Magical undies anyone?

Every week on Warehouse 13, Pete, Myka, and Arty have to deal with the fall-out from some bizarre magical item loose in the world. The recent reveal that Sean Maher’s superhero-speedo was enchanted in the “Mild Mannered” episode was surely one of the show’s most hilariously inspired artifacts.

But this got us thinking: how do they keep coming up with ideas for fresh new artifacts?

“The staff and I sit around in a room for November, December, and January, and we just spitball ideas,” says the Warehouse 13’s showrunner and executive producer Jack Kenny. “Sometimes it starts with what’s an interesting artifact … and we build an episode around it.”

As an example of an episode that began with the idea for the artifact itself, Kenny cites an upcoming one featuring the telegraph from Telegraph Island, the source of the expression “around the bend.”

But, Kenny points out, “We don’t like to start with an artifact and build a story around that. We like to look at what’s going on in our [characters] lives and how can the story be informed by that. Make it more of an emotional fun ride for the viewer, rather than just an artifact. We want to make it personal.”

Often, he says, the setting for the episode precedes the artifact itself. “We set one episode in a college wrestling team,” he says, “because we thought it would be fun to send our girls there…. We sent Claudia and Myka to the team [in the episode "For the Team"], so they would deal with all these college wrestlers, guys in the lockerroom. So sometimes it starts with the place [and then we come up with the idea for the artifact].”

Other artifacts from the upcoming season include a cane that causes earthquakes when tapped against the ground; a statue of a griffin, which results in a body-switching episode for Pete and Myka; Mata Hari’s’ silk stockings, which cause men to do whatever the wearer tells them do; and the chains of Torquemada, the torturing priest from the Spanish Inquisition.

Pete and Myka may also have to deal with Artifact Zero — “The first artifact collected for the first warehouse, the most dangerous artifact, the most powerful that’s ever been and that started the idea of putting these things away,” Kenny says.

One artifact that might pop up in a future season is Hitler’s microphone.

“I’ve been pitching it for two seasons,” Kenny says. “You come up with a cool artifact, you just have to find the right story. In the future, I want to do a story where some talk-radio guy gets a hold of Hitler’s microphone.”

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Warning: The following article contains information and vague spoilers about the second season of Warehouse 13.

What can we expect in the second season of SyFy’s hit show Warehouse 13, the second season of which debuts July 6th? We talked to Jack Kenny, an executive producer and the showrunner of the show, to get the scoop right from the horse’s mouth!

(As always, episode numbers are subject to change as networks sometimes juggle when various episodes are aired.)

• The season premiere, which picks up seconds after last season’s finale left off, resolves a lot of the strings left hanging at the end of last season: whether or not Leena is a traitor, where Claudia went, whether Arty’s dead. And keep your eyes on McPherson: he did something in the finale (and continues to do it in the premiere) that will impact the characters lives all through the upcoming season, and possibly the third season (if there is one). “It all culminates in a relatively surprising two-episode [season] finale where we will actually visit Warehouse 2 in Egypt,” Jack Kenny says.

• What’s this about Warehouse 2? “Warehouse 13 isn’t the first warehouse,” Kenny says. “They’ve existed for centuries, moving from country to country, based on where the safest place in the world is at the time.” Warehouse 2 has a similar feel to Warehouse 13, Kenny says. “It’s the second warehouse they built after the first one, built by Alexander the Great. This had been buried.”  For Kenny’s history of the different warehouses, they’re all listed on the SyFy website.

• Expect to get to know more about the characters’ personal lives this season. “I wanted to explore the emotional lives of our characters a little more deeply,” Kenny says. “I wanted to explore their family dynamic little bit more, and one of the things that comes into play in families is who they’re dating, who they see, what their social lives are like outside the family and how it reverberates into the family. There’s somebody for Pete to see a few times, Claudia’s going to meet somebody in town. We discover that Arty has a crush on somebody. And even Myka develops an unlikely friendship with someone.”

• But while the characters and their relationships deepen, don’t expect Pete and Myka to get together. “Whether it’s true or not, everyone always says that once [the main characters] sleep together, that’s the end of the series,” Kenny says. “Maybe it’s something we’ll do eventually — they’ll develop a relationship. [But] to me, they’re more brother and sister. They annoy each other like brothers and sisters do. They have that dynamic. I’m not really interested in that happening yet. There’s always going to be a little sexual tension there, but they’re not going to sleep together.”

• There’s a new “big bad.”

• The season’s guest stars include Firefly’s Jewel Staite and Sean Maher who appear in a superhero/comic book-themed episode as unrequited lovers. “We knew them both from Firefly and we knew they had great chemistry together and were good friends, so we thought it would be fun to do,” Kenny says.

• Philip Winchester appears in an episode. “He plays an old movie actor who gets projected into the town in various of his old movies,” Kenny says. “He played a noir detective, a cowboy, a gladiator.”

• Heroes‘ Tawny Cypress plays a high-end fashion model — something Myka impersonates to hunt down an artifact.

• Tia Carrere will play the same character, a former flame of Pete’s, in two different episodes. “She’s great — I could have her back every week,” Kenny says. And will they write in Relic Hunter references? “We haven’t yet, but maybe we’ll throw one in! She brings her own cheekiness.”

• Rene Auberjonois (Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) plays older and younger versions of the same guy. “He’s a guy who created the first warehouse computer system and then got lost in it,” Kenny says.


Jack Kenny

• Nolan Gerard Funk plays Claudia’s new boyfriend, a guy who works at the hardware store in the town next to Warehouse 13.

• Lindsey “Bionic Woman” Wagner guest stars in an episode.

• The much-publicized Eureka cross-over includes Neil Grayston appearing as Fargo who comes to update the Warehouse 13 computer system. “Our two shows cross-over really well,” Kenny says. “We don’t know a lot about each other’s towns, but we’re both kind of in the same universe. It’s hard to cross-over with certain [SyFy] shows, because the dynamics are different — it’d be impossible for us to cross-over with Caprica.  But this seemed like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we had Joe Morton on our show as a different character, so we can’t have him come over and play his Eureka character!”

• Artifacts from the upcoming season include a cane that causes earthquakes when tapped against the ground; the telegraph from Telegraph Island (the source of the expression “around the bend”); a statue of a griffin, which results in a body-switching episode for Pete and Myka; Mata Hari’s’ silk stockings, which cause men to do whatever she tells them do; and the chains of Torquemada, the torturing priest from the Spanish Inquisition.

• In episode nine, we learn the real reason Arty was arrested for treason, which is how he ended up assigned to the warehouse in the first place. Suffice to say, he had some pretty good reasons! We also learn a lot about his past and where he came from.

• Pete and Myka may deal with Artifact Zero — “The first artifact collected for the first warehouse, the most dangerous artifact, the most powerful that’s ever been and that started the idea of putting these things away,” Kenny says.

• “In episode eleven, we learn a tremendous amount about Mrs. Frederick in connection to the warehouse and how it operates, and how she operates,” Kenny says. “You don’t want to learn too much about her, or she’ll lose her mystery. But we learn some really cool stuff about her that I think in a way makes her more mysterious.”

• CCH Pounder, who plays Mrs. Frederick, will appear in five (out of twelve) episodes this year, including the season premiere on July 6th.

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