W13S04E16Syfy, 20 May, 3 & 10 June 2013

The Warehouse teams tackle battling Vegas magicians, re-encounter H.G. Wells and investigate a strange prison break…

After the high of the brilliant partially black and white episode ‘The Big Snag’, Warehouse 13 comes crashing back to earth with a bit of a thump, as do several of the characters in ‘The Sky’s the Limit’. Checking out why glowing orange bodies are falling from the sky in Las Vegas, Pete and Myka come between a pair of squabbling magicians. Not as magical as ‘The Big Snag’, this is nonetheless a pretty neat conceit, with some lovely set dressing harking back to old time magic acts. Shame the B story is so leaden, with Artie still dealing with his grief over killing Leena. I’ve said it before, but such heavy material doesn’t sit well in a light hearted show like Warehouse 13. This show doesn’t do ‘dark’ at all well.

The welcome return of Jaime Murray’s H.G. Wells is wasted in the rather too rote and neat ‘Instinct’. It’s a rather contrived ‘bonding’ episode, especially for Leena’s replacement Abigail, and the motions it goes through are all surface. Similarly, the slightly better ‘Runaway’ at least features an intriguing prison break mystery at its core, even if it becomes obvious that the motive of the ‘villain’ is not going to be exactly what everyone may think.

We could have done without the awful trip to England and Watford ‘race course’ in ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ and Allison Scagliotti’s self-indulgent rendition of ‘Cherry Bomb’ at the end of ‘Runaway’… Why oh why do good TV shows do these terrible things?

Verdict: Still one of TV’s more entertaining fantasy shows, Warehouse 13 needs to ditch the angst and stick with the funny…

Episode 14 ‘The Sky’s the Limit’: 7/10

Episode 15 ‘Instinct’: 6/10

Episode 16 ‘Runaway’: 6/10

Brian J. Robb

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