Warehouse 13 Review

I suppose I’m roughly a week behind with this review — not that I had it scheduled or anything; I saw the pilot posted on Hulu and decided to give it a go.  Going in I had little knowledge of what the show was about other than the obvious, that Warehouse 13 is home to a vast number of supernatural objects.  My initial thoughts were something along the lines of, “Hey it’s a show kind of about the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark!” — and if I can be so bold, that HAD to have been the original pitch and/or concept that the creators thought up.

As for the pilot, well, it was so-so.  It definitely falls into the realm of TV pilots where it’s hard to make heads or tails of what the show is going for, and therefore it is extremely hard to make definite judgments just yet.  Here is your basic set-up:

Secret Service Agents Myka Bering and Pete Lattimer stumble across an odd artifact while on duty to protect the President.  Since they have much more important issues, neither think much of the artifact until it’s stolen by a mysterious, mad-scientist looking man who disappears on a rooftop.  Soon after, both agents are given orders to relocate themselves to a set of coordinates that lead them to, you guessed it, Warehouse 13.  Here they discover the mysterious man from the rooftop — Artie — who seems to be playing caretaker to the warehouse, and who is also offering them jobs to come work for the big brother government agency that runs it.  Their job?  Investigate various cases where a potential supernatural artifact may be involved.

Sound familiar?  Kind of an X-Files/Fringe kind of thing, yes?  Well, it is and it isn’t.  Both of those shows dealt/deal with an underlying vast conspiracy of one form or another.  Warehouse 13 doesn’t take itself so seriously, which can be good or bad depending on your tastes.  From what I observed of the pilot, it seems like it might be one of those “every week a new mystery!” kind of shows, and I personally am not quite sure I’m ready for another one of these at this point in time (I’m taking my chances with Fringe right now).  On the other hand, the show does have a bit of cheekiness to it that I’ve grown to appreciate in shows over the years.  And how could it not be cheeky, one of it’s creators, Jane Espenson, was once a prominent writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel — more recent projects include Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, and Battlestar spin-off Caprica, of which she is showrunner.

And perhaps that is the show’s biggest charm: an innocence akin to the first season of Buffy.  My only real complaints are with some of the characters.  Artie can be a little too kooky at times, and Agent Lattimer a bit too cocky (cockiness has to be EARNED, man!).  On the other hand I did find Agent Bering to be a wonderful character — smart, flawed, with a beautiful pair of sad and skeptical eyes.

The show seems to have a lot of potential that, again, was sadly underused in the pilot.  I wanted to see more of the various “artifacts” inside of the warehouse!  I wanted to know more about the warehouse itself (the show is called Warehouse 13)!  I don’t know how much I’ll enjoy a new mystery each week but I do think the show can get away with it as long as the artifact (i.e., MacGuffin) is something that can really intrigue me and pull my interest — the hair comb used in the pilot was rather boring.  And all of that being said, I suppose I can at least say that there have been sci-fi/fantasy TV show pilots in the past that I didn’t particularly “love” — Buffy, The X-Files, The Invisible Man — yet to this day I adore each of them.

As for Warehouse 13, I’ll definitely catch the next couple of episodes… for now.

Warehouse 13 airs Tuesday’s at 9 P.M. on Syfy.