OMNIPOTENT COLE

[vandergraafk]

During Season 5, Cole is revealed as a magical being who cannot be vanquished, at least not by any potions, spells or combination thereof that the Charmed Ones can imagine. Not wishing to use his powers for evil, lest he succumb to that very Evil, Cole finds it difficult to achieve his intended outcomes. Though he wishes to do good (to win Phoebe back), his efforts often result in harm that he never intended. His frustration culminates during Sam, I Am when he exclaims to an indignant Phoebe who has just accused him of murdering two humans: "I can't do good, I won't do evil!"

Who is this Cole and whence did his powers derive? Why was he driven to see suicide by witch as his only way out? Could he have found peace as an Avatar? Would he, too, have rebelled against the Avatars?

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In the Charmed Cafe, I casually commented that Cole probably had absorbed the Source's powers in the Wasteland as I was trying to explain what the Avatars did and were able to extract when Leo was vanquished in Season 7. Ljones dismissed my thought as just not possible. After some further thought, I commented:

I am not sure any of us can say for certain what the Sandworm did in the Wasteland. Digested powers? I don't know. Stored those powers for future recycling? This makes more sense to me. Clearly - and boy I hate to use that word - Cole absorbed any powers that were sent to the Wasteland immediately prior to and after he had slain the Sandworm. Was Cole able to access stored powers for future recycling? I'll guess that he could and that's the only way he could have gotten the Source's powers.

Now, I know there is no direct evidence that Cole got these powers. I would not go so far as ljones to say that's not possible. At some point, we have to explain how Cole became invincible. The Source was vanquishable. Cole, as Mr. Invincible, was not. Certainly, whatever powers Cole had amassed were at a minimum greater than the Source's powers. For that to have occurred, it seems reasonable to me to assume that Cole had taken in all of the Sandworm's stored, but not yet recycled powers, that among those powers were the powers of the Source, and that what made Cole invincible was the addition of powers beyond anything that the Source had ever amassed. Remember, too, that as powerful as the Source was, he was not invincible. Some of his enemies had to be banished (Kurzon). Others had to be imprisoned (Giant Man and Zankou).

[vandergraafk]

In the Charmed Cafe, Jate88 called our attention to an entry in Wikipedia. This entry described the Source as follows:

"It appears that the Source itself was a very ancient demonic being, that moved into the body of each demon that held the position of the Source. It then gradually absorbed/integrated the powers and personality, of each demon that held the position of the Source, into itself. Therefore, each demon that defeated other demons to hold the position of the Source, including defeating a previous Source, would over a long period of time, literally become the same Source with even more powers. It does not appear that this was generally known to most demons."

The suggestion is intriguing and perhaps hints at how the Source differed from the TRIAD, who, as we learned in Season 8, are evil incarnate. The Source, on the other hand, seems more of an amalgam, whose power grows from successive coronations.

With this in mind, I advanced the following proposition:
the reason Cole became invincible after collecting powers in the Wasteland is that he had tapped into all of the stored and not yet recycled powers accumulated in the Sand Worm. These powers included the Source's powers since his powers had yet to be recycled, as there had been no coronation since the Cole/Source coronation in We're Off to See the Wizard.

As I noted in the Charmed Cafe,

"As the entity Source/Cole had not been coronated, no such "merger" has you have quoted has occurred. After the coronation, what you suggest may very well be correct. And, it is that more powerful entity, the new Source, that is vanquished by the Charmed Ones in Long Live the Queen.

When Cole is in the Wasteland and begins collecting new powers, he apparently is able to amass not only the powers of vanquished demons as we see in Witch Way Now, but also claim the powers of the vanquished new Source, as these have not yet been recycled and claimed by yet another newly crowned Source. This is perhaps what gives him such vast powers to make him Mr. Invincible and what attracted him to the Avatars who sought to exploit his collection of powers for their own ends.

In addition, after Cole leaves the Wasteland, there is never ever an atttempt made to reclaim the mantle of the Source. What does happen is that Zankou, admittedly an already powerful demon, begins acquiring new powers by stealing them from demons he vanquishes in order to bolster his bevy of powers. He cannot reclaim the Source's old powers since these have been "seized" by the Avatars.

Admittedly, this line of reasoning has one major flaw. In Desperate Housewitches, we see the Source "reincarnated" once more. Fortunately, he doesn't demonstrate any powers other than to sniff out "non Evil". The Charmed Ones, of course, get all worked up about his reappearance. Then, again, they really don't understand what happened to Cole after the Wasteland or what happens to powers after demons are vanquished. Indeed, that question is never even raised after Paige made great note of it in Charmed and Dangerous. So what exactly was summoned: the body of the Source sans powers, as I would argue, or the Source itself - with all its powers, as the Charmed Ones feared? Logic perhaps dictates that it be the former, not the latter."

A bit later, I noted:

"As for what transpired in the Wasteland: it is true that we don't know how much time elapsed between the vanquish of the Source in We're Off to See the Wizard and Cole's discovery of the secret treasures of the Wasteland. However, since no one ever again claimed or attempted to claim the mantle of new Source through coronation, it is safe to assume that these accumulated powers were not yet recycled and certainly could have been acquired by Cole. That would explain the fascination that the Avatars had for Cole, as well as Avatar Alpha's desire to accede to Cole's "bizarre" request in Centennial Charmed. It was the great power he had that made Cole so appealing to the Avatars, power that he had acquired not by tapping into random demons vanquished and sent to the Wasteland. Rather, it was the storehouse of not yet recycled powers, including those encapsulated in the Source, absorbed by Cole that was the target of the Avatars."

Please note that this is an interpretation that I believe is strongly supported by the events subsequent to the vanquish of the Cole/Source in Long Live the Queen.

"It is an interpretation that I believe can be supported by subsequent events. If you wish to call it a "theory", that's your choice. I avoid such words since in the American context they are especially pejorative. That is, a theory is nothing more than an opinion. No, it's an overarching explanatory tool that organizes information. How well it does that and explains previously inexplicable phenomena is what gives a theory its strengths.

Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity - special and general - is not just an opinion about how electromagnetism and matter relate. It's a viewpoint that demolishes absolute notions of time and space, viewpoints that the old Newtonian perspective integrally incorporated. Einstein's theory also dispensed with the necessity of inventing an ether in order to make sense of the transmission of energy across space by waves.

In Sympathy for the Demon, it is true that Barbas co-conspirator wishes that Barbas would concentrate on efforts to unite the Underworld and thus become the new Source. However, this effort went without avail since Barbas preferred to use his powers against the Charmed Ones. We never even get close to a coronation where the new Source's powers would merge with those of the old Source.