Well, the Warehouse's GSA is going to be a lot smaller next year...

[seriousfic]

It would maybe be a little petulant to criticize Warehouse 13 for killing off two gay characters and a black woman in its finale, since it's not as if there's a vast array of straight side-characters going unscathed--a diverse cast leads to diverse deaths when the cast takes hits. I am wondering why a redemption-seeking ex-sociopath from Victorian England somehow needs less said about her than, say, Pete. We get it, you're going to make a pop culture reference when confronted with a situation where a pop culture reference isn't specifically called for. This season, they had to introduce his long-lost mother to give him something to do. What's next, an evil twin? And I've never cared for BatArtie.

But, who lives and who dies aside, a much bigger issue I have with the show is that it simply won't pull the trigger. Leave aside the question of why they can clearly intend for two female characters to be in love yet play coy about it, in 2011, in the supposedly socially transgressive genre of sci-fi (Archie comics has a gay character who's married. Everything that's not Archie comics should be more edgy than Archie comics). The thing is, the show keeps pointing to a grander story, the grandest story it can tell, really, and then backing away.

Basically, time and again the show hints, suggests, and outright depicts the Regents as fallible, corrupt, wrong, then goes back to them being the authority figures that everyone listens to until they don't. It started in the first season with McPherson, who talked a good game about wanting to use the Artifacts for good instead of storing them in the Warehouse. And yet, his definition of "good" was apparently selling weapons of mass destruction to skeevy underworld types. Immediately afterward, it turned out he was motivated by nihilistic atheism. He thought there was no heaven or hell, so why not be evil? Because that's the only way someone could be against the Regents, if they had literally declared themselves to be evil.

Then comes H.G. Wells and bronzing. We're told that the Regents take particularly "evil" people and sentence them to a living death so they're unable to harm the world, but the Regents can still pick their brain from time to time. That's barbaric, and Helena suggests she was set up. She quickly turns out to be evil and crazy, setting aside the notion that turning people into statues is the definition of "cruel and unusual punishment."

Then this season, Sykes. At first, it appears he was simply a kid who was crippled by Warehouse agents taking away a healing Artifact, so now he wants it back, along with revenge. There are all kinds of story avenues to make this a sympathetic, interesting character who's still in the wrong. What if the Warehouse only suspected that the Artifact would harm him down the line, or wanted to study it so they could duplicate its powers, or even if a Regent had pilfered the Artifact to help a loved one (one of our cast, maybe?). Then it quickly turns out that the Artifact changed his character sheet to Chaotic Evil, and yet our heroes take responsibility for his darkness anyway. Whotta guy(s)!

(I'm not sure why the Warehouse agents won't negotiate with Sykes. "We can't let you have this Artifact that will turn you evil, since you're... already clearly evil. God knows what you'll do with a pair of evil working legs!")

We also had Mrs. Fredric torturing someone. At first, it appears Jinks gets fired because he objects to this, but soon enough it ends up that he was working for the Warehouse all along. So, the torture and his objection to it are swept neatly under the rug.

Finally, we learn the fate of H.G. Wells. While her personality was stored on a coin so she could continue to help the Warehouse, her body was used to house an entirely new individual, one who would by necessity be erased if Helena ever needed her body back. Long-term thinking, that. Now, the Regents claim this is the humane solution. I might be more inclined to believe them if their plan for dealing with Sykes wasn't to use Emily Lake (by their own thinking, a completely innocent woman, mind you) as bait. Yes, let the psychopaths who are willing to collapse buildings to get what they want go after a schoolteacher.

The solution to this is to destroy the Janus Coin Helena's consciousness is stored on--effectively, Helena herself--so Sykes can't possibly use her in his evil scheme. So now we're talking torture, brainwashing, and killing a prisoner in cold blood. At this point, it's not the Regents being in the wrong and the heroes having to work around them, it's the heroes themselves taking advantage of a clearly suicidal woman. Which begs the question of why we're differentiating between the heroes and the Regents at all.

So, time and time again, we have the Regents adopting an "ends justify the means" attitude that you'd think our heroes, who are meant to be Joe Sixpacks pulled into this crazy world, would question or object to. Yet the only person who calls the Regents on their shit is Claudia, and it's treated almost like a Start of Darkness, with her snapping at Captain Janeway and speaking in a creepy monotone voice about raising the dead.

Now, I do appreciate the subversion of the authority figures turning out to be good guys, but that only works if they're actually good guys and not freaky conspiracy people whose clear evilness just never gets talked about. For Christ's sake, Pete's mother turned out to be a Regent. Any writer worth their salt would have to fit that into a larger scheme, but we're meant to see that as just a kooky coincidence.

Comments

[mondoshawan555.livejournal.com]

Thank you. This is what bugs me most about the show but I could never put it into words like this.

[http://users.livejournal.com/thrace_/]

Pretty much this post is all the deeper thoughts that were trying to coalesce in my brain but couldn't because I was sobbing over H.G.

Like, fuck Jack Kenny, and not because he blew everyone up real good. He's like "Oh, gayness is just there, but we don't focus on it." WE'RE NOT THERE YET, JACK, REPRESENTATION NEEDS A LITTLE MORE THAN THAT.

[julietcetera.livejournal.com]

your line about archie comics is amazing and should really be on a tshirt, because it is the most true.

[mm-burnttoast.livejournal.com]

The only thing that saved this episode for me was the moments between Myka and H.G. It was obvious, to basically everyone, that they had chemistry. I'm annoyed that they didn't delve into it more. >.>

[tafkarfanfic.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there will be time. Artie had the watch and since when has W13 EVER committed to ANY good guy being dead?

[harper-m.livejournal.com]

You've articulated things about this show that I didn't even realize were bothering me until you put them in words. Everything that's initially shown as morally ambigious has to be made clear in W13. There aren't any shades - the enemy is ultimately irredeemably evil, and so the regents must be right in their actions. Maybe it's just the by-product of an inherently silly show trying to tell a serious story. I don't watch the show because it has objectively good writing. Most of the time, I watch it in spite of the writing, because I like the characters and it's entertaining. And, you know what? I'm fine with that. How does my light, fluffy show come back from this? Total destruction and the heroic self-sacrifice of one of the show's most engaging characters - followed up by the zany hi-jinks of the xmas special - make for the kind of tonal shift I just can't get behind.

tl;dr: I am made sad.

[ded-n-berried.livejournal.com]

I hate myself for watching SyFy network shows in the same way that I hate myself for dating a certain vapid, funny, pretty girl in college: the show is only half-aware what it's doing to MY EMOTIONS!! and sort of cavalier about the meaning of its actions regarding anything big-picture. I have decided to credit the wondrous actors for making me give a shit about WH13... so, as usual, I shall blame my shallow, sparkle-blinded id for my heartache.

Wonderful analysis. Thanks very much for articulating all this so succinctly.

[vincent-millay.livejournal.com]

This is everything I have been trying to say, put together in a coherent manner.

I think what bothered me the most about the whole thing was that, for a show that has never taken itself seriously, suddenly they tried delving into a story line that was serious. Like, they thought it would be a good idea, but had no idea how to actually execute it in a deliberate and well thought out manner.

The whole Pete's mom being a Regent thing bugs the crap out of me. I mean, sure, it's cool, the Regents suck but Pete's mom is one so we can't really think they do. But doesn't that say a lot about Pete as a character. He needs other people to make him interesting (Kelly, his ex-wife we never heard about, Myka to an extent, and now Regent Janeway).

Don't even get me started on killing HG. Ugh. Tears forever.

[fallon-ash.livejournal.com]

Yes! This! This is perfect. So perfect.

To me it feels a lot like the superhero thing, I was reading this and it made me think of Lois & Clark. Bad guys or good guys, good or evil, one or the other, and people can step over the line and change, but then they don't retain the qualities that had them on the other side because there's no grey area (though I really liked the call-back to HG's body count, and the way she smirked about it, because even if she's all redeemed now, that's still a part of her). This show has a similar approach to good/evil, and then they get so caught up in that they forget how to be multidimensional and utilize the grey area.

I do think it's important that they keep emphasizing that using artifacts is bad, because they're a bit lazy about that, and eventually it just might seem greedy of the warehouse people to lock them away and not be using them to do good. They use so many artifacts as it is, and while that's fun and all.... sometimes I really wish they wouldn't do that so easily.)

[theagonyofblank.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I was too busy crying over H.G. (and Steve as well) to really think about it, but this pretty much hits the nail on the head. But to its credit, Warehouse 13 has never really been a serious show, until they started to make it one this season (well, more serious than it's been before, at least). I'm not sure if this means they're going to take it in a more serious direction next year, and actually try and go places with the characters, or if they'll go back to being their more lighthearted selves.