‘Warehouse 13’ 5.01 Episode Recap and Review: Endless Terror

Since it’s been a while, let me remind you where we left things last season. Myka thinks she might have cancer. It takes a while, but she finally faces it and goes in for emergency surgery. Paracelsus, the alchemist, used to be a Caretaker of Warehouse 9 before he went off the deep end and started experimenting with artifacts. One such experiment left him immortal (at the expense of about 200 lives), but the Warehouse team captured him and brought him in. While in captivity, Paracelsus convinces Pete that Myka is dying and offers to help him to find a way to cure her. Pete attempts to restore Paracelsus’s mortality, but ends up binding him to the Warehouse, instead. The team escapes, but for Claudia, who can feel the Warehouse needing her to stay.

And that’s what you missed on Warehouse 13!

Season 5 picks up immediately on the heels of the season 4 finale. Claudia goes to confront Paracelsus one-on-one. The Warehouse won’t let Paracelsus kill her, but the alchemist quickly deduces that if he has control of the Warehouse and Claudia is part of that, he can control Claudia’s body, as well. He forces her to help him gather the necessary artifacts for his next big project.

Outside, Steve and Artie are trying to break through the Warehouse shield, but with limited success. Pete brings Myka home from the hospital (she’s totally fine now, btw. False alarm!) to help. Since Myka’s the only one who’s read the Regents’ addendums to the manual, she’s able to rejigger the shield so that they can regain entrance to the Warehouse without alerting Paracelsus. Once inside, Steve and Pete go attempt to create a distraction while Artie and Myka make their way down to the Eldunari. Pete and Steve’s distraction is countered by a well-armed and still-controlled Claudia. Fortunately, Artie and Myka are able to reignite the Eldunari, disconnecting Paracelsus from the Warehouse and freeing Claudia before she can actually hurt her team.

It’s not in time to stop Paracelsus from carrying out his master plan, though. He’s managed to cobble together several artifacts in order to create a working time machine. He jumps through the portal back to Warehouse 9, changing something massive back in the past. The cozy, steampunk-ish Warehouse morphs into a sterile research facility as the team watches. They’re unaffected by the changes themselves, as Artie managed to grab Louis XIV’s dining forks beforehand. (Evidently, Versailles had some issues with the timestream. Wonder if that had anything to do with clockwork robots?)

Pete and Claudia head for the new Warehouse’s computer hub while Artie, Myka, and Steve start rebuilding the time machine in order to follow Paracelsus back to Warehouse 9. In the process, they learn that Paracelsus has been replicating artifacts to build Warehouse Borg, who are now under the command of a not-dead Benedict Valda. On top of that, he’s been using the artifacts to conduct torturous research on human test subjects. Further investigation tells us that the future changed when Paracelsus jumped back to Warehouse 9 and killed all of the Regents in one fell swoop, granting him sole power over the Warehouse. With the time machine back in place, Pete and Myka go back to Warehouse 9, leaving Artie to distract the guards, Claudia to rescue him, and Steve to keep everything running.

Back in the 1500s, Pete and Myka run into Agent Lisa DaVinci (yes, that DaVinci). Once they’ve convinced her that they’re the good guys, she helps them to save the Regents before Paracelsus is able to kill them with a tusk from the only elephant ever killed by a boa constrictor (yeah, that one seems like a stretch to me, too). Honestly, the time spent back at Warehouse 9 is pretty short, but there are a lot of fun things to see: the precursors to the goo and the Durational Spectrometer, for example. Pete and Myka rebronze Paracelsus, returning the present Warehouse to its current state just in the nick of time.

Pete and Myka are home, and everything is back the way it should be. Claudia is still getting a vibe, though. She says it’s big, and it’s both good and bad. I’m guessing it has something to do with the fact that evil!Valda was able to snag a time-anchor fork and hitch a ride back to our Warehouse. What do you think?

Oh, Warehouse 13, how I’ve missed you and the way you send me running to Google to learn more about artifacts. If you can’t tell from the list below, this was an extremely artifact-heavy episode. So much researching!

For all that I adore this show, this episode wasn’t without its flaws. Granted, what gripes I have were answered pretty clearly by Executive Producer Jack Kenny in a recent press call. They had to get both Paracelsus and Myka’s cancer scare out of the way pretty quickly to make room for the stories that they wanted to tell in the remaining six episodes of the show, and I can understand that. It did make parts of this episode a bit jarring, especially in regards to Myka’s not-cancer, but I agree with the decision. As much as I would like to see how that story would have developed over five episodes in a full-length season, I’d much rather devote the episodes we have left to the bigger stories.

So we know that Valda is going to come back and haunt us (and wasn’t it awesome to see Mark Sheppard again?), but do you think we’ve seen the last of Paracelsus? I’m betting on an un-bronzing in one of the last episodes.

Best Quotes:

Artie: “[There’s a] backlog since I turned evil and tried to poison the world.”
Steve: “That’s the best excuse.”

Steve: “He’s like that annoying paperclip!”

Things to Ponder:

• What’s evil!Valda up to in our Warehouse?
• Do you think Claudia is going to become the permanent Caretaker before the end of the series?
• To refresh: Ralph Brunsky is the kid who bullied Pete back in the day.
• Artifact Roundup (and ye gods and little fishes, there are a lot of them): Swarzschild’s pocket watch,  Al Capone’s machine guns, Hitler’s… double explody thing, Sargon the Great’s mirrors, Marquis de Laplace’s telescope, Aristarchus’s sun dial, Achilles’s arrow, H.G. Wells’s time machine, Louis XIV’s dinner forks, Chester Moore Hall’s lens, Spine of Saracen, stationary bike, Joan of Arc’s helmet, Blackwood’s stethoscope, Tower of London rack spindle, elephant tusk