episode review - warehouse 13 - 'resonance' - episode 2

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There’s a series of bank robberies in Chicago in which no one is killed or hurt, but no one remembers anything after the fact. Meanwhile, at Warehouse 13, someone is trying to hack their computers. Artie sends Scully and Mulder - excuse me, Mika and Pete - off to check out the robberies while he tracks down the hacker himself. The very pretty psychic girl from the Bed & Breakfast where Mika and Pete are living hangs around for no real purpose other than to briefly make goo-goo eyes at Pete (and his aura), and to give Artie someone to exposit to while the series leads are away.

In Chicago, Pete and Mika meet up with the local FBI investigator, played by Tricia Helfer. She may be an FBI agent here, but I think I speak for all of us when I say she’ll always be Carla from Burn Notice. What? She was in some other show too? Jeremiah? No? That’s not it? I dunno, I guess I must not have been paying attention.

Anyway, the team doesn’t make a strong first impression with Carla from Burn Notice, so Mika calls her old boss at the Secret Service, who instantly, magically resolves the tension. Pete then goes about making paper dolls from the surveillance photos in order to make sort of foamcore models of the crime scenes, while Mika tracks down a cellphone recording of the sound played in the bank heists.

One of the witnesses they play goes all goofy and blanks out. When they turn off the tape, she has no memory of it, but says she feels loved. Pete recognizes the music as similar to his dad’s favorite song, and Artie discovers that the musician who wrote and recorded the song is living in Chicago. They go to check him out.

He’s a Brian Wilson type, who started out in sixties bubblegum, moved in to Jazz, then experimental stuff, then mental illness. He’s semi-catatonic, manic depressive, clinically depressed, and has terminal cancer too. A sad case. Mika is able to get him to talk a bit, and Pete plays the song they heard on the piano, which gets a reaction out of him, but he’s in basketcasevill - population: him - and it’s obvious he’s not robbing any banks. The housekeeper seems really nice, and used to be his backup singer back in the day. She tells them that a record company exec screwed the musician out of all his stuff, at which point he just sort of lost it, and has been like this since.

At the label, there’s a receptionist ignoring them and putting on perfume, which is so incongruous that you know it’s gonna’ be a clue later on, right? The exec is nice enough, and takes them to see the musician - I keep forgetting his name, so let’s just call him Brian Wilson - he takes them to see all of Brian Wilson’s stuff in the label archives. It’s all there, nothing is missing, though he lets on that there’s an anonymous bidder looking to buy it all up. He lets it slip that it was Brian Wilson’s engineer who caused his sad decline, encouraging him to do more and more experimental stuff, and not happy songs about happiness in happy times or whatever the hell