“Pilot – Part 1” is episode one of season one of Warehouse 13.
Yet another unimaginatively named pilot episode (sometimes this episode is shown as a feature length single episode, rather than two separate episodes).
It opens in a museum Washington, D.C. with a woman standing so still next to an exhibit she nearly looks like one. She’s holding a file and wearing a gun. She is Agent Bering of the U.S. Secret Service, and she’s organising security for something being held in the museum.
In another place, there’s another Secret Service agent, Lattimer. He is rather more relaxed looking, as he looks to be in his home with a woman who isn’t wearing much and clearly doesn’t know him that well.
Back at the museum, Bering and the man escorting her visit someone cleaning up an artefact, an Aztec bloodstone. After they leave, the man catches his finger on the rather sharp tooth, getting blood on it. Blood on a bloodstone? This is probably not going to be a good thing.
The event in question is being hosted by the U.S. President and is at the Capitol Museum of Natural History. It’s a celebration of ancient art from around the world. The woman Lattimer was with is a waitress at the event. the man who caught his finger on the bloodstone is now acting a bit oddly. Lattimer and Bering know each other, and seem to have a bit of a personality clash. Bering has changed Lattimer’s protocols for the event (which might be the first of its type that she’s been in charge of). Lattimer thinks there is something wrong. Prescient. Bering says she thinks that everything is fine. Although when Lattimer leaves she has the agents check the perimeter. Then a strange bearded man with a bag approaches the outside.
The man damaged by the mask is sweating, has what appear to be broken blood vessels in his eyes and still bleeding. The man with the bag stuns one of the agents with some sort of strange electrical device. Lattimer looks at the bloodstone and discovers that it’s got blood on it (it seems to be bleeding), so he grabs it and leaves. The injured man approaches the President with a knife, who is escorted out of the building, and the man with the bag approaches Lattimer. Bering disables the man with the knife and the man with the bag does something to the bloodstone that involves light being sucked back into it. At which point the man who was affected by the bloodstone seems to get a bit better.
Bering comes out of this whole affair looking good. Lattimer gets to do a drug test and is suspended for a couple of weeks. When he gets home, he find a woman there, Frederic. Mrs Frederic says that she is there to see him on a matter of national security. Lattimer is now working for her she says. He has to get to a place in South Dakota by noon tomorrow.
In South Dakota, the place Lattimer goes to is a decaying, fairly substantial, warehouse that isn’t even on a road. The place seems abandoned, then another vehicle turns up. Agent Bering has been told to come to the same place. Neither knows what they are doing there. When the warehouse door opens, the man who took the Aztec artefact in Washington the previous shows up behind them. He says his name is Artie. Things are still confusing for them.
Inside, the warehouse looks a bit more sophisticated. In parts. Other parts look weird. The warehouse itself is full of shelves and boxes (think of the place at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark) and is really, really big. Artie says that the warehouse needs their talents. Bering is not happy to be there, but she has to stay there for now. They both will.
The first warehouse was built in 1898 and was used to store things. Weird things. Lattimer thinks the stuff is cool; Bering not so much. The artefacts are unexplained items that are tucked away safely, because they don’t know what they do or why. Events just start getting weirder. What Lattimer and Bering are there to do is hunt down equally weird artefacts, bring them back and store them safely.
Much of this episode is just the setup and things continue in the next, “Pilot – Part 2”.