What has happened to Warehouse 13?  By the end of the first act, I was left scratching my head.  Was it the two years that the series was out of production, as the over-long fourth season was split between 2012 and 2013?  Is it the short six-episode season?  A combination of the two?  Warehouse 13 took some time to find its balance between its dramatic and comedic elements, and it feels like this season has regressed back to the days when that balance was still a work in progress.

       

Every episode this season has been an exercise in partial victories.  One plot thread will work fairly well; another will struggle just to gain some level of credibility.  In this case, I’m not even sure that the stronger of the plot threads could be considered a full success.  Claudia’s day with her sister probably would have been a weaker element of another episode, if it wasn’t for the woeful state of the main plot at the renaissance faire.

 

Almost nothing about the renaissance faire thread worked.  The tone was beyond even broad comedy, right over the line into self-aware farce, yet the tone of the direction and the performances was far too serious for the material.  My first worry was that Eddie McClintock was being given too much free reign, as his over-the-top performances have been all too close to those problematic second season days.  But as the episode unfolded, practically every performance had the same problems.  (Although I did enjoy, in theory, the mini-Alphas reunion!)

 

It’s almost as if the director shot all the scenes with one tone in mind, and then changed his tune during the editing while prepping the final cut.  That might also explain why Claudia’s subplot seemed to be out of sync as well.  To be fair, some of that was the amount of time to work with the plot points; Claire’s return probably should have been more than a single episode, since it short-changed her acclimation.

 

But Myka seemed out of character, even before the artifact began having its effect on her.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I found it odd that Myka would so readily help Claudia with only a few minor warnings.  And it doesn’t help that the writers are still plugging away at the whole “cancer scare”, which only goes to show that it was ill-advised from the start, when sweeping it under the rug seems like it would have been better than the constant lampshade thrown on it now.

 

The reconciliation of Claudia and Artie was probably the only point of progress, which again puts a bit of a spotlight on how awkwardly that was handled.  Why wouldn’t Artie just be proactive and show Claudia what he had been doing?  And why is Myka suddenly needing to be reminded that they are all “family”?  It just felt disingenuous and sloppy, which is probably the only way to sum up this episode, when all is said and done.