Warehouse 13: Season Four

At the end of season three of Warehouse 13, the titular structure, an enormous facility in South Dakota also known as "America's attic" and "the world's junk drawer," was blown to smithereens, taking with it the mass of strange and wondrous artifacts that had been housed there. Since these objects are the SyFy series' raison d'être, something must be done to remedy this disaster--and sure enough, we're not even finished with the first of the 20 episodes included in the five-disc season-four boxed set before Special Agent in Charge Artie Nielsen (Saul Rubinek) has managed to turn back time by 24 hours and prevent the explosion. But Warehouse agents aren't supposed to use artifacts for their own ends--on the contrary, their job is to make sure they stay out of the hands of anyone who seeks to exploit them, whether by design or by accident--and the one he chooses is an astrolabe, a navigation device that once belonged to Ferdinand Magellan and now visits some very bad, season-long mojo on Artie and the others (a major reveal in the ninth episode explains but doesn't fully resolve the issue). Much of the season involves tracking down various missing artifacts, some whimsical, some unpredictable and very dangerous: the first pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses makes its wearer invisible. Explorer Richard Byrd's smoking pipe creates lightning and terrifying storms. A medal belonging to Saint Joseph of Cupertino has powers of levitation. Author Lewis Carroll's mirror, making a return appearance from season one, houses a very evil Alice. Suicidal poet Sylvia Plath's typewriter can suck the life out of you, while Pancho Villa's boots numb feelings of guilt or grief. More than the storylines, it's the artifacts that make Warehouse 13 entertaining and fun, along with the show's overall cheeky tone, smart dialogue, and a cast of characters who enjoy nothing more than exchanging rapid-fire witticisms (Eddie McClintock's somewhat dim Agent Pete Lattimer and Allison Scagliotti's Claudia Donovan, a sharp-tongued computer genius, are particularly amusing). Sure, the show will remind many of a cross between The X-Files and the Indiana Jones movies. Then again, those are some pretty decent role models.