“Magnetism” is episode four of season one of Warehouse 13.
In the previous episode, “Resonance”, someone tried to hack the Warehouse’s servers. Artie stopped the hack and tracked it back to what he thought was its source – Dickinson’s office. Only it wasn’t; he’d been spoofed.
This episode opens in Paris and Pete is suspended above an exhibit of the guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette. He’s fiddling around with it – which includes reaching his arm under the blade whilst holding a spanner. Which he promptly drops. They are trying to retrieve the blade; Myka is distracting the guard. The spanner is at the bottom of the guillotine and Pete sticks his head through the hole at the bottom to reach it, dislodging the blade. Fortunately for him, he doesn’t wind up a head shorter, but that really was a silly thing to do. Still, they manage to swap the blades out.
Back at the Warehouse, Artie is tracking events. In Unionville, Colorado, people start acting oddly. A woman throws an urn full of ashes at a hospital before spraying graffiti on it, a boy breaks the bow of his violin when he’s finished playing and then smashes the violin itself up and a nun climbs onto the roof of a building and jumps off. She survives. Pete and Myka start arguing in the Warehouse (about the mission they just completed) which is bad. Negative energy causes the Warehouse to react. They ignore Artie, so he douses them in neutraliser. Pete says there has to be someone in charge in the field. Naturally, he thinks it should be him. Myka thinks the same thing. Artie suggests to each separately that they let the other think they are running things.
Artie wants them to go to Unionville and ask the questions on his list of the three people affected. They don’t like asking the questions. Artie tells them they have to. They need to see if there’s an artefact involved.
On their arrival in Unionville, both are still arguing over the best way to proceed (Pete wants to improvise; Myka wants a plan) when an elderly lady (the same one who attacked the hospital) attacks a newspaper vending machine. Then she goes into a shop, speaks to a doctor who ignores her as he’s on the phone. So she smashes his head into a glass counter. The boy who smashed up his violin set fire to the room and then went into a coma, the nun who jumped thought she could fly and, stupidly, when she says it again whilst being interviewed, Myka has her and the father go out of the room. So the nun climbs out of the window and onto the bell tower. And jumps again. You could see that coming. This time she got saved by a snow bank.
The elderly lady is getting worse and then the medic who treated her in the shop is affected as well and starts groping Myka. Someone at an AA meeting that Pete attends starts heading for alcohol, after 20 years on the wagon. The problem is spreading. Pete and Myka are going to have to learn to work together effectively.
Back at the Warehouse, Artie is having problems with a build up of energy (lightning bolts and power failures). So he talks to the Warehouse. Again. It seems the hacker is back.