GregHowley.com

Linda and I saw the two hour pilot of Warehouse 13 last night. After having looked forward to the show for so long, I've got to say that I'm a bit disappointed. I'd say that the show could best be described as a cross between The X-Files, Men in Black, Ghostbusters, and Scooby Doo, with just a hint of Fringe thrown in. When the goofy scientist guy made the grandiose announcement "This is America's attic." and the show cut to a black screen showing "WAREHOUSE 13" in red letters, I began to worry.

Hang in for a minute now while I totally spoil the basic premise of the show. Two federal agents who absolutely hate each other are assigned together to work at the super-secret Warehouse 13, and must start work without being given any real idea of what the warehouse is about. Although they're given a brief and unconvincing explanation, they're still far from believing that anything truly supernatural exists there. And although their involvement is ostensibly critical, no real effort is made to convince them that the stuff in the warehouse is all freaking magic.

So here we've got the token goofy scientist guy, who is a poor attempt at John Noble's character Walter Bishop. He manages and oversees a warehouse the size of Soho, in which are housed thousands of magical artifacts, many of which I would guess are capable of destroying the planet. And aside from its remote location, thick walls, and a single retinal scanner, there is no real security present.

The sheer size of the warehouse makes locating and reaching a specific item quite the challenge. But Mr. Goofy scientist has multiple modes of conveyance at his disposal. He's got the golf cart thing that has a max speed of 3.5 miles per hour, and when that's too slow, he's got a zip line probably about two miles long. Even with the double safety harness, it's somewhat surprising that he survives, given that the end of his trip down the zip line ends with him pulling a release and falling to the cement floor while he's likely travelling at least 30-40 miles per hour. After having taken this recklessly speedy trip, his return must be made on foot while carrying a large weighty painting, which I can only imagine takes a few hours. Couldn't such an important and well-funded government project have a better method available? A small truck perhaps?

The two new agents assigned to Warehouse 13 are given about four minutes of briefing before being sent off on their first mission. They obviously think that everything they've been told is bullshit. To me, this firstly says something about their level of professionalism, and secondly says something about the conscientiousness of their superiors who were so careless in their briefing.

The guy is mister intuition. This is beaten into the viewer relentlessly. Yes - he's got ESP-like intuition. And he's not even a woman! Oddly, he is very childish. While I laughed at his "Ooh! Cookie!" moment, his reckless over-enthusiastic inhibition-free inspection of everything in sight after entering the warehouse felt just a bit too childish.

Then there's the woman. She's uptight to the point of being a seriously annoying character. And her fight scene in the beginning was laughable. When a director takes a female actor who probably runs and throws like a girl and tries to put her into a fight scene against an obviously in-shape male, it just doesn't work. Gender equality notwithstanding, males are stronger than females, and generally not slower. In my amateur opinion, there are likely women in existence out there who are trained well enough in hand-to-hand combat to beat the average in-shape male opponent. There are likely even highly trained women who are good enough to beat trained men. But my guess is that they're very rare and when they make an appearance, a big deal is made of that skill. Such rare women would likely be best utilized where their superlative melee skills combined with their apparent vulnerability would make them an asset. Not on quests to find magical artifacts. And a woman with such combat skill that she could defeat a trained man so easily as we saw in the opening moments of Warehouse 13 would not move so awkwardly. She'd move more like this woman. I'd much rather see the type of confident and capable federal agent we see in Fringe's Olivia Dunham, who's not a melee expert, but knows when to pull a gun.

We'll likely watch the next episode of Warehouse 13 before giving up on the show entirely, but the outlook is not good.