PLEASE NOTE: Syfy is re-running the first season of Warehouse 13 as a way of simultaneously building up for the new season and and admitting it's got nothing in the way of programming, so, as such, we're re-running this review for those of you who may not have seen it, or the episode previously. We're not always going to do this, but in this case it seemed warranted.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: That while I feel like we probably should continue to cover this show in its second year, I definitely feel like I don't wanna' be the guy who does it. I've got waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much stuff on my plate, so if *YOU* would like to take a stab at it and reap the (non-financial) rewards of having hundreds of total strangers hang on your every word, and then call you a jerk afterwards, we're probably willing to let you try. Drop me a line at Three@Republibot.com and we'll talk.

Is it too early to start calling this show a Joss Whedon Knockoff?

PLAY BY PLAY

We start out with Artie in a limbo-lit set, shot in high contrast black and white, talking to Mrs. Fredericks. He wakes from this dream in his warehouse office to find Mika and Pete phoning in a genuinely funny frantic report from one of their assignments (“No more zoos! Monkeys spit! Did you know monkeys spit?” “You still have some monkey phlegm in your hair.” “It isn’t phlegm”). Then “Claudia,” the hacker from the previous three episodes kidnaps Artie.

Ok, first up, let me apologize for that teeth-gnashing pun. I’ve obviously been hanging out with R2 entirely too much.

I’m kinda’ tired, and this is my third full-length review of the night, and my fingers hurt and I’m tasting metal, so let’s just jump to it without my normal coy intro, shall we? Sorry. I apologize. I’ll be charming - or at least time consuming - later, but for now…

PLAY BY PLAY

We start off with a great scene of Sgt. Greer tasting some alien food, then going to yell at Baldo, who was supposed to be on KP an hour earlier, but didn’t show. In the cabin, he finds Baldo dead, and immediately contacts Young. It looks like a suicide, but there’s no weapon.

The version of this review I initially posted last night was rather terse and threadbare because I was tired and wasn’t feeling well, so I figured I’d expand it a bit today as I’m feeling better (But even more tired. I just ended up staring at the ceiling last night until 5AM, insomnia.) The changes will all be in the “Observations” section.

PLAY BY PLAY

We start out with a montage of various crew people going through their daily routines - Chloe is doing yoga, Eli is spying on Rush, one of the female doctors is having sex, the masses are doing calisthenics, Camille is sketching a Polynesian landscape, and Baldo, the recurring minor antagonist with the attitude problem, takes his last anti-psychotic pill.

This episode started out much, much better than the previous two, with a tone that could almost - but not quite - be called ‘jaunty’, and for a while there, maybe twenty minutes, I thought “Say, this has some promise!” but then it all fell apart into a ponderous and portentous muddle, and kind of a disturbing one at that.

PLAY BY PLAY

Two seasons and like four years ago, The Venture Brothers, an adults-only cartoon that has always prided itself on being as hillariously offensive as possible, introduced a transexual character. We met him as a dude, actually, Colonel Hunter Gathers of the OSI, a thinly-veiled parody/hommage to Hunter S. Thompson. (So thinly veiled that I don't know why they bothered, apart from the name "Hunter Gathers" is pretty damn funny). I assume - without being interested enough to look in to it - that this is the first major recurring transexual in a cartoon.