Some shows, like Hung, begin weakly and grow stronger. Others, like Warehouse 13, have an extremely entertaining pilot and get more and more entertaining as their first season progresses. Warehouse 13 has a little something that many cult sci-fi shows do not, and that is a sense of humor. And not just a sense of humor in an undercutting-the-extreme-drama-of-it-all kind of way as featured on shows like Buffy or even The X-Files, but humor with a whimsical bounce to its step. While it can be every bit as dark and creepy as the aforementioned shows, the Warehouse 13 writers and characters also know how to have pure, unadulterated fun.
Each object Mika and Pete collects or comes into contact with week to week, and its effect on the people in its immediate vicinity, is cleverer than the previous one, from Lewis Carroll’s mirror to Sylvia Plath’s typewriter to Edgar Allan Poe’s pen and notebook to Timothy Leary’s eyeglasses. Then, there is the Escherian Bed and Breakfast that won’t allow its residents to leave once they’ve entered, and the camera that freezes the people that cross its lenses. Meanwhile, Mika and Pete have dynamite chemistry, at times joshing each other and pushing one another’s buttons, like siblings, while also being the best of friends. Additionally, a few episodes into the season, a brilliant young tech named Claudia whose older brother had been involved with the warehouse, joins the series, instilling it with an even more youthful energy, to counterbalance the “sagaciousness” of Artie or Mrs. Frederic.
If the series has any flaw, it’s that it can feel too episodic at times. Although there is a slowly building arc in the framework of the series, it often remains in the background too long. To its credit, nearly every episode, however, is character-driven, providing either an additional layer to Pete, Mika, and Company, or delving into their psyches to varying degrees. Further, the season finale, “MacPherson,” which aired last night, pulls off the remarkable trick of unveiling a number of heretofore obscured revelations that are not only genuinely surprising but pull together a number of plot threads throughout the season which had seemed unrelated. It gives the entire season an even more solid structure and increases its rewatchability factor tenfold, as events that at the time appeared to be narrative diversions, are now revealed to have been intrinsic to the series’ overall story arc and mythology, from the start. The episode features all of the series’ strong points–its expert character development, its surprises, its wit–and is even more finely composed than ever before. Additionally, it makes MacPherson, the season’s Big Bad, even bigger and badder than we’d have guessed. To put it succinctly, the man scares Mrs. Frederic, and that’s saying something.
Warehouse 13‘s first season is capped off with a truly fantastic cliffhanger, one that incorporates a plot twist within a plot twist, a character reveal that changes all we thought we knew about this person while raising even more questions, a life-or-death situation for at least one of the characters, and the entire world of the series potentially crumbling around our heroes’ heads. Now, this, my friends, is a season finale.
Related posts:
- Warehouse 13 2.01: “Time Will Tell”
- Warehouse 13 2.02: “Mild Mannered”
- Warehouse 13 2.03: “Beyond Our Control”
- Warehouse 13 2.06: “Around the Bend”
- Warehouse 13 2.08: “Merge With Caution”
