Warehouse 13: Review: Season 3 Ep 9

Pete has the weirdest mother-son bonding experience ever while Myka and Claudia chase an artifact that vaporizes people.

Pete is totally, and justifiably, freaking out about the fact that one of the Regents is Jane Lattimer – his mother (played by Kate Mulgrew). Claudia is also freaking out about the Regents firing Steve.

Jane’s solution to the former is to try to find out more about A-Z Technologies, which Artie has learned is connected to the people who are targeting the Warehouse. The name is familiar to Jane from some time in her past, but she can’t remember from where. She uses an artifact to go back in her own memories – and Pete goes with her. So naturally, the event they go back to is Pete’s father’s funeral, which is also when Mrs. Frederick (who, of course, looks exactly the same as she does now) convinced her to come back to work for the Warehouse.

Artie’s solution to Claudia’s complaints is more basic: he sends her and Myka on a case. People are being vaporized in Portland. This half of the episode ranges from being a bog-standard artifact case to being actively annoying, in that multiple murders have gone on, and it’s treated with an appalling lack of urgency. The person wielding the artifact is a serial killer, but is never treated as such, which comes across as callous, to say the least. Plus Claudia’s moping over Steve is pretty much paint-by-numbers.

The Lattimer family flashback is of more interest, in part because Emily Andrews does an excellent Kate Mulgrew impersonation as the younger version of Jane, but mainly because it provides the most revelatory material about the wheelchair-bound menace to the Warehouse, who is revealed in both the flashback and the present-day by the episode’s end.

Verdict: Good flashback with strong character work on the Lattimer family, mediocre present-day story, with okay character work on Claudia, plus we finally get some forward movement on the over-plot.

Episode 9 “Shadows”: 7/10

Keith R.A. DeCandido

Check out our interview with Eddie McClintock here