Warehouse 13 Returns!


As much as I hate Siffie, I have to respect some of their choices over the last few years. One of those choices was to kill Stargate Universe. The other was to bring Warehouse 13 into existence and to continue to renew it year after year. If you’ve never heard of Warehouse 13, I strongly suggest you take a look at it; I’ll even give you an idea of what it’s like by comparing it to a probably much more popular show: J. J. Abram’s Fringe.

The first thing you need to know is that WH13 is the funny twin of Fringe. Both shows debuted in the same season, focus on weird occurrences in a X-Files sort of way, and seem to possess nearly identical character hierarchies: the main characters (a white male and female) are employed by a major government law enforcement agency, supervised by a mysterious black character (Broyles in Fringe, Mrs. Frederic in WH13), coupled with a cranky and weird older white guy (Walter Bishop on Fringe, Artie Nielsen on WH13) who is assisted by a young woman (Astrid Farnsworth in Fringe, Leena) of questionable ethnicity. WH13 adds a few more characters, but as you can see there are really strong parallels between the two series, and the key difference is that while Fringe is generally a very serious show, following in the footsteps of Fox’s X-Files franchise and Abrams’ Lost, Warehouse 13 goes the other direction, refusing to take itself seriously at all.

In fact, last night’s season premier made me laugh harder than I have all year, with lines from main character Pete Lattimer such as “I once put on Abe Lincoln’s hat and had an uncontrollable urge to free Mrs. Fredrics.” The chemistry between characters and actors on the show make WH13 one of the best acted and alluring shows I’ve seen on Siffie or many other channels all year, and they should be proud of the work they do.

Over the last three years, WH13 has even snagged some fairly big names as guest stars. Among those are Tia Carrere and Lindsay Wagner. Mark Sheppard, whom you know as Romo Lampkin on Battlestar Galactica and as Crowley on Supernatural, was a regular on the show as Benedict Valda until his character’s self-sacrifice in last year’s season finale.

Warehouse 13 combines science fiction with humor in a way that hasn’t been seen since Firefly, and I, for one, am glad that it’s on the air and pray that it will be for a long time to come. It doing the one thing that so much of television is failing to do these days, and that is entertain me. I enjoy watching a lot of my favorite shows because I’m curious how the plot points are going to work out, or I’m trying to solve the puzzles that the characters are confronted with as they are, but so often I’m not actually entertained by the show so much as fascinated by it. Warehouse 13 does both, and I’m thankful to the writers, producers, cast and crew, and even Siffie for this show.

In short, go watch Warehouse 13 on Monday nights on Siffie. Oh, and this doesn’t change my view point that Siffie needs to stop dissing me and all the rest of the geeks and nerds that got it to where it is.

Review: I Am Number Four


I saw I Am Number Four on Thursday, when I was in a really bad mood, so take some of the things I say here with a grain of salt. That said, it was a decent movie, with good special effects, and well acted. The thing I liked best about it was that I personally didn’t know of any of the actors in the film. That’s not to say they’re unknowns, I just didn’t know them. I love the big name stars as much as anyone, but they can’t and shouldn’t be in everything, and I was pleased that they weren’t here. That said, the lack of big names is probably the reason this movie isn’t doing as well as it probably should. I’ve only seen a handful of commercials for it since its release a week ago, and the only reasons I watched it were because I remembered something vaguely interesting from the trailer I saw months ago, and it was starting shortly after I got to the theater.

Given what Wikipedia has to say about the film and the book it was based on, I’m no longer surprised by the faults I had with the film. The basic story is that 18 aliens from the world of Lorien came to Earth as their world was attacked by another alien race called the Mogadorians. Half of the Loriens were special children, gifted with special powers called “legacies”, each sent with a guardian to protect them. The goal was that they would be sent to Earth to be raised and taught how to fight back so that they could one day rescue their world, but apparently by the time the film starts things have gone worse than they imagined. The Mogadorians, or Mogs as they’re frequently called in the film, apparently have either completely wiped out their world, or are well on their way to doing such, and have followed the 18 to Earth to finish the job. In fact, before the film even starts, two of the children, and at least three of the guardians have been killed by the Mogs. The film opens with the death of Number 3 and his guardian.

Immediately afterwards we meet Number 4, known to humanity as John Smith. My first, irritated, impression of him was that he was a typical privileged  white kid, living the dream life in a tropical area, just like every one of us would do if we could afford to do so. His good life is interrupted by the a glowing and burning light that erupts from his leg, after Number 3 is killed, while he’s at a party on a beach at night. Needless to say, he and his guardian had to immediately uproot themselves and leave for less green pastures and anonymity in Paradise, Ohio. Thankfully, his guardian is a grumpy, pragmatic and practical man by the name of Henri, which slowly began to make me appreciate the characters and the actors cast to play them.

I’m not going to go any further with the plot, because it’s too simplistic and cliche to require further explanation, and that is my chief problem with the film. Everything in it’s been done before, and been done better. Everything from the revelations of who the characters are to the fight scenes has been done before and little in the film is unique or inspiring. The fight scenes would be right at home in the X-Men or Fantastic Four movies. There are “I Want To Believe” posters in a conspiracy theory organizations’ house/hideout straight out of the X-Files. The secrets to finding the other Loriens is in the hands of a missing man that will probably turn out to have betrayed them in the books or a later film. There’s even predictable and cliche high school angst and pranks. None of this is original and there was no interesting spin put on them to keep me interested while they paraded around in front of me. Don’t get me wrong, these things weren’t bad, they just weren’t special. There was a point I felt I could get up and walk out of the movie and still know exactly how everything would end.

The problem with most teen oriented books and movies is that they reproduce the popular thing of the moment, and rarely do anything completely original. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, while mostly an exception to that rule, gives in to it here and there becoming a teen romance novel briefly instead of a fantasy novel. I Am Number Four clearly focused on being that thing, and as such failed to fully work out the setup of the story. For instance, John clearly knows at the start of the film that he’s not human and that he’s from another world, but he seems to only have a limited knowledge of his people and of his own uniqueness. Henri had to explain to him why he had light shooting out of his hands and how to control it at one point in the movie. If he was from an alien world and he and his fellows were destined to save the planet, shouldn’t he have known how and why they were selected to do so? Otherwise why shouldn’t it have been some other individuals? Similarly, the “legacies” should have had a history on their home-world that would have been carried through legend if not documented fact, so he should have been quite aware of his potential, even if he was only just discovering it. Finally on this point, how could he be properly trained and prepared to save anyone without knowing anything about these legacy powers?

What made John and the other eight so special that the Mags had to hunt them down and eliminate them after conquering their world and wiping out the population? Well, we don’t find out in this movie, and probably will never see an answer in a sequel to this movie because I doubt that there will be a sequel. The book series may or may not have continued, and so the answer may be there, but the marketing support for the film isn’t sufficient enough to keep the movie in the awareness of movie goers, and therefore likely will not net enough revenue to warrant a sequel.

The movie has problems because, I suspect, the underlying story has problems but in truth I’ve seen far worse films than I Am Number Four. Would I pay money to see it again? No, not likely, but I wouldn’t change the channel if I came across it on TV. Review score would be 7 out of 10.