WAREHOUSE 13 Recap: ‘Don’t Hate the Player’

Hey WAREHOUSE 13 fans! How did you like “Don’t Hate the Player”? I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it, and I’m wondering if it’s the sort of episode where viewers either loved it or hated it.

It’s rare that WH13 can make me think “WTF?” but this one did a few times. It seemed almost too goofy at times, and then it got dark — and fast. However, any main issue I had was countered by the excellent work from Allison Scagliotti (Claudia) throughout the entire episode. Do you agree?

The episode began with Pete and Claudia at a local coffee shop — open mic night. Pete tried to encourage Claudia to bring her guitar and impress, but she said she wasn’t interested. As they are talking, she gets an urgent call from a guy she’s never met named Gibson. He tells her that something is incredibly wrong with an experiment involving Douglas Fargo (Neil Grayston from EUREKA), and he had specific instructions to call her.

Claudia, Pete and Myka rush to the scene — a local home, and they see Fargo and another of his friends, Jerry, hooked up to a virtual reality gaming system. They are both experiencing rapid pulse rates and can’t seem to escape the game. Gibson leads the team to a room and shows them Fargo’s experiment, “FarGames,” and he provides a teapot the guys used before testing out their gaming equipment. When the teapot tests positive for artifact-ian properties, the warehouse agents know Fargo has gotten in way over his head.

Meanwhile, new agent Steve Jinks is in New York City at the request of FBI Agent Sally Stukowski (played again by Ashley Williams). We’ve seen Sally a few times, and she’s never quite up to anything good, so it will be interesting to see what her plans are. Is it me, or is it strange that Jinksy, while able to tell when Sally was lying, never quite realized she was up to no good? Luckily, Artie was there to assist him and make sure he didn’t spill any warehouse secrets.

Sally brought them in to investigate the apparent suicide of a museum curator. When Artie spots Van Gogh’s “Stormy Night,” he knows it’s no accidental death. The painting has been missing for years, but legend states that death follows it wherever it’s been spotted. There’s only one way to get the painting to the warehouse — steal it.

Back at the warehouse, Leena has identified the teapot as being part of a tea set once belonging to Beatrix Potter. Drinks poured from it provided stimulus to the creative imaginative part of the brain. If Fargo drank the tea to assist with the virtual game, then it’s having a negative effect. Claudia realizes there is no way to help Fargo and Jerry from the outside world.

And that’s when it gets kind of crazy. Right?

As Claudia and Pete navigate the game to try to find Fargo, they realize that they must follow the game rules to proceed to each level — eventually to free a princess from a tower. Leena acts as a guide, but once they find Fargo, he tells them that the game has elements he didn’t create — probably caused by the teapot artifact. Myka does research and finds out that Beatrix Potter’s original works were much darker.

While I liked the idea of Pete and Claudia entering the video game to discover Fargo had created a Warehouse 13 game, and I LOVED the camera, costuming (Leena’s Wings!!), sound effects, and lighting work used, something still felt off to me. Maybe it was the video game warehouse world in conjunction with the heist-y feel with Artie and Jinks in NYC? What were your thoughts on that? Like I mentioned at the beginning, Allison Scagliotti was great when she portrayed both “Elf” Claudia and “Princess” Claudia and especially when she was facing her fear of being back in the institution. Fargo and Jerry face their fears, and Jerry’s is fear that his girlfriend Hannah will reject his proposal. He faces her down in the game and by doing so, the team is saved and able to return to the non-virtual world.

Neither Pete nor Myka had to face a fear in the game, as far as I could see, and I was expecting that to happen. This, combined with the way Artie and Jinksy were far away in New York made me realize I really want to see an episode/case where Pete, Myka, Claudia and Jinks are all really working together with Artie and the warehouse. Am I just being too picky?

Favorite parts: Pete’s reference to READING RAINBOW, Artie’s reference to MYTHBUSTERS and the way the writers wove in references to both THE WIZARD OF OZ and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” I also liked that Claudia took a chance and sang a song and played her guitar at the coffee shop at the end of the episode (though it seemed sort of weird that none of her friends were there).

But what about you? Did you have a fave artifact in this episode? Did you buy “Fortress 13: The Most Wondrous Place That’s Never Been Seen”? How about the side plot with Artie and Jinks in New York vs. Sally Stukowski? Since we see her talking to some superior baddie at the end of the episode, do you have any guesses as to who that might be? Perhaps someone we’ve seen in the past? And what about those deadly looking machine-flies that have escaped into the warehouse?

Let’s discuss!