Warehouse 13 Season 4 Episode 10 review: We All Fall Down
It’s the last episode before Warehouse 13s mid-season break. Here’s Jennifer’s review of We All Fall Down...
This review contains spoilers.
4.10 We All Fall Down
This week gave us a fairly good episode with a few chuckle-worthy jokes, some well-choreographed action scenes, and a pretty decent cliff hanger. I believe last week’s episode would have been a better mid-season finale, but the episode still had some good qualities. We had some excellent acting surrounding Leena’s death and Evil Artie’s exploitation of the team’s insecurities, Brent Spiner in an episode is always a treat, and it was fun to see just how evil Evil Artie could be.
We start off with the team coming to terms with Leena’s death, and also with the fact that Artie was her killer. The cast does a great job mourning Leena, and Allison Scagliotti is the bright spot amongst a very talented group. While everyone takes a bleak view of Evil Artie’s actions, Claudia believes in Good Artie up to the end, and her performance in this episode is excellent. I have to say that while the acting was brilliant, as an audience member the emotional impact was minimal. There have been too many resurrections in this show to discount another.
The real action kicks off when the team first encounters Evil Artie trying to trick them into telling him where the astrolabe is. When that fails, he torches the Holy Roman Empire section of the Warehouse, apparently inherited from Warehouse 8, in order to cover his tracks as he moves forward in his scheme to recover the astrolabe. I liked that Leena’s spirit is hanging around and that Pete is “in tune” enough to see it. It was a nice way of moving the plot along, leading Pete to HG’s research on the dreaded dagger.
Mrs. Frederic and Jink’s research in the Brotherhood’s library seemed superfluous; Mrs. Frederic has already figured out that Artie’s personality was split. I suppose we learn through their research that the Evil Artie will continue to grow while Good Artie gets weaker, but that is already apparent. However, it did give us an excuse to see Brent Spiner as the ACTUAL Brother Adrian, and he is fantastic. His exit line from the episode is a bit chilling and reminds us that while he wasn’t who we feared throughout the season, he is still a formidable man. What kind of favor will he call in, I wonder?
Meanwhile, the team tracks Artie to Budapest, puts him on a terrorist watch list so that he’s detained, and Pete and Myka get ahead of him to find the dagger in Prague. When Evil Artie catches up to them, after he’s escaped from Hungarian detention of course, we see him start to play on their emotions. Picking at their most vulnerable spots in order to distract them, immobilize them and steal the dagger. Saul Rubinek is in top form here, showing some very convincing disdain towards our two agents and really digging into their psyches to make the hurt as personal as possible.
While Pete and Myka are in Europe, Claudia discovers that Artie is also attempting to recover “The Chinese Orchid”. The most deadly artifact that was held by Warehouse 8, it releases the English Sweating Sickness, a plague that affected England and Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, bringing death within hours of showing symptoms.
Warehouse 8 encased the orchid in something that is supposedly unbreakable, but the dagger is supposed to be able to break through this unbreakable material. So Evil Artie’s plan is to threaten the team with a worldwide plague in order to get the astrolabe. A weak plan at best, even if the plague manages to kill as many people as were lost when hope was lost, at least hope is still intact. I don’t see any necessity to use the astrolabe to undo something that is not as bad as what happened originally.
I feel like it all becomes needlessly complicated here. Claudia and Steve, aka “The Second A-Team”, go to snag the orchid from Warehouse 8, only to find it missing. Apparently a family descended from Warehouse 8 has been in charge of the orchid for generations and moved the orchid to keep it safe from the Third Reich. Evil Artie finds the family first, and gets them to take him to it through dubious logic. Seriously, “people are following me to get to the orchid so take me to the orchid”?
And it turns out that the family moved the orchid from a hidden, extremely hard to reach underground cavern to a small wooden mill easily accessible by roads? Let’s ignore the fact that the mill may have been raided by Nazis for any of a hundred reasons, what about the threat of being blown up by bombs falling from the sky? I’m not really getting a “safer during wartime” vibe here.
Perhaps the writers wanted the orchid in the mill so they could orchestrate the fight scene that leads us to the end of the episode. The choreography was great here and it was fun to watch Steve and Claudia kick some butt (“Sprechen sie head lock?”). In the end Claudia loves Artie enough to stab him, banishing the evil, but not before Evil Artie activates the orchid, infecting the team and the rest of the world. Cliffhanger to the second half of the season next year.
Overall I enjoyed this episode, but I think it would have been better as the mid-season opener next year. I wasn’t that engaged in the plague threat, it seems to be one of the more easily approached issues that the warehouse has caused, but I am interested to see how Artie deals with what he’s done and how the team will move forward. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait until April to see. See you all then!
Read Jennifer's review of last week's episode, The Ones You Love, here.
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