After waiting so long in this shortened fifth and final season to get to the point, the penultimate episode set up the prospect that Warehouse 13 was going to transition to Warehouse 14.  It would have been logical to presume that the final episode would have been the team fighting to stop the transition, or figuring out a way to move on with their lives.  But of course, instead, we get a strange mash-up between a clip show and a character-centric farewell.

                 

The premise is that Mrs. Frederic sits down the team, informs them that the Warehouse is transitioning and it cannot be prevented, and tasks them with recalling their most defining experience as Warehouse agents so they can be set into the Round Table for posterity.  Which brings to mind the notion that selected scenes from previous episodes would be recalled in a super-nostalgic set of sequences for each character.

 

That’s not what happens, which is fairly off-putting.  With the exception of Pete (who has the most poignant and meaningful of responses, by running through a montage of every major plot point since the beginning of the series), the characters all choose moments that were never actually in a previous episode.  Now, I understand that the writers were trying to avoid giving the faithful viewers a total rehash, but by displaying new scenes as the most important moments in the lives of the agents, it all but implies that we never got to see them happen during the actual run of the series.

 

A big part of the episode was Claudia’s apparent decision to set aside her destiny as the next Caretaker.  In fact, the whole whiz-bang dance routine was meant to put a huge highlight on that point.  Which, at least initially, is a terrible way to resolve one of the best long-standing character arcs on the series.  I can get that the series is ending early, so why not spend some of the limited time directly on that issue?

 

But here’s the really strange part.  The very end of the episode shows a still-very-much-intact Warehouse 13 well into the future, manned by different but vaguely familiar new agents, with Claudia as the never-aging Caretaker.  And she looks barely older (and still ridiculously attractive), so it can’t be too far ahead of this point that she assumes the Caretaker mantle.  So two of the things stated with strong conviction at the start of the episode, the inevitable transition of the Warehouse and Claudia’s decision not to become Caretaker, are completely reversed at the end of the episode!

 

I could quibble about Artie’s son at this stage of the game, especially since it would have been another really good thing to mention while Claudia was being pissy with Artie about keeping family secrets.  But that’s nothing compared to the worst offense: they finally put the matter to rest and paired up Pete and Myka, even though their platonic partnership was one of the most refreshing aspects of the series from the very beginning.

 

The finale did none of the things that the urgency of a short six-episode final season should have pressed the writers to achieve.  Did it need a huge action set-piece, demanding a massive budget?  No, not in the slightest.  This episode could have been about the end of Warehouse 13, and the debates and decisions that the characters would have to make as a result.  Taking the time to set up those final moments, far in the future, would have made a lot more sense!

 

Oddly enough, this finale actually sums up a lot of what was flawed about the final season, and really much of the material since the high point that was the third season.  Warehouse 13 was always a show with a delicate balance between the serious and the farcical, and all too often, it was the farcical that overshadowed the rest, often to the detriment of the final product.  For some, that was entirely the point of the series, but for others, it was a source of frustration.  I suppose it makes sense for Warehouse 13 to go out on a similarly polarizing note.