“Don’t Hate the Player” is episode six of season three of Warehouse 13.
This episode opens with Claudia and Pete picking up some coffees ready for a night of inventory when Claudia gets a call from, not Artie as she assumes, but someone called Gibson. He was asked to call her if something went wrong with a beta test. He was told to call her by Eureka‘s Fargo, who is currently jerking around looking to be having some type of seizure. Yes, Fargo has managed to get himself in trouble. Again.
Pete, Myka and Claudia head to Palo Alto – Fargo’s there, not in Eureka. Fargo and someone else are currently wired up to what is apparently a video game, but neither have their eyes open and they can’t be unplugged. Fargo has a presentation explaining what the things is – Fargames. Gibson, and the other guy plugged into, Jerry, he game, had come to him with a new idea – BioElectric Reality Augmentation Interactive Device – or BRAID. It creates a full sensory experience, one you live, not just play. Claudia rather quickly figures out that the BRAID never worked. Fargo had found something he thought would help – an artefact. It’s a teapot – part of a set that belonged to Beatrix Potter. It was used to brew mushrooms during her time as a mycologist. Including ones that stimulate the imagination centre of the brain.
Claudia says that there isn’t anything they can do to help Fargo and Jerry and outside the game. So Claudia and Pete wire up and join the game itself. First they have to brew tea brewed in the teapot. The videogame is supposedly sword & sorcery – but it seems that Fargo has actually made a game based around Warehouse 13. With added sword & sorcery. And the Warehouse is a castle. Pete is a gladiator and Claudia an elf. The game’s graphics – aren’t that convincing. Well, they look like real life with a Photoshop filter added. Fargo has also added other Warehouse people to the game. They have to play the game’s quest – and save the princess – in order to find Fargo and Jerry. Myka is looking at the original Beatrix Potter books – and they are rather different, and darker, from the well known ones. The full sensory experience of the game means that it’s possible to die in it – and the game has been altered from the original programming. Using artefacts with videogames – not a good idea.
Jinks is in New York City where he is meeting FBI agent Sally Stukowski, originally seen in “The New Guy”. She has called him, and Artie as it happens, in to help with an unusual situation. Neither know, as yet, that she is also working for some mysterious new player, one who already uses artefacts. So her asking for help is probably not entirely honest. The director of an art gallery jumped out of a window. It was ruled as suicide, but he was not apparently suicidal. He also shows signs of having fallen much more than two stories. Artie says that the coroner is right, it’s suicide – but he’s spotted a painting, a Van Gogh, Stormy Night, that is directly across from the broken window and has been missing for years. Death and Destruction have apparently followed the painting wherever it went. Rather than tell Agent Stukowski what is going on, Artie plans to steal it (he doesn’t want her to find out more about artefacts). Nothing could possibly go wrong with that. Especially as Agent Stukowski expects them to turn up.