Warehouse 13, Season 3, Episode 9, Shadows
Hi, show! We need to have one of those serious talks.
Warehouse 13 is one of my mind candy shows, something that, like Castle, I put on when I don't feel like thinking much. If you've missed the show, it's more or less about an ultra secret Warehouse (number 13) whose agents run around the world, or more specifically places that look more or less like Vancouver, to pick up "artifacts" - objects imbued with magical powers by the creative fire of the artist/scientist who used said object. Each episode usually has two (sometimes three) plots per episode: the main one, where a couple of Warehouse Agents, more or less disguised as Secret Service agents (the show does a pretty good job of showcasing that the average American cannot and will not distinguish between the FBI, the US Marshals Service and the Secret Service) run after the artifacts while the other deal with some issue back at the Warehouse or run out after a second artifact.
With few exceptions, the artifacts are dangerous, although the show's main characters use a few of them in their work or to solve problems in the field. This is important. We're going to come back to it.
The show's been critiqued for doing a decent job of casting a couple of black characters in the main cast and then pretty much immediately turning around and marginalizing them (a particular waste in the case of the great and awesome CCH Pounder who really should be given more to do here, but then that's true for pretty much everything I've seen her in: her gravestone is probably going to read: CCH Pounder: I should have been given more to do here). It's also had a few queer characters here and there, including a gay main agent guy this year, and done a so so job tiptoeing around the issue of mental illness.
I don't think I - or anyone - would call this a great show, but it's generally entertaining, and if Mika (the main female agent) bores me, I like Artie (the Warehouse boss) and Claudia (the cute geeky Warehouse geek chick) and Pete's enthusiasm. As I said, mind candy: not demanding, but pleasant enough.
And even the episode I'm about to complain about, "Shadows," was enjoyable enough until the last five minutes.
Here's what happened: In the B plot, Claudia and Mika went off to investigate people who were disappearing into flashes of hot light because some stalker dude had found a piece of the Enola Gay and was using it to reenact, in a small way, a nuclear holocaust to kill people. I'm just going to skip over the obvious problems with this storyline and talk about the A plot.
Here, the rest of the Warehouse group, including Regents Irene and Jane (played by a certain former captain of Voyager fame) are trying to track down this season's Big Bad, a faceless person who has been hiring assassins to hunt down everybody connected with the Warehouse. The Warehouse guys naturally find this a bit alarming, to the point where they are willing to use a potentially dangerous artifact to explore Jane's old memories, since she's convinced that someplace back in them is the killer's identity. So, Jane and Pete pop back into her memories, allowing for some Nice Character Development.
Jane remembers heading out to chat with a boy who has a bit - a bit - of an attitude problem, but has been correctly raised to Not Talk To Strangers, which means their conversation ends after about 45 seconds - just long enough for her to realize that the kid really, but really loves baseball. Jane and Pete pop out of the memories and Jane identifies the season's Big Bad - that boy.
Turns out that the only reason the boy could play baseball at all was that he'd somehow found an artifact - connected to Pinocchio - that gave him the ability to walk. After Jane's 45 second conversation with him, she had determined that the artifact was changing the boy's personality for the worse, so she made the decision to have the Warehouse agents remove the artifact - and the boy's ability to walk - because, as she justifies, the artifact would inevitably have turned him evil, and the traces were already there. The Warehouse just couldn't take the risk. Lesser evil and all that. The final scene shows us a very angry man in a wheelchair vowing vengeance against everyone in the Warehouse and Jane in particular.
Let's unpack this for a moment, shall we?
1. Warehouse 13 showed us agents - the good guys of the show -- removing a child's ability to walk - presenting this as a good thing. Since the strong implication was that the kid couldn't walk before he found this Pinocchio device, they, in a sense, removed his mobility device. They also took away his ability to play baseball, something he clearly loved.
Have I mentioned that all of the Warehouse 13 agents are perfectly able bodied agents with the full ability to walk?
2. Although in the B plot the agents (Mika and Claudia) attempt to reason with the guy to get him to willingly give up his artifact - after said guy has already murdered people in the episode - we never see anyone making the slightest attempt to reason or talk with the kid and allow him any say in this decision - even though at this point, the kid hasn't harmed anyone. But the Warehouse has decided that he's already showing signs of evil, based on, again, a 45 second conversation where an adult is asking him some rather, how do I put this, suspicious sounding questions. I'm not at all surprised that the kid started acting hostile, and that hostility, far from coming from an artifact, seemed more to come from natural suspicion and parental warnings of "Never Talk to Strangers."
So, guy that has already murdered four people in the episode, given a chance to talk and surrender peacefully and transform his life. Kid that hasn't murdered anyone? Has his artifact removed.
3. Although the show has demonstrated, in canon, and even in this very episode, that some Warehouse devices can be beneficial, and shows agents using the devices on a regular basis, at no time do we see anyone at the Warehouse going through the motions of even looking for a replacement device, even though both Irene and Jane agree that this is a "tragedy." If it's such a tragedy, then why not - I dunno - try to mitigate the effects?
4. Ok, my next point here is going to be a little muddled. Because on the one hand, I think that what the Warehouse agents did was absolutely )(*(*^*((*(* awful. And because in typing this out, I can see myself nodding and going along with, wow, yeah, little kid can't play baseball anymore and can't walk and his baseball things have been left on the lawn and SNIFFLE and I don't blame the kid at all for being pissed and wanting revenge.....
On the other hand...
The guy is in a wheelchair.
Not dead.
He's still able to make piles of money and set up shell corporations everywhere and command a loyal and obedient staff that merrily kills on his command and is even willing to endure torture rather than give up his secrets. His money gives him access to all the best things in life; he looks remarkably like Anthony Michael Hall so can probably coast a bit on his looks, and so on. He has full use of his arms and hands.
But, according to the show, none of this matters: what matters is that he can no longer walk. And this matters so damn much that not only is he building a multibillion entity to take the Warehouse down, he intends to take everybody down with it - not just the one person who made the decision to put him in a wheelchair in the first place.
(The other agents apparently felt so uncomfortable with the entire idea that they decided they couldn't come to a decision, leaving it up to Jane, who felt it was the only thing she could do.)
Now, yes, I also get that we're meant to understand that the Pinocchio device also warped the guy's soul, turning him to evil, which just makes the actions of the Warehouse agents even more reprehensible - why not, you know, check the guy out for lingering effects. (Although, now that I think of it, other artifacts don't seem to have these lingering effects, which raises more questions, but I'll jump past that for now.)
But for the most part, this is a repeat of the same message: ending up in a wheelchair is the worst thing ever, so terrible that you will spend the rest of your life seeking vengeance on those who put you in one.
And that's a terrible message. Not just because in general, the response to finding yourself in a wheelchair is less, "How can I get back at people," and more "how can I adjust to the wheelchair" and "does every door to a public bathroom really need to be this heavy?"
But because it continues to feed into the idea that a wheelchair is the worst thing ever, and that therefore, people in wheelchairs are to be pitied, an idea that, trust me, absolutely plays out in real life, where I get a very different response depending upon whether people meet me on the trike, the scooter, the cane or the wheelchair.
And while this is pervasive in Hollywood, damn it, science fiction and fantasy shows, even admitted fluff like Warehouse 13, are supposed to show us something different. Something not part of ordinary life.
So knock it off, Warehouse 13. Stick with the fluff. Because I'm tired of having to write crap like this.
ETA: I forgot to note: I have no problems with disabled villains. I'm all about that. My issue is when disability alone turns villains into villains, as if people don't have enough other reasons, besides wheelchairs and so on, to go evil. By all means have Evil Villains in Wheelchairs who want to destroy the world/take it over/become Wall Street bankers. I'm just unhappy with "the wheelchair made me do it" bit.
***************
I've noticed something: the bigger disability in entertainment issues are the ones that catch me off guard. So far, for instance, I've been fine with Alphas, a show featuring a character with TV autism, because going into it I'm expecting the show to fail. (Surprisingly enough, Alphas provides some excellent moments between the inevitable fail.) And I was equally resigned/ok with X-Men: First Class. It's the unexpected -- going from the troubling but thoughtful and nuanced talk on disability in Wicked the book to Wicked the Broadway play, for instance, or having this pop up in otherwise fluffy stuff like this.
Warehouse 13 is one of my mind candy shows, something that, like Castle, I put on when I don't feel like thinking much. If you've missed the show, it's more or less about an ultra secret Warehouse (number 13) whose agents run around the world, or more specifically places that look more or less like Vancouver, to pick up "artifacts" - objects imbued with magical powers by the creative fire of the artist/scientist who used said object. Each episode usually has two (sometimes three) plots per episode: the main one, where a couple of Warehouse Agents, more or less disguised as Secret Service agents (the show does a pretty good job of showcasing that the average American cannot and will not distinguish between the FBI, the US Marshals Service and the Secret Service) run after the artifacts while the other deal with some issue back at the Warehouse or run out after a second artifact.
With few exceptions, the artifacts are dangerous, although the show's main characters use a few of them in their work or to solve problems in the field. This is important. We're going to come back to it.
The show's been critiqued for doing a decent job of casting a couple of black characters in the main cast and then pretty much immediately turning around and marginalizing them (a particular waste in the case of the great and awesome CCH Pounder who really should be given more to do here, but then that's true for pretty much everything I've seen her in: her gravestone is probably going to read: CCH Pounder: I should have been given more to do here). It's also had a few queer characters here and there, including a gay main agent guy this year, and done a so so job tiptoeing around the issue of mental illness.
I don't think I - or anyone - would call this a great show, but it's generally entertaining, and if Mika (the main female agent) bores me, I like Artie (the Warehouse boss) and Claudia (the cute geeky Warehouse geek chick) and Pete's enthusiasm. As I said, mind candy: not demanding, but pleasant enough.
And even the episode I'm about to complain about, "Shadows," was enjoyable enough until the last five minutes.
Here's what happened: In the B plot, Claudia and Mika went off to investigate people who were disappearing into flashes of hot light because some stalker dude had found a piece of the Enola Gay and was using it to reenact, in a small way, a nuclear holocaust to kill people. I'm just going to skip over the obvious problems with this storyline and talk about the A plot.
Here, the rest of the Warehouse group, including Regents Irene and Jane (played by a certain former captain of Voyager fame) are trying to track down this season's Big Bad, a faceless person who has been hiring assassins to hunt down everybody connected with the Warehouse. The Warehouse guys naturally find this a bit alarming, to the point where they are willing to use a potentially dangerous artifact to explore Jane's old memories, since she's convinced that someplace back in them is the killer's identity. So, Jane and Pete pop back into her memories, allowing for some Nice Character Development.
Jane remembers heading out to chat with a boy who has a bit - a bit - of an attitude problem, but has been correctly raised to Not Talk To Strangers, which means their conversation ends after about 45 seconds - just long enough for her to realize that the kid really, but really loves baseball. Jane and Pete pop out of the memories and Jane identifies the season's Big Bad - that boy.
Turns out that the only reason the boy could play baseball at all was that he'd somehow found an artifact - connected to Pinocchio - that gave him the ability to walk. After Jane's 45 second conversation with him, she had determined that the artifact was changing the boy's personality for the worse, so she made the decision to have the Warehouse agents remove the artifact - and the boy's ability to walk - because, as she justifies, the artifact would inevitably have turned him evil, and the traces were already there. The Warehouse just couldn't take the risk. Lesser evil and all that. The final scene shows us a very angry man in a wheelchair vowing vengeance against everyone in the Warehouse and Jane in particular.
Let's unpack this for a moment, shall we?
1. Warehouse 13 showed us agents - the good guys of the show -- removing a child's ability to walk - presenting this as a good thing. Since the strong implication was that the kid couldn't walk before he found this Pinocchio device, they, in a sense, removed his mobility device. They also took away his ability to play baseball, something he clearly loved.
Have I mentioned that all of the Warehouse 13 agents are perfectly able bodied agents with the full ability to walk?
2. Although in the B plot the agents (Mika and Claudia) attempt to reason with the guy to get him to willingly give up his artifact - after said guy has already murdered people in the episode - we never see anyone making the slightest attempt to reason or talk with the kid and allow him any say in this decision - even though at this point, the kid hasn't harmed anyone. But the Warehouse has decided that he's already showing signs of evil, based on, again, a 45 second conversation where an adult is asking him some rather, how do I put this, suspicious sounding questions. I'm not at all surprised that the kid started acting hostile, and that hostility, far from coming from an artifact, seemed more to come from natural suspicion and parental warnings of "Never Talk to Strangers."
So, guy that has already murdered four people in the episode, given a chance to talk and surrender peacefully and transform his life. Kid that hasn't murdered anyone? Has his artifact removed.
3. Although the show has demonstrated, in canon, and even in this very episode, that some Warehouse devices can be beneficial, and shows agents using the devices on a regular basis, at no time do we see anyone at the Warehouse going through the motions of even looking for a replacement device, even though both Irene and Jane agree that this is a "tragedy." If it's such a tragedy, then why not - I dunno - try to mitigate the effects?
4. Ok, my next point here is going to be a little muddled. Because on the one hand, I think that what the Warehouse agents did was absolutely )(*(*^*((*(* awful. And because in typing this out, I can see myself nodding and going along with, wow, yeah, little kid can't play baseball anymore and can't walk and his baseball things have been left on the lawn and SNIFFLE and I don't blame the kid at all for being pissed and wanting revenge.....
On the other hand...
The guy is in a wheelchair.
Not dead.
He's still able to make piles of money and set up shell corporations everywhere and command a loyal and obedient staff that merrily kills on his command and is even willing to endure torture rather than give up his secrets. His money gives him access to all the best things in life; he looks remarkably like Anthony Michael Hall so can probably coast a bit on his looks, and so on. He has full use of his arms and hands.
But, according to the show, none of this matters: what matters is that he can no longer walk. And this matters so damn much that not only is he building a multibillion entity to take the Warehouse down, he intends to take everybody down with it - not just the one person who made the decision to put him in a wheelchair in the first place.
(The other agents apparently felt so uncomfortable with the entire idea that they decided they couldn't come to a decision, leaving it up to Jane, who felt it was the only thing she could do.)
Now, yes, I also get that we're meant to understand that the Pinocchio device also warped the guy's soul, turning him to evil, which just makes the actions of the Warehouse agents even more reprehensible - why not, you know, check the guy out for lingering effects. (Although, now that I think of it, other artifacts don't seem to have these lingering effects, which raises more questions, but I'll jump past that for now.)
But for the most part, this is a repeat of the same message: ending up in a wheelchair is the worst thing ever, so terrible that you will spend the rest of your life seeking vengeance on those who put you in one.
And that's a terrible message. Not just because in general, the response to finding yourself in a wheelchair is less, "How can I get back at people," and more "how can I adjust to the wheelchair" and "does every door to a public bathroom really need to be this heavy?"
But because it continues to feed into the idea that a wheelchair is the worst thing ever, and that therefore, people in wheelchairs are to be pitied, an idea that, trust me, absolutely plays out in real life, where I get a very different response depending upon whether people meet me on the trike, the scooter, the cane or the wheelchair.
And while this is pervasive in Hollywood, damn it, science fiction and fantasy shows, even admitted fluff like Warehouse 13, are supposed to show us something different. Something not part of ordinary life.
So knock it off, Warehouse 13. Stick with the fluff. Because I'm tired of having to write crap like this.
ETA: I forgot to note: I have no problems with disabled villains. I'm all about that. My issue is when disability alone turns villains into villains, as if people don't have enough other reasons, besides wheelchairs and so on, to go evil. By all means have Evil Villains in Wheelchairs who want to destroy the world/take it over/become Wall Street bankers. I'm just unhappy with "the wheelchair made me do it" bit.
***************
I've noticed something: the bigger disability in entertainment issues are the ones that catch me off guard. So far, for instance, I've been fine with Alphas, a show featuring a character with TV autism, because going into it I'm expecting the show to fail. (Surprisingly enough, Alphas provides some excellent moments between the inevitable fail.) And I was equally resigned/ok with X-Men: First Class. It's the unexpected -- going from the troubling but thoughtful and nuanced talk on disability in Wicked the book to Wicked the Broadway play, for instance, or having this pop up in otherwise fluffy stuff like this.