EPISODE REVIEW: Warehouse 13: “Burnout” (Episode 6)

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Pete and Mika are in St. Louis investigating a gas fire in a police station, where Pete notes “A bigass generator,” so you know that’s going to come in to play later on, right? Six people died, several others injured. In the basement, they find a man wearing 1960s clothes handcuffed to a pipe. They quickly realize he was a Warehouse agent.

Back at the Warehouse, Mika emails Artie some pictures of the crime scene, which an uncharacteristically technophobic Artie blathers on about mainly so Claudia can try out her new holographic projector she just cobbled together that combines the pictures in to a 3-d representation floating in space. They proceed to attempt to ID the body, while Mika and Artie have a rough time with the local police chief, and realize that someone escaped from the police station fire. Before they can do anything about it, though, the witness and two of his friends get killed.

Claudia and Artie identify the guy as a Warehouse agent who went missing in the early 60s, so Artie takes the new girl down to a big revolving storage facility and dials up the dead guy’s room. Evidently, when an agent disappears, their room is sealed up, REMOVED from the Bed & Breakfast somehow, and stored in the Warehouse. No explanation as to how, or even why they’d do this, it’s just a plot device. If this were an episode of Trek, it’d be a holodeck, which is even more annoying, so let’s just squint so we don’t notice how dumb that is, and move on. In the sealed room, untouched and unsearched in nearly 60 years, they find a name and address of a “Rebecca” in St. Louis, so Pete and Mika are sent to interview her. She’s a nice old lady, but they get the feeling that she’s hiding something. Before she can tell them anything useful, they get a call about the three more dead bodies, all showing signs of having been rapidly burned, so they head out to the scene. As they leave, Rebecca says “Were they electrocuted, too?” but Pete and Mika, inconsistently written cheese-heads that they are, completely ignore this obvious clue.

They quickly figure out that the killer is a cop who’s specialty is anti-gang crime, so they go to his apartment to check him out, and find him with an external spine thing on his back. It looks a bit like a Vindrizzi from B5, really. He jumps out the window, they chase him, but by the time they catch him, he’s already dead, and the do-whacker on his spine is gone. They stupidly abandon the scene without looking for the thing-a-ma-do, and question Rebecca some more. She cops to being a Warehouse agent back in the day, and her and the dead guy were partners. The comparisons to Pete and Mika are very, very obvious and deliberately made. When he disappeared in St. Louis, she went AWOL, changed her name, and has been looking for him ever since. Well, for a year or two, anyway. She shows them the dead guy’s notes, and some newspaper clippings that suggest the thing was an artifact from the 11th century (A touring museum display of 11th century hoo-hahs came through right before the first killings). From this, Artie