“A New Hope” is episode one of season four of Warehouse 13.
This does not follow on from the season three finale, “The Greatest Gift”, which was a Christmas episode, but from “Stand”. It looked as if Sykes had finally been beaten. Marcus had been ‘killed’ – he was actually already dead and had been some time; he was being kept alive by an artefact that Claudia wants to use to brink Jinks back – and Sykes himself had died shortly after he took the artefact he wanted to recover.
Unfortunately, he had left what Artie called the artefact equivalent of a nuclear weapon behind. The Warehouse’s shields remained up, to prevent the effects of destroyed artefacts from polluting the world, meaning that Artie, Pete, Myka and HG were stuck inside. HG managed to divert the shields enough to protect the other three but not herself. As a result, the bomb went off and the entire Warehouse, and HG, were destroyed. This caused Mrs Frederic to, well, die. Or at least stop living. It was an odd death. However, Artie seems to have an idea, connected to a pocket watch that MacPherson had left him. When Pete says they have lost, he says ‘Not yet.’
The Warehouse is a smoking hole in the ground with a few small fires still burning. Pete, Myka and Artie are upset over what has happened. Artie says the watch might be a key to some sort of failsafe device. It can’t rebuild the Warehouse on its own. At Leena’s, they discover that Mrs Frederic is gone as well. They want to use the watch, but no-one knows how it works. Or what the consequences of using it are.
Even the strongest part of the Warehouse has been destroyed – and that vault stored Pandora’s Box. Financial markets are panicking and suicides, including group suicides, are up. At the bottom of Pandora’s Box was hope, and with that destroyed, the world has lost hope. This is bad.
The first step of figuring out the watch turns it into a stopwatch, and it’s counting down – 24 hours from the moment of the Warehouse’s destruction. So it looks like they have less than a day to track down whatever the failsafe is and where it is. The next step is the weird American football that crashes into the Warehouse every now and then. It’s not a ball.
The trail leads to a secretive sect of the Knights Templar (who are not that friendly and are led by Brent Spiner, perhaps most famous for playing Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation – Saul Rubinek had previously appeared with him in the TNG episode “The Most Toys” – but he also had a part in Threshold) and France. They have to find the artefact, when they don’t know what it is, figure out how it works, get the day back and research how to defuse Sykes’ bomb before it explodes.
The clock is ticking, the world is falling to pieces and the team is being whittled down – and there will be consequences whether they are successful or not. And a new plot thread launches.