is to prevent Wyatt from growing up to be the evil dictator he becomes in the future. Unlike her pregnancy with Wyatt, the pregnancy with Chris offers Piper no protection and she is forced to relocate to Magic School, with Wyatt, for her own protection in the last weeks of her pregnancy. The Elder Gideon (Gildart Jackson), also headmaster of Magic School, attempts to kill baby Wyatt in order to prevent this future, the trauma of his attempts to do so being the original cause of Wyatt's evil; Leo kills Gideon in the season finale, the same episode in which future Chris and present-day Chris are born.
Season seven (2004–5) starts with Piper mourning Chris. She and Leo attend two Indian friends' wedding, where they are possessed by the spirits of two passing Hindu deities, Shakti and Shiva; Piper uses these powers to defend herself from demons dispatched to kill her by old enemy Barbas (Billy Drago). In "Someone to Witch Over Me", Leo concedes to the offer of membership extended by the Avatars (powerful neutral beings who seek to create a Utopian reality), of which he informs Piper in "There's Something About Leo" so that they can lend their powers to create Utopia in "Extreme Makeover: World Edition" and "Charmageddon". Realising the Utopia robs people of their free will, Leo sacrifices himself; Piper realises her children's pain with their father's loss, and allies with the underworld's new leader, Zankou (Oded Fehr) to force the Avatars to rewind time to before the change took place. Leo chooses to return to Piper in "The Seven Year Witch" at the expense of his magical abilities, becoming mortal. She and Leo encounter evil Future Wyatt (Wes Ramsey) for themselves in "Imaginary Fiends" but are able to stop the last impediment to his being a power for good. In "Something Wicca This Way Goes?", the sisters are forced to fake their deaths after they destroy Zankou. Season eight (2005–6) begins with the sisters assuming new identities (those of their fictitious cousins), and hiring neophyte witch Billie Jenkins (Kaley Cuoco) to do some of their legwork for them when she discovers who they really are. They later resume their real identities in "Rewitched". The Angel of Destiny ([Denise Dowse) seizes Leo in "Vaya Con Leos" to motivate Piper against their final threat as Charmed Ones. This turns out to be Billie and her sister Christy (Marnette Patterson), who believe the sisters have come to use their powers for good. In "Kill Billie, Vol. 2", the two sets of sisters undergo an all-out battle which destroys Halliwell Manor, and only Piper and Billie survive. In the series finale, "Forever Charmed", Piper uses a time-travelling ring which belongs to Coop (Victor Webster), a cupid to call upon her grandmother and her mother and save the lives of her sisters. After Christy is defeated, Piper returns to the Book of Shadows to write about their lives. An epilogue depicts Piper living to old age (played by Ellen Geer) and being surrounded by children and grandchildren.
[edit]Powers and Abilities
Piper possesses the power of temporal stasis; i.e., the ability to retard molecular motion so that objects, people, and even energy discharges freeze in place. This ability is activated by fear, and at first Piper would freeze everything in the immediate area whenever she became startled. Gradually, Piper learned to control this ability and could consciously freeze everything in the immediate area by a conscious act of will and gesturing. She must be able to gesture to activate her freezing power and cannot do so without using her hands. Piper has also learned to selectively freeze specific objects of her choosing, rather than everything in the entire area. When Piper was new to her powers, objects she froze would eventually regain their mobility on their own, usually after several seconds. Piper then learned to unfreeze things by gesturing and an act of will. She could even freeze an object, then unfreeze a portion of it. She has, for instance, frozen a demon in midair, then unfrozen its head in order to interrogate it. She can also specify objects to be frozen without actually knowing which objects will meet the criteria. She once specified that all the innocents in a courtroom be frozen, without knowing which participants in the courtroom were actually innocents rather than disguised demons.
The mass of an object seemed to be no restriction to her ability. Instead the limitation of her freezing power appeared to be determined by the size of the area, and could freeze anything (except those entities immune to her powers) in the area of effect. The exact limitation was never determined. However, in a magical trip to the future, when her powers were apparently at their peak, she once froze an entire city block. Indoors, however, Piper is limited by the room she is in. She can freeze objects in the same room and cannot freeze anything outside the room, unless she has an unobstructed path to objects outside the room, such as through an open door or window.
Certain entities have proven resistant or immune to her freezing ability, such as ghosts, good witches, furies, certain demons and warlocks.
After two years of her freezing powers being reactivated in adulthood, Piper gained the ability to cause objects to spontaneously explode. Unlike her freezing power, this new ability was triggered by anger, but similarly, this ability depended on a conscious act of will and gestures. She also proved able to cause magical energy discharges and even living entities to explode. However, the limitations on her explosive power are even less clear than those of her freezing ability, but appeared to be determined by an object's size and durability. The largest object she ever caused to explode was a truck door entrance to a warehouse. It once took her several tries to break down a much smaller gate, although this object was magically reinforced.
Like her sisters, Piper can also create potions and cast spells, even originate her own.
Piper is also a skilled chef, a talent which lends itself to potion-making.
While Piper has shown some gymnastic and athletic ability, unlike Phoebe and Prue, she is not adept at conventional means of fighting.
