Don’t sweat, Warehouse 13 fans; our intrepid team is back on the job.
The series returns with 10 new episodes in Season 4.5 at 9 p.m. Monday on Syfy.
Warehouse 13 is so successful that the network expanded the Season 4 episode order from 13 to 20, and it’s time to find out what happened since we left our heroes hanging.
For those out of the loop, Warehouse 13 follows the adventures (with frequent doses of humor) of a team of super, super secret Secret Service agents who’ve been assigned to a super, super secret government facility in the middle of nowhere (well, actually South Dakota, which is pretty much the same thing) that houses thousands of supernatural artifacts, gizmos and gadgets.
The Warehouse gang spend their time “snagging, bagging and tagging” dangerous artifacts and storing them in the Warehouse to keep the world safe from their deleterious effects.
Artifact examples: Lucrezia Borgia’s comb, Sylvia Plath’s typewriter, driftwood from the Titanic. They go on and on.
Joanne Kelly and Eddie McClintock portray agents Myka Bering and Pete Lattimer.
Saul Rubinek is Artie Nielsen, the special agent in charge of the warehouse. He has been there more than three decades.
The resident computer whiz (every secret agent show has one) is feisty young Claudia Donovan, played by Allison Scagliotti.
And Aaron Ashmore plays Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent Steve Jinks. He was killed in Season 3, but was resurrected by Claudia (it’s a long story) early in Season 4.
There was a doozy of a cliffhanger back in October. We pick up where we left off.
In “The Living and the Dead,” Artie has infected the Warehouse team - and the world - with the Black Orchid Artifact’s deadly English Sweating Sickness. (In Arkansas, we call that “August.”)
If our heroes can’t reverse what Artie has done, the world will be swept by the deadliest pandemic since 1528.
Not to give anything away, but there are nine more episodes this season. Yes, they figure it all out. It’s how they do it that makes for fun viewing.
Guest stars for Season 4.5 include Polly Walker (Caprica, Rome), who plays Charlotte Dupres, a historian who knows more about the Warehouse than she lets on, and Kelly Hu (The Scorpion King, Cradle 2 the Grave), who joins the cast as Abigail Cho, a protege of Artie’s supervisor, Mrs. Frederic (CCH Pounder).
Returning guest stars include Jaime Murray as H.G. Wells, and Kate Mulgrew as Pete’s mother and Warehouse regent Jane Lattimer.
What’s ahead the rest of this season? Pete and Myka find themselves trapped inside a black-and-white noir world, passing through solid matter while chasing a vintage race car, investigating people falling from the sky in Las Vegas, dealing with earthquakes inside the Warehouse and, finally, discovering a cache of long missing and extremely dangerous artifacts from the old Warehouse 12.
With the new series Defiance preceding Warehouse 13 at 8 p.m., Syfy hopes to have a solid two-hour block to satisfy viewers looking for something a little different on Monday nights.
Fallout. Did you watch NBC’s Hannibal last week? It wasn’t the episode originally set to air. Producer Bryan Fuller and the network decided to pull the original episode following the shootings in Newtown, Conn., and the bombings in Boston.
The episode featured guest star Molly Shannon as a woman who brainwashes children to kill other children.
Not only that, but ABC delayed last week’s episode of Castle in which Detective Kate Beckett (series star Stana Katic) steps on a pressure-sensitive bomb and can’t move. The bomb episode, “Still,” will now air at 9 p.m. Monday.
I find it a little disingenuous and hypocritical when networks suddenly get all sensitive when their series that revolve around murder, mayhem and body counts are reflected by an incident in real life.
Are they to be applauded for being socially responsible? Place your bets now for which network (after a “respectful” passage of time) will be the first to cash in on the tale of two brothers turned bombers.
NBC’s oops. NBC pulled Ready for Love off the air so fast, it made producer Eva Longoria’s head spin.
The insipid dating show lasted all of two episodes. What were they thinking putting this swill on the air in the first place?
To fill the void, NBC is moving Grimm to 9 p.m. beginning Tuesday. Dateline replaces Grimm at 8 p.m. Fridays.
NBC hasn’t decided what to do with the remaining Ready for Love episodes. Maybe they’ll burn them off on Saturday nights. Maybe over the summer or online. Or maybe, and this is the best idea, toss them in the Dumpster and promise never, ever to do it again.
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Style, Pages 48 on 04/28/2013