‘Warehouse 13’ 4.19 and 4.20 Episode Recap and Review: All the Time in the World and The Truth Hurts

Time once more for an epic, two-part season finale on Warehouse 13!

When our story begins, Pete and Myka are using the Durational Spectrometer to piece together the series of events that led to Claudia’s bronzing. Paracelsus saw Claud as a threat, and rather than throw her in the Bronzer for easy thawing later, he used and then stole the Bronze Stele that makes the Bronzer go. Claudia can’t be unbronzed without it, and her bronze state is very unstable. She’s slowly crumbling into glittery metal dust. Paracelsus left a ransom note on the Bronzer: “Sutton knows what I want.” The team is going to have to find both Paracelsus and Sutton in order to save Claudia.

Strategic use of the tabloids leads Pete, Myka, and Charlotte to Sutton, who’s running a Lonely Hearts con on a Russian duchess. They capture him and head to Paracelsus’s lab in Istanbul (was Constantinople) with two of the three pieces of the Philosopher’s Stone. Paracelsus wants it back in order to turn himself immortal and his brother, sister-in-law, and nephew mortal again (that’s right. Spike and Giles are brothers. Ponder that one for a moment). Of course, immortality comes at a cost. It took the lives of an entire village to turn the Sutton family into immortals. When Sutton found out that little tidbit, he turned his brother in. Agents from Warehouse 9 got there first and bronzed the dickens out of the crazy alchemist.

Paracelsus captures Sutton and Charlotte and lures Pete and Myka into a trap using the Stele. By the time the agents have found their way out, the entire Sutton family is mortal again – Charlotte a little moreso, as she’s been shot by Paracelsus. Nick and Sutton are forced to leave her body behind as the lab crumbles around them.

Pete and Myka are just able to get the stele back in time. Fortunately, Artie had bought them a few more hours by injecting Claudia with DNA from a family member. He says it’s from Josh, but Steve can tell that Artie isn’t telling the truth about that. As soon as Claudia has her feet under her again, she can sense a great disturbance in the Warehouse force.

Meanwhile, both the Warehouse and Mrs. Frederic have been acting off. The computers are slow, and Mrs. Frederic is losing her memory. When they investigate the Restricted Files to find more information on Paracelsus, all of the information is redacted, even from the Regents’ files. Mr. Kosan comes in to help, acknowledging that they need to bring in the Keeper – the one person per generation who keeps all the secrets of all of the Warehouses as a living memory. In this generation, it’s Abigail. She communes with the secret-keeping Artifact to reveal the reason Paracelsus was bronzed, and the reason the Warehouse and Mrs. Frederic are sick: Paracelsus was the Caretaker of Warehouse 9, and his bond takes precedence over that of Mrs. Frederic.

Paracelsus has to be taken alive, or the transfer of Caretakership could kill Mrs. Frederic. The gang tracks him to San Francisco, where he’s been spending a lot of time in cancer wards. He isn’t hurting people, though. He’s curing their cancer. A witness says that he’s going “where the air has yielded to the stone” and that he could see the cancer in her eyes (because that’s not going to be vitally important later or anything). “Air yielding to stone” turns out to be petrified wood from the mouth of the Euphrates River, the final element in the immortality process. Pete, Myka, and Sutton arrive just as he’s completing his transformation, killing all of the cancer patients he’d just healed. Pete manages to capture him anyway and bring him back to the Warehouse, but he’s too strong for the Caretaker transfer and too canny for the Bronzer.

At this point, things are a little calmer at least, so Myka bows out to head to the hospital. Her doctor is a little concerned about some pain she’d been having, so he wants to perform a biopsy right away. Pete’s not happy about her going alone, but there’s too much going on for him to leave. That’s not the only important conversation happening, either. Artie has to tell Claudia where he got the familial DNA. Her sister Claire is still alive, and it sounds like she’s next season’s Big Bad. Definitely trouble on the horizon.

Pete heads down to Paracelsus’s cell in order to get him to figure out how to save Mrs. Frederic. Paracelsus tells him that Mrs. Frederic isn’t the only one in danger. Myka’s cancer has spread, and she’s dying. In a rather fantastic temptation scene, Pete decides to turn Paracelsus mortal again so that the alchemist can save Myka without being a danger to everyone else. Of course, this was Paracelsus’s Xanatos Gambit all along. Using the Philosopher’s Stone in proximity to the Warehouse gives Paracelsus total control over it. The Warehouse is now his own personal playground, and he wants the agents out.

Claudia is able to disconnect Mrs. Frederic from the Warehouse, saving her life, but now Claudia is the only one standing between Paracelsus and his evil schemes. The gang manages to get out of the Warehouse, but Claudia can’t leave. The Warehouse wants her to stay, and she’s the only one who can fight Paracelsus from the inside. Everyone else leaves as Paracelsus seals off the Warehouse with Claudia and himself inside. Now the fight is on.

Oh, I already can’t wait for next season, even though it’s the last. I absolutely love the way we’ve watched Claudia grow up over the course of the series, and it looks like this storyline is going to be the culmination of that. Seriously, I got chills on that last shot of Claud and Paracelsus squaring off like it’s high noon at the Warehouse Corral, and the way everyone had a ‘family’ moment as they left her behind… just awesome.

I also have to commend both Anthony Head and Eddie McClintock for taking some brilliant beats in the “your friend is dying” scene. That hit hard, even if we could kind of see it coming as soon as Myka said “everything’s going to be okay.” (Kiss of death. She could have just said “I’ll be right back.”) In my personal, get-me-through-the-hiatus, head canon, Claudia will become the Caretaker when Paracelsus goes down, and her new bond with the Warehouse will lead her to something that will cure Myka. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

We’ll be sitting down with the cast of Warehouse 13 at San Diego Comic Con next week. Let us know in the comments or on the forums if you have any questions you want asked!

Best Quotes:

Pete: “I bet he’s that Nigerian prince who keeps emailing me! [to actual Nigerian prince] Not you.”

Artie: “The Farnsworth is more than an oversized iPhone.”

Pete: “So I ask myself, ‘what could possibly make a creepy basement even creepier?’ I know! Make it also be a morgue!”

Claudia: “He’s a pretty smart boy when he’s not thinking about cookies or boobies.”

Things to Ponder:

• Artie said that Mrs. Frederic may never be the caretaker again, and there are only six episodes left in the entire series. Does this mean that we’re going to get to see Claudia become the new caretaker?
• What was with Ghost Leena’s appearance? And for that matter, has Abigail always been the Keeper, or was that Leena’s job?
• Artifact rundown (so many this time!!): Genghis Khan’s Mace, Richard III’s Crown, Stalin’s Gold Star Medal, Caligula’s Sandals, Bronze Stele, Folsom Prison Ball and Chain, Barry Seal’s Radio, Binnacle from USS Squalus, Coleridge’s Fishing Net, Queen Ka’ahumanu’s Lei Niho Palaoa, Copper Bowls of Life and Death, 16th Century Ear Trumpet, John Baird’s Scanning Disk, Hippocrates’s Fibula, and “Chinese dude’s scalpel”