I was wondering how it is that Jinks has the ability to tell without fail when people are lying, the Alphas episode Never Let Me Go explains it; Jinks is an Alpha!
Similarly the since forgotten vibes of Pete's, and Myka's Monklike sense of perception.
Fridge Horror: In that case, wouldn't that mean Pete is going to become the Big Bad of season four, since IIRC, he's the one who closed the portal on Sykes, thus killing the latter?
It is Fridge Horror, since season four's Big Bad is Artie, who was responsible for the Reset Button that wrapped up season three.
It gets better Artie was dying and he didn't want to come back.
This will obviously be very YMMV, but here goes: in the alternate timeline in The Greatest Gift, there is a brief shot of a portrait of President McCain in Myka's office (just as there have been similar portraits of Presidents Bush and Obama in the Warehouse 13 / Eureka / Alphas universe). As strange as it sounds, this makes perfect sense in the context of the series:
In the very first episode, Pete and Myka meet Artie while he was trying to retrieve the Aztec Bloodstone. In the altered timeline, Artie is caught and is known to the country as a man who attempted to assassinate the president. We can assume that the president in question is Bush.
Arresting Artie would not have stopped Professor Gordon (the guy who first discovered the Bloodstone) from trying to kill the President. Without Pete's vibes there to tell the President not to come into the building yet, he probably either succeeded in killing / injuring the president or came far closer than he did in the regular Warehouse 13 universe. He was no doubt thrown in prison for the attempt, and Artie was assumed to be his collaborator.
You do realize he was actually going after the Mexican ambassador's daughter, right? (As in, a virgin sacrifice) She just happened to be standing near the President and so was assumed that the President was the target.
In the US, it is not totally unreasonable to assume that an assassination attempt would increase the popularity of the public figure in question (especially if they were injured - see Reagan and Giffords). As a result, it is possible that Bush's popularity increased after the events at the museum.
According to many commentators, Obama's victory was in part because of Bush's unpopularity. If Bush had been more popular, Obama could very well have lost.
Thus, the fact that Pete was never born could plausibly change the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and, as a result, of U.S. history. Whether this change would have been good or bad is obviously an exercise left to the reader.
The Trojan Horse is a huge artifact, so how did it get into the Warehouse? Easy. One property of the Trojan Horse has to be it's ability to easily get into secure areas...
A better explanation than a Hand Wave, would be to assume that it is very likely that they have a Bag of Holding or something else that can access Hammerspace among the artifacts. Given that there are probably multiple artifacts with that function, they probably even have recursive Hammerspace as well, which means that their storage space could be theoretically infinite, within the building we see. The hardest part would be recording where everything is.
Also, the simple answer would be that there's a shipping container sized door that they use for the big stuff (or some artifact-powered version there of) that they can use. It's just never used or mentioned very often because there's generally not going to be that many massive objects. Alternative or additionally, the front door (ie the one people use) is simply part of a larger front door which isn't opened unless you need to get something big into the warehouse. Again, since they almost never need to use it, it's never mentioned.
Just look at the establishing shot of the Warehouse in every episode. The entire front looks like a folding door. It could be that it used to be a hanger door but was replaced to be more secure.
Given the sheer power contained within, it's perhaps surprising that the Warehouse and the world has survived as long as it has. But given that the organization sees fit to have failsafes and such, some of which can turn back time, perhaps it's less that nothing bad has every happened and more that various people throughout the existence of the Warehouse have simply hit Reset Buttons.
It makes perfect sense that the Feng Shui Room would work best with Jinks. He's the Agent with the least amount of unresolved emotional baggage.
It makes very little sense that artifacts which are as dangerous as some we are shown, would simply be left loose on a shelf with a sign in front of them. That is terrible security, and isn't even as good as that employed by Real Life museums. I would expect most artifacts to be stored in their own vat of the purple neutralising substance, and to preferably have general-purpose wards laid over them as well, since the Regents would presumably have to know how to create them.
Come to that, it also seems inexplicable as to why certain hazardous artifacts are not simply destroyed. Artie mentions that, "we preserve, we don't destroy," but he never really gives a convincing explanation for why that is, and in the case of many (if not most) of the artifacts that the team recover, destroying them really would be the safer and more sensible course of action.
In season five, we seen an artifact being destroyed and resulting in its victim being permanently affected. Many dangerous artifacts may be preserved in case there's some horrible enduring effect that the Warehouse staff might not know about and may need the artifact to reverse. For instance, Carroll's mirror has a woman's soul trapped inside. If they'd destroyed it, it may have killed Alice. You may argue her fate is worse than death, but this is the organization that bronzes people, so they probably wouldn't agree.
You never know when an artifact might be needed. While many are dangerous by themselves, combining them another can cancel out or control any danger. It may also be unpredictable how an artifact reacts when destroyed, and some may be difficult to do so. As far as not securing them, the artifacts aren't meant to do anything but sit there. Only members of the warehouse are likely to ever come in contact with them. It's more like keeping them in the museum's basement than displaying in an exhibit.
There are also several indications that destroying most artefacts won't actually destroy them at all, including the actual on-screen creation of one, the reliance of several techniques on a sort of over-literal version of the law of conservation of energy, and a number of artefacts which respond to being destroyed by literally showing back up in the same form. While it's not explicitly stated, it's _heavily_ implied that destroying an artefact is at best unleashing reality-warping power at random, and more likely setting the contained power/effect loose without the control of the tether to a physical object to make it manageable.
Even though Claudia fixed evil Artie, the Astrolabe's curse still came true. The evil that Artie created that he will have to live with for the rest of his life is the fact that he killed Leena.
When Pete learns that his mom is a Regent he asks her who her "one" was (the one person you're allowed to tell the secret of the Warehouse). She replied that it was her late husband, of course. Pete then asks why she didn't tell him after his dad died. Because, obviously, she would have told her elder daughter in case something happened and she had to take care of Pete. Unfortunately the series never addresses this again.
The fact that the Secret Service is used as a cover for the Warehouse is actually pretty brilliant if you know anything about its history— after The American Civil War, it was founded as a part of of the Department of Treasury to combat counterfeiting. Even today, they work alongside the IRS and other agencies to investigate financial crime, so the idea of 'secret service agents working at a tax warehouse' makes sense as a cover story- anyone who dug into it would assume it's a legacy position from back before the Service was made part of Homeland Security! For bonus points: the ATF also used to be part of the Department of Treasury, so Jinks is in good company.
The metronome causes synchronization with the person who activated it and the revivee. Now just imagine all the shit that Sykes' dragon walked away from.
So, the downside of using the metronome to resurrect a person seems to be that it requires another person, and that person will experience, or at least, feel, every injury the resurrected person experiences from that point on. Sykes used the metronome to resurrect Marcus. Who's the poor sap he used? While Marcus was getting shot and getting tossed out of buildings and walking away, was there some unknown person somewhere in constant agony not of their own making? Seems like something Sykes would do, but damn.
I'm not sure if the riding crop could be used for that but I don't think Sykes could make someone go through the entire process.
Sykes used himself and made Marcus work for him on the pain of dying permanently.
The dogtags were used to fix the broken bones of the hockey player and his x-rays showed that the bones were not actually healed but simply braced by hardened tissue. When Peter neutralized the dogtags it automatically reversed the physical changes to Myka. Did this also remove all the 'fixes' done to the hockey player? Is the guy suffering from a dozen fractures all reappearing at the same time?
Also some Fridge Horror from the same episode: Myka's baby was killed/uncreated as a result of nullifying the artifact.
Even more horrifying. Imagine that the child had lived and the artifact was collected without being nullified. Imagine the child grew up and had kids and those kids grew up and had kids and so on. Then one day some unknowing warehouse employee finds the artifact and wishes for something unfortunate so that it had to be nullified. Dozens of people would immediately cease to exist but not the memory of them.
"Falcon Scott Protocol" involves containing a security breach through lowering the Warehouse's internal temperature to below freezing. As in Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the famously doomed 1910 Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. Scott and his entire team froze to death on the return trip in 1912. Naming a security protocol involving freezing after him: Black Comedy? Or something creepier? Were Scott and his team actually Warehouse Agents, trying to retrieve an Artifact? An Artifact that could only be contained by freezing, and the loss of all their lives?
Alternately, it could be that the protocol uses an artifact created on that expedition that causes an area to freeze.
Extremely grim example: Ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, mainly because it's hard to detect in its early stages. By the time a standard medical examination can find signs of it, more than likely it's already progressed beyond the point where it can be treated. Paracelsus was probably not lying to Pete about what he saw in Myka's eyes.
In the first episode, Artie says "If a radio landed in the hands of Thomas Jefferson, do you know what Jefferson would do? He would just lock it up, until he figured out it wasn't going to kill him. That's exactly what we do here. We take the unexplained... and we safely tuck it away.", however that hypothetical scenario implies that the batteries in said radio work, etc. The line works just fine to describe the warehouse, but still conjures up a pile of Fridge Logic when looked into.
That, and Jefferson is a pretty specific example, having nothing to do with science or research of any kind and famously the most risk-averse of the founders (for instance, he put an ocean between himself and the actual battles during the revolution). Pretty much anyone else from the era would have found a radio fascinating and at least conceivable in the sense of science fiction, and fiddled with it to see how it worked. A historical in-joke sneaking in, perhaps?
I first found it as a shock that Jinks was a homosexual as of episode 2. However, if you think about the "unresolved sexual tension" that is fostered between agents of the warehouse, it makes sense as Jinks was Pete's new partner.
How does this have any correlation? Pete's love interests have all been women. That doesn't leave out the possibility of bisexuality, but I can't remember any unresolved sexual tension between Pete and Jinks.
Pete has specifically said that he is straight which does tend to discount the possibility of bisexuality. He is open-minded and not the type of guy who hides his attraction from people, so there is no reason to think he was lying. It's likely the show wanted a set of partners who did NOT have sexual tension i.e. Jinx and Claudia who love each other intensely but platonically.
In a recent episode, why didn't they just put the forcefield around the bomb instead of around the agents? then not only would Noone have died but the warehouse wouldn't have been blown up
Likely, the bomb is strong enough to break through the forcefield from the inside, but not the outside. Also, it was stated that the forcefield could only be put in one specific area, and the bomb probably didn't have enough time left to move.
The forcefield would have been strong enough to contain it, as it was a small extension of the forcefield surrounding the entire Warehouse. As for not having enough time to move the bomb, Wells activated the field, and had enough time to explain what she did and the reasoning behind it, complete with a few endless seconds of staring at each other while the timer counted down. Another relevant bit of fridge logic: how the hell did whatshisname know how to rig it to go off? He must have tested it at some point to make sure it worked, so why didn;t anyone notice the equivalent of a nuclear explosion?
One interpretation is that rebooting the forcefield around the agents effectively makes it so that they are "outside" the Warehouse— it's not one forcefield and one bubble, but one single forcefield that contains everything except the contents of the bubble. Putting the bubble around the bomb would make the bomb "outside" the Warehouse, and the nuclear explosion would do much more damage.
Or...That's exactly what Artie is going to do once he uses the pocketwatch MacPherson gave him to reverse time, if that's what the watch can do anyway.
H.G. Wells tells them that the anomaly only allows her to make the forcefield where they are standing.
Word of God has stated that the force field could not have withstood the force, and that H.G. knew that.
Where did the Black Diamonds come from? If the Brother Adrian who was stealing items from the Warehouse and leaving the diamonds as his calling card was really a manifestation of Artie's evil side, then Artie was actually doing it all himself without realizing it. Where did he get Black Diamonds?
Remember, Artie went to see the Brotherhood in Vatican City and trapped them in the painting. He probably got the diamonds from them or some other location of theirs that he visited.
We also saw way back in Season 1 that Artie was able to create a perfect replica of the Honjo Masamune by himself, presumably with some Artifact mojo. Who's to say he didn't just make the black diamonds?
I'm currently watching the late third season of this show, and it's already straining Willing Suspension of Disbelief. The reason why, is because I've realised that if artifacts were a} as easily created as the show implies, and b} always as dangerous as is implied, human society (and probably life in general) would have ceased to exist a very long time ago. There is no way that a single repository (or even a group of repositories) for these items would be anywhere near enough. This hasn't destroyed my ability to enjoy the show, but I have started to somewhat view it as a cartoon, or at least very "soft" SF.
Except they aren't always dangerous. Mrs. Frederic specifically said that they only collect Artifacts that cause trouble, and that the person who created it gets to keep it unless it's dangerous. This would imply there's many low-power, unobtrusive and perfectly safe artifacts out there in the world that the Warehouse simply doesn't bother with. It's only the Artifacts created from particularly intense events, or from people of great importance, that are powerful enough to cause a disturbance and require the intervention of the Warehouse.
Exactly. We see many artifacts that do something very small and simple that could never possibly be used to destroy the world. Like a snow-globe that can make real snow (Claudia once used it to chill a soda) or a magic lightbulb that lights up and levitates and apparently nothing else. These were likely collected simply to prevent The Masquerade from being broken, not because they were dangerous.
This might just be me, but I can't help but wonder why they couldn't just give Walter Sykes that bracelet he kept obsessing over. Its not like he wanted all the artifacts in the Warehouse, or could have used the bracelet to take over the world, he just wanted to be able to walk. I know they said that whoever owned it would become as bitter as Collodi himself, but it wasn't like Sykes could get much worse than he already was. Hell, letting him get up out of that wheelchair might even have given him a new lease on life and made him a better person. All his villainy revolved around getting Collodi's Bracelet, so just give it to him and boom, problem solved.
All his villainy up until now revolved around getting the bracelet. If he'd gotten away with it, he would have found another reason to be evil.
It was all but outright stated that his goal was not just to recover Collodi's Bracelet but also to exact revenge on the Regents and the Warehouse, who he saw as responsible for ruining his life. Considering how he treated the people who were working for him, there's no way he would have given up on his revenge even if they handed over the bracelet peacefully.
Also, it was stated that Collodi's Bracelet is what caused Sykes to become evil. It let him walk again but it also created a darkness inside him that never went away. Giving him the bracelet would not have fixed the problem. At best it would have done nothing. At worst it would have turned him eviler.
Speaking of Sykes—he had Sally Stukowsky kill all his employees who had outlived their usefulness. So it was really dumb of her not to realize that sooner or later, he would kill her too.
