Think I'll Nitpick a TV Show Episode

In the recent past I watched a rerun of Bewitched on TV Land. Bewitched has always been a perennial favorite of mine, and like many other shows, I don't mind seeing the same episode more than a couple of times.

Now I feel like I want to nitpick this episode just for the fun of it (it is Episode #7 of the first season). In one particular scene, Samantha is with three of her aunts: Bertha, Mary, and Clara (witches all, of course, played by Reta Shaw, Madge Blake, and Marion Lorne) having tea at Samantha's house. Aunt Clara is the witch who has difficulty with her powers because of her advancing years thrown in with a bit of neglect. Bertha decides she'd like a cup of tea, so she levitates the cup of tea from the table over to her by reciting the incantation: "Zolda, pranken, kopek, lum!" Mary does likewise, reciting the same incantation word for word. Then comes Aunt Clara's turn. She, of course, fumbles through the words and doesn't get them exactly right. Her cup levitates about half-way towards her, shakes and rattles a bit in mid-levitation, then crashes to the floor into a thousand pieces.

Bertha, a bit embarrassed for Clara, says something like "Oh, Aunt Clara, really!" She waves her hand over the broken pieces and spilled liquid, and everything re-assembles into a perfectly whole cup of tea back in mid-air whereupon Bertha then has it float cautiously over to Clara (or something like that).

My nitpick is this: Why is it, if you want to levitate an object across the room, it requires an incantation of no fewer than four words (zolda, pranken, kopek, lum)? But if you want to re-integrate the broken pieces of an inaminate object, all that is required is a simple hand gesture. Let's compare: which task is more difficult? Levitation or re-integration? Granted, no mere mortal can do either, but if I had to assign levels of difficulty to both, I'd say that re-integration requires more skill and more work. And that said, a longer incantation.

This particular nitpick ought to extend to a much later color episode (having a different Darrin, of course) in which Maurice gives Darrin a magic pocketwatch enabling him to perform witchcraft in conjunction with speaking the words (you guessed it) zolda, pranken, kopek, lum. But I will forgive the writers for this continuity problem because of the large amount of time between episodes.