Claudia: "Years ago, I swear you said you were just a simple professor. I guess you left out the off-the-grid, top-secret warehouse full of madcap."
Artie is kidnapped by a woman who blames him for the death of her brother. Despite Mrs. Frederic's orders to remain in place, Pete and Myka pursue the trail to try and recover Artie before his kidnapper's schemes come to fruition.
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Tropes that Apply to this Episode:
- Kidnapped Scientist: Though Artie isn't technically a scientist, Claudia still thinks he's a professor and breaks into the Warehouse and kidnaps Artie to force him to help her recreate her brother Joshua's experiment.
- My Greatest Failure: In much the same way Myka is haunted by the thought that she could have prevented Sam's death in Colorado and Pete is haunted by the thought that he could have prevented his father's death if he'd listened to his intuition when he was 12, Artie believes that he could have prevented Joshua Donovan's "death" if he'd stopped the young man's experiments sooner. Artie knew that Joshua was using an artifact in his teleportation experiment, but instead of confiscating it immediately he allowed Joshua to continue testing in the hopes that the young man would succeed. Artie had just arrived at Joshua's lab to take the artifact "for safe keeping" and promised Claudia he wouldn't allow anything bad happen to her brother when Joshua performed the final, ill-fated test of his teleportation experiment and disappeared right in front of them.
- Place Beyond Time: Joshua's experiment with Rheticus' compass attempted to find a way to perform human teleportation, but he didn't follow all the steps and wound up pulled into an "inter-dimensional space" without time. From the point of view of Claudia and Artie, he vanished into thin air (or was vaporized, as Artie assumed). Years later, Claudia tried to recreate the experiment to bring him back. She didn't have the compass, but she did manage to "open a door" to wherever or whenever Joshua had been trapped, allowing a ghostly apparition of him to pop back over into reality for a few seconds at a time at random intervals (at the cost of draining her life force while trying to stabilize the connection — if she'd kept up with the experiments without Artie's help or Pete and Myka's intervention, she probably would have died or gotten pulled into whatever realm Joshua was trapped in). When Joshua is restored to reality, he hasn't aged a day since he disappeared.
- Promotion to Parent: Claudia and Joshua's parents died when he was a teen and she was a young child. It appears that Joshua was made Claudia's legal guardian, as she describes her brother as "the one who raised me."Claudia: Joshua and me, on our own, again. It's a good thing I'm used to it.Artie: I know that it hasn't been easy.Claudia: No. No, it hasn't been easy. He was all I had after our parents died. And then he was gone, too. He spent his fun years sewing Girl Scout patches and teaching me how to fold an omelet. And then, reading Maria Looney on the Red Planet to me every night. He was a genius who put his life on hold for me.
- Suddenly Always Knew That: Pete can read lips. He explains that his deaf sister taught him this skill.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Her introduction has her kidnapping Artie to save her brother, who's trapped between dimensions due to his experiments that utilized the artifact of Rheticus' Compass.
