Warehouse 13 pimp post
Warehouse 13 starts up again on SyFy tomorrow (or tonight, depending on when I get this posted - Tuesday, anyway). This will be its second season, and I've been looking forward to it for months. I look forward to Doctor Who, but that is not a stress-free show for me. Warehouse 13, on the other hand, is my fun summer candy. It's good enough to be satisfying, but I'm not so emotionally invested that it's stressful.
I've been meaning to do a pimp post for weeks, but now that I'm down to the wire, I'm going to just rely on what some other people have done.
The shallow and pretty: Warehouse 13 picspam by azuremonkey. This will introduce you to the main characters and a few guests from Season 1.
The cute meta: Alison Scagliotti, who plays Claudia on the show, tweeted a few photos during the filming of Season 2. This is one of my favorites: the male and female leads, zonked out in folding chairs on a break. I don't know if they were shooting in a meat locker or what, but those down coats look cozy.
The philosophical: If you lean more toward the academic, this is an article by Bob Goodman, one of the show's writers, about why he thinks the premise of Warehouse 13 is philosophically and psychologically relevant to our society. The article is spoilery for plot points for all of Season 1.
Why Warehouse 13 Works, or Relax, It's Just Everything
What the hell is this show? I mean, sure it's funny, frenetic and action-packed - a mix not only of cultural references but genre conventions and tones, all thrown together in a blender and somehow... working. But this all runs contrary to my deeply-ingrained story sense, which believes in finding clean, clear lines and well-defined motifs.
At first, I admit, that's what I thought. And I was one of the guys writing it.
But now I get it. Just recently, during our early weeks of writing season two, I grokked the show.
(...)
Warehouse 13 is about the collective, cognitive anxiety we're feeling, caused by the sudden collision between our primitive, analog selves... and digital access to everything.
(...)
We find ourselves living in a time when we have simultaneous and ready access to all history, culture, knowledge, news, music, TV, movies, stories - ever. Need an image of a twelfth-century trebuchet, or maybe an historically-accurate recipe for how mille-feuille was prepared in Napoleon's time? Click; here you go. When was the last time you were talking with someone about a funny or formative TV moment, that you couldn't pull it up on the web to show them? If you were so inclined, you could carry around every song you've ever heard in your life, in your pocket. And thanks to Facebook, that same random access exists for every friend, relative or co-worker you've ever known. We're all getting to experience Slaughterhouse Five firsthand. Our lives are on shuffle.
And all of this is both good and bad. In the proverbial definition of "crisis," the moment presents both danger and opportunity. We're all in input overload, struggling to stem the tide of messages coming at us by email, cell phone, chats, texts and tweets. The elusive holy grail of nerd pride has become the phrase "inbox zero."
(...)
Which brings me back to the show. Here's what this borderline-insane rant has to do with Warehouse 13:
The warehouse in the series' title is the repository of every mystical artifact from all human history. The storage site of all our cultural touchstones, all our stories, all our myths, in one place. Sound familiar? There's a reason the warehouse is depicted as infinitely large, why we see a new room, a new section, a new feature every week. The warehouse is our moment in time made physical; the internet in hard copy. The reason we can't see the edges is because there aren't any.
And that leaves me to tell you one of my favorite things about the show: beyond the attractive actors and likable characters doing goofy, interesting things every week, the show is about objects and our connection to them. Concrete things and the abstract, even mystical effects they have on the world. Which means the possible storylines are infinite: pick any object from history, and any historical or modern character it might be connected to, and you've got something to hang a plot on. Lewis Carroll's mirror. Edgar Allen Poe's pen. Nicola Tesla's... well. You get the idea.
Plus, it's way steampunk. Warehouse 13 had a vintage typewriter for a computer keyboard before the Eleventh Doctor did. And if you look in the background of the office? Card catalog. ::draws big hearts around show::
Also, there's a ferret.
Whoops. Need to rectify my lack of a Warehouse 13 icon.
ETA - iTunes has a free, 7.5 minute Season 1 recap up here. It's very informative, but stop before the last 1:10 if you don't want a preview of the coming season.
I've been meaning to do a pimp post for weeks, but now that I'm down to the wire, I'm going to just rely on what some other people have done.
The shallow and pretty: Warehouse 13 picspam by azuremonkey. This will introduce you to the main characters and a few guests from Season 1.
The cute meta: Alison Scagliotti, who plays Claudia on the show, tweeted a few photos during the filming of Season 2. This is one of my favorites: the male and female leads, zonked out in folding chairs on a break. I don't know if they were shooting in a meat locker or what, but those down coats look cozy.
The philosophical: If you lean more toward the academic, this is an article by Bob Goodman, one of the show's writers, about why he thinks the premise of Warehouse 13 is philosophically and psychologically relevant to our society. The article is spoilery for plot points for all of Season 1.
Why Warehouse 13 Works, or Relax, It's Just Everything
What the hell is this show? I mean, sure it's funny, frenetic and action-packed - a mix not only of cultural references but genre conventions and tones, all thrown together in a blender and somehow... working. But this all runs contrary to my deeply-ingrained story sense, which believes in finding clean, clear lines and well-defined motifs.
At first, I admit, that's what I thought. And I was one of the guys writing it.
But now I get it. Just recently, during our early weeks of writing season two, I grokked the show.
(...)
Warehouse 13 is about the collective, cognitive anxiety we're feeling, caused by the sudden collision between our primitive, analog selves... and digital access to everything.
(...)
We find ourselves living in a time when we have simultaneous and ready access to all history, culture, knowledge, news, music, TV, movies, stories - ever. Need an image of a twelfth-century trebuchet, or maybe an historically-accurate recipe for how mille-feuille was prepared in Napoleon's time? Click; here you go. When was the last time you were talking with someone about a funny or formative TV moment, that you couldn't pull it up on the web to show them? If you were so inclined, you could carry around every song you've ever heard in your life, in your pocket. And thanks to Facebook, that same random access exists for every friend, relative or co-worker you've ever known. We're all getting to experience Slaughterhouse Five firsthand. Our lives are on shuffle.
And all of this is both good and bad. In the proverbial definition of "crisis," the moment presents both danger and opportunity. We're all in input overload, struggling to stem the tide of messages coming at us by email, cell phone, chats, texts and tweets. The elusive holy grail of nerd pride has become the phrase "inbox zero."
(...)
Which brings me back to the show. Here's what this borderline-insane rant has to do with Warehouse 13:
The warehouse in the series' title is the repository of every mystical artifact from all human history. The storage site of all our cultural touchstones, all our stories, all our myths, in one place. Sound familiar? There's a reason the warehouse is depicted as infinitely large, why we see a new room, a new section, a new feature every week. The warehouse is our moment in time made physical; the internet in hard copy. The reason we can't see the edges is because there aren't any.
And that leaves me to tell you one of my favorite things about the show: beyond the attractive actors and likable characters doing goofy, interesting things every week, the show is about objects and our connection to them. Concrete things and the abstract, even mystical effects they have on the world. Which means the possible storylines are infinite: pick any object from history, and any historical or modern character it might be connected to, and you've got something to hang a plot on. Lewis Carroll's mirror. Edgar Allen Poe's pen. Nicola Tesla's... well. You get the idea.
Plus, it's way steampunk. Warehouse 13 had a vintage typewriter for a computer keyboard before the Eleventh Doctor did. And if you look in the background of the office? Card catalog. ::draws big hearts around show::
Also, there's a ferret.
Whoops. Need to rectify my lack of a Warehouse 13 icon.
ETA - iTunes has a free, 7.5 minute Season 1 recap up here. It's very informative, but stop before the last 1:10 if you don't want a preview of the coming season.