Warehouse 13: Review: Season 3 Ep 6

Eureka‘s Fargo creates an artifact-powered VR game, which goes horribly wrong, so it’s Warehouse 13 to the rescue. Meanwhile Jinks and Artie re-encounter Special Agent Stukowski…

For the second time in three weeks, we have a call-back to last season’s “13.1,” this time with Douglas Fargo of Eureka showing up once again. This time it’s a VR game that Fargo is developing along with two programming nerds. (Presumably this takes place between the fourth and fifth seasons of Eureka, since the fifth season has Fargo too engrossed in the Astraeus project to have time for this.)

Fargo and one of the programmers are trapped in the VR game, and the other programmer does what he was told to do in case something went wrong: call Claudia. Along with Pete and Myka, she shows up at the California house where this is happening. It soon becomes apparent why Claudia was the emergency contact rather than Sheriff Carter or Henry Deacon: the VR game only works if you drink tea from Beatrix Potter’s tea set (the pieces of which Artie has been chomping at the bit for, for years).

Pete and Claudia go into the fantasy game, which is based on Warehouse 13 (complete with a rhyming Artie dressed in full-on wizard garb and with even bigger eyebrows, as well as Leena with wings and Claudia as a princess—both women also have large protrusions, as it were). Pete is a barbarian, Claudia an elf. Later on, Myka joins in as what appears to be a dominatrix archer…

If this sounds like fun, you’re underselling it. The VR game is a hilarious sendup of first-person shooters, fantasy videogames, and both Warehouse 13 and Eureka. Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any more wonderful, they play the Star Trek fight music during a climactic fight between Pete-the-barbarian and the bad guy.

Elsewhere, Jinks and Artie cross paths once again with Special Agent Stukowski from “The New Guy.” We get no closer to finding out who she really works for, nor what their agenda is, but that plot definitely does thicken. And Aaron Ashmore gets to prove that he works well with Saul Rubinek, too. (We just need to see him with Myka now…)

Verdict: A delightfully off-the-wall A-plot, with a sinister advancing of the background story.

Episode 6 “Don’t Hate the Player”: 8/10

Keith R.A. DeCandido