Adventures In The 13th Warehouse
Do you like quirky science fiction? Like maybe authors Douglas Adams and Jasper Ford mixed in with a little Doctor Who? Well, have you ever watched the TV series Warehouse 13? No? Then you should give it a try. Be aware, there will be minor spoilers ahead.
Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the series but the basic premise is that there are supernatural artifacts in the world. Mostly, they become imbued with some kind of power due to human emotions and actions related to them in some way. For example, Ivan Pavlov’s bell now has the ability to call any dog to the user but also causes excessive drooling for 24 hours. Marilyn Monroe’s hairbrush now turns the user platinum blond. Some artifacts have silly or relatively harmless effects, but others are very dark and dangerous, such as Lucrezia Borgia’s hair comb, which grants the user mind-controlling abilities but at the price of great personal jealousy and anger. As you might imagine, strong feelings of jealousy and anger joined with mind-control abilities is very much not a benign combination.
Warehouse 13 is a holding place for all of these artifacts, so that they are not loose in the world, spreading their particular influence unchecked. Two of the main characters, Pete and Myka (both former Secret Service agents), are tasked with seeking out and recovering these various artifacts. The third main character Artie is more experienced than the other two and mostly remains back at the Warehouse, maintaining its infrastructure and guiding and assisting the agents. There are other recurring characters, and a couple more that end up joining the team later on, but I’ll leave those details for the viewer to discover.
One of the things I particularly like about this series is that while each episode (except for the rare two-parters) stands alone, they all fit together in a story arc. And while our characters remain themselves throughout, they do change and grow in realistic and believable ways.
I thought that for today’s blog post, I might list my four favorite Warehouse 13 episodes in chronological order.
Season 1, Episode 2: Resonance
Pete and Myka investigate some mysterious bank robberies where no one present remembers what happened. During one of the robberies, one of the customers was on his cell phone and managed to record what happened, although the customer still has no memory of the event. Music can be heard playing in the background, and when it is played back in the presence of one of the bank clerks, she zones out briefly while tears run down her face. When she is made aware of her surroundings again, she still cannot remember what happened but says that she “feels loved.”
Artie analyses the music and is able to link it to a composer named Eddie Marsden. When the agents visit him at his address, they discover that Eddie has fallen into some unspecified dementia after losing the ownership rights to his own compositions, and is mostly unresponsive, although he does respond a little to music. Pete and Myka realize that the bank robbers are playing this music in banks with particular acoustic qualities and the combination of the acoustics and the music is rendering people briefly catatonic, so that the robbers can steal the money and escape without any violence at all. The money is being stolen by Eddie’s former bandmates (and his daughter), who are trying to gather the funds to buy back the rights to Eddie’s music.
In the end, Pete and Myka take only the the record that was being used in the bank robberies and leave Eddie and his bandmates and family with the piles of master recordings of Eddie’s music. The power of music to evoke memories and deep emotion is well known and documented. Whenever I listen to the Dan Reed Network’s eponymous album, I still remember how I felt when I was listening to the album repeatedly while going through a breakup during my college years. If the music isn’t playing, I can’t really remember much about how I felt. But when Dan Reed belts out “I Forgot To Make Her Mine,” the feelings are there as if it were only yesterday.
Season 2, Episode 10: Where And When
Pete’s first introduction to H.G. Wells doesn’t go as planned
Rebecca, an elderly former Warehouse 13 agent who is dying of cancer, comes to the Warehouse to get help to solve a crime she and her partner were unable to solve in 1961. Four women had been killed by a man who used a knife that turned them entirely to glass. Rebecca tells Pete, Myka, and Artie that she and her partner/fiance Jack never found either the suspect or the artifact and also that she and Jack have 22 hours that were unaccounted for; they had no memories of that day. The missing 22 hours suggest to Helena (H.G. Wells, who now works with Pete and Myka) that someone used her “time machine”. This theory is supported by a very short film which was recently discovered and shows the 1961 versions of Rebecca and Jack claiming to the camera that they are really Pete and Myka.
Myka rocks a pillbox hat
It turns out that Wells’ time machine sends the consciousness of one or two persons back in time to inhabit the bodies of someone who lived in that time, an interesting variation on the notion of time travel. I can see clearly enough how Wells’ machine manages a specific time but not how it targets which person to send the traveling consciousness into. Never mind, small gripe. Pete and Myka go back and solve the mystery, recover the artifact, and bury it in a place that they can find it in the present.
When Pete and Myka have returned to their own time, the dying Rebecca asks Helena to send her back to the moment when she and Jack awaken from their 22 hour absence. She wants to see Jack one more time. Helena tells her that she will only be in 1961 for a moment or so and since the time machine has been damaged, she won’t be able to come back. Rebecca asks, “Why would I want to come back?” She sees Jack and kisses him and then she is gone and her younger self is back kissing Jack.
Season 3, Episode 4: Queen For A Day
Moral of the story: don’t touch mysterious objects that don’t belong to you, especially if they are covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs
Pete’s ex-wife Amanda (played by Star Trek alumnus Jeri Ryan) makes a surprise visit to the Warehouse, informing Pete that she is getting married the next day and asking him for a family ring that was still in his possession. Pete gives her the ring and she leaves, but unbeknownst to anyone, she takes with her a mechanical bee from a recently recovered artifact. The bee hides in her purse and waits for its opportunity to sting her at the wedding venue.
Meanwhile, the Warehouse agents realize that the recently recovered artifact (a golden beehive covered with Egyptian hieroglyphs) is missing the important piece, the bee. Pete and Myka hustle off to find Amanda at the wedding to try to recover the bee while Artie does research at the Warehouse to try to find out what the bee actually does. And right about the time the Warehouse agents arrive at the wedding venue, the bee stings Amanda and the effects become immediately apparent. As she touches each of the six members of her wedding party, their demeanor undergoes a dramatic change and it is obvious that they wish to care for her, keep her safe, and obey her (mostly). They carry this way too far, imprisoning the groom’s parents (because Amanda said, “Keep them away from me, whatever it takes!”). Then she says that she doesn’t want anyone entering or leaving the venue and Pete and Myka come to grief as they try to leave.
This is turning out to be very much not the dream wedding
Pete and Myka manage to find Amanda and lock themselves in a room with her, with the groomsmen guarding the door to keep them inside. Artie has now translated enough hieroglyphs from the beehive to understand that the effects of the bee artifact are going to continue to get worse, ultimately resulting in the death of the groom (apparently, the Egyptian queen who made this artifact had to watch her husband-to-be get mummified while still alive, which sounds…unpleasant). Amanda, Pete, and Myka break out of the room they are being held in and go to rescue the groom, resulting in quite the fight against the six members of the wedding party, some of whom are sword-carrying Marines. I did enjoy watching Myka kick everyone’s butt.
During the fight, Artie figures out how to nullify the effect, which returns everyone to their normal mental state, although their physical state is not quite as pristine as could be desired of a wedding party. Nonetheless, the wedding proceeds, and everyone gets a happily ever after. This is one of the more humorous episodes, but it’s still got plenty of heart.
Season 3, Episode 5: 3…2…1…
Helena is quite displeased to discover someone has been tampering with her rocket
This one has everything! It begins in London, 1893, when Helena (H.G. Wells) was still an agent for Warehouse 12. She and her partner come across an artifact they are calling Joshua’s Trumpet (because it’s the ram’s horn trumpet that brought down the walls of Jericho; it’s been around a long time), which when activated, makes a brief trumpet sound that puts out sound waves strong enough to vaporize anything in the path of the sound. One of the other Warehouse 12 agents has turned to his own interests, and has placed the trumpet into a rocket that Helena has created, and plans to send it to eliminate Britain’s enemies in Europe (mostly Germany, I believe). Helena disables the traitor, who is promptly disintegrated by the horn, but the rocket fires up to take off anyway. Before it lifts off, Helena manages to change the coordinates to what she believes will be outer space.
In 1962 America, the rocket has crashed into a barn (it is never explained where the rocket was for 70 years). When the farmer approaches to inspect the damage, the horn activates and disintegrates him. Later on, Jack and Rebecca come to question a few people who saw the horn activate, among them the farmer’s young son Daniel, who believes his father has been taken by aliens (he reads a lot of spaceman comic books). Jack and Rebecca go to the farm to investigate and are almost killed by the horn which is apparently activating randomly. They decide to shoot at it from a distance and cause an explosion, after which the horn is nowhere to be found. They decide it must have been destroyed, and close the case.
In the present day, there are some instances of damage to property and people which are sufficiently mysterious that Warehouse 13 gets involved. They consult Helena, who is only present in hologram form now, and she tells them her story. Eventually, Pete, Myka, and Helena figure out that the young farmer’s child Daniel took the horn when Jack and Rebecca weren’t looking, and he’s now wired it into a satellite dish so that its power is amplified and also easily directed. They find him in an observatory, and he tells them that he is aiming for GL-581, a star which is 20 light years away but is also in the Goldilocks zone…theoretically able to have planets that support life. Daniel has been in and out of psych wards all his life, and has fixated on the idea that aliens kidnapped or killed his father, and he wants them to know that he’s watching them.
Pete and Myka arrive but are unable to turn off Daniel’s machine, which is still aimed at the star but which will pass through a baseball stadium full of people, likely killing thousands of them. Pete and Myka are unable to persuade him to stop, but Myka activates Helena’s hologram projector and Helena persuades him to turn the machine off. The agents secure Joshua’s Horn but Daniel’s ultimate fate is unclear.
I really like this episode, even though it’s not heavy on humor. I love seeing the Warehouse 12 agents work, and love the steampunk aesthetic of the period. I love seeing Jack and Rebecca again, even though I know their love story did not end well. And I love that people in our era are still reaching for the stars, some more successfully (and less destructively) than others. Oh, and I love that Pete knew what SETI stands for because, “I saw Contact.”
Warehouse 13 ended in the spring of 2014. Seasons 1-3 have only 13 episodes each; season 4 has 20. And season 5 comes in at a paltry 6, although I approve of the ending. It wraps the series up nicely. This show is much more sci-fi than supernatural, and quite fun and interesting. Even ingenious in spots. Give it a try.
