WAREHOUSE 13 Enlightens

WAREHOUSE 13
Season 3, episode 09: “Shadows”

[photos: Syfy]

Lots of freaking out in this episode. All the way through. Some of it worked. Some, not so much.

Claudia’s freaking out because Jinks has been fired. Myka’s freaking out because the Regents are under attack. And their combined freakage makes for some fun by-play between the two and gives Artie a chance to compare them to the very obedient dog. Pete’s freaking out, but in a quieter way. The fact that his mother, Jane (Kate Mulgrew), is a Regent has just blown his mind.

Now, I must interject something here. Over at that other science fiction site – you know, the one with the 9 – there were quite a few comments about the fact that Pete was an ex-Marine, and why in the world would he be freaking out over the whole “need to know” thing? Let’s be frank, here. How many of us dissolve into blithering pools of “duh” when our parents (especially our mothers) are around? I’ve been guilty of it, and you have to cop to it, too. Pete’s behavior is textbook teenager/tween on the verge of independence. Which, if you think about it, may be where their relationship left off. And despite how close they are in age, Kate Mulgrew and Eddie McClintock totally sell the mother-son dynamic. Their bickering is spot on. There’s a natural rhythm, a patter, that you find with any strong parent-child relationship.

The threat to the Regents is a deep dark mystery, and the only clue anyone has is “A to Z Tech”. Jane has this in her head, but can’t remember the connection, so she and Pete use an artifact to go into Jane’s memories. The idea is for Pete to act as an anchor to pull Jane out. Except, of course, this is “Warehouse 13” and Pete’s the one who ends up leading the charge down memory lane. Which is consistent with what we saw in “Don’t Hate the Player” – the one with the most emotional baggage ends up affecting everyone else in the artifact-driven reality. Maybe the writers are trying to tell us something…

That emotional baggage takes us right into the funeral for Pete’s father, a firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty. More metaphor for the whole Lattimer family, making sacrifices for others. Even the fun bit with Mrs. Frederic showing up and looking the exact same as she does in the present… when she asks young Jane to come back to the Warehouse, it’s because of a boy. Jane takes some convincing, but she has Pete’s dad as an example. His speech to Pete: “We make that choice” when it comes to protecting others. It makes an impact, and that’s what takes Jane back into the job.

In the meantime, Myka and Claudia have been sent to Portland, where people are starting to disappear in a flash of light and cracking light bulbs and power outages. They trace the connection to a t-shirt shop owned by one of the guys who got fried, and find a link to a recently fired employee: Megan Reese (Caprica‘s Alessandra Torresani in blonde locks), who is also freaking out because she thinks she’s doing something to make people flash-fry whenever she gets angry. So Myka and Claudia tear apart the apartment looking for an artifact, but come up blank.

Down the rabbit hole, Pete and Jane are exploring the memories around Jane’s return to the Warehouse and her duties as a Regent, something in connection with a young boy with a bracelet made of string. McClintock and Mulgrew play off each other very well, and Kate can still do that soul-sick look she gave us so many times on “Voyager”. I was disappointed they didn’t find a younger actress that looked more like Kate, but it’s a minor quibble for me.

Back in Portland, Myka recognizes the flash-bomb shadow residue as being similar to what’s left behind after nuclear blasts, and she figures out the source of the attack came from a direction that eliminates Megan as a suspect. So now she has to piece together from the clues – glitter left behind at the scene, a yearbook, and a list of the t-shirt shop employees – to find that Megan has a stalker. So he’s got the artifact and is using it to blast anyone who upsets Megan.

The artifact is a pair of binoculars that belonged to the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. It took the emotional imprint from that moment and focuses a mini-nuclear blast powered by the strong emotions of anyone looking through them. I’m always impressed with the connections the writers make between events and artifacts. And the other one in this episode has subtext galore: Collodi’s Bracelet, which belonged Carlo Collodi, the writer of “The Adventures of Pinocchio”. Now, there are several layers in this one artifact as metaphor:

First, it’s a credit to the writers to come up with something like this. The bracelet is made from marionette strings, connecting it back to Pinocchio, but also making it a painfully powerful artifact for a young boy with dreams of playing baseball. When the bracelet is taken away, the boy’s strings are cut, and he has to go back to being in a wheelchair. The boy: Walter Sikes, who now is the man in charge of whatever nefarious organization is trying to take out the Regents.

But also, consider that Sikes (Anthony Michael Hall) has been pulling strings to get things this far, and now he and Marcus (Sasha Roiz) have their sights set on Jinks, which hints at further string-pulling and manipulation. It’s subtle, but it’s nicely done subtext. And the fact that the last bit of the episode makes it personal between Sikes and the Lattimers – well, we’ll have to see what happens next week, won’t we?

Fun lines of the epsiode:

Mrs. Frederic in response to Artie’s recognizing she just made a joke: “I’m very dry.”

Artie: “It’s not ‘Snag, Bag and Nag’.”

Glaring error if you watch for it?

I noticed that when Claudia picked up the binoculars, she held it with both hands, but had on only one glove. Granted, she wasn’t looking through them. Didn’t activate the power. But isn’t that a violation of protocols?

(And some others have pointed out that Myka and Claudia could have just used their Tesla guns to zap both Megan and her stalker, but note when Claudia points out that they’re pointing ray guns at an artifact that shoots out nuclear bomb type stuff… so, nyah.)

Technical kudos:

I really liked the transition into memory-world being a stained glass motif. It was a nice visual, and implied more of the idea that memories are sacred and shouldn’t be traipsed through lightly.

[Official Show Site at Syfy]