Teilhard de Chardin
POSSIBLE ORIGINS OF WAREHOUSE 13 ARTIFACT THEORY:
A graduate student at Trinity
Once conmpted the square of infinity.
But it gave him the fidgets
To put down the digits
So he dropped math and took up divinity.
— Isaac Asimov
Teilhard de Chardin was a geologist and palentologist who became a Jesuit priest, a nervous scientist hedging his bets. His theory of how the universe works involves tangential energy and radial energy. In Teilhard’s world, tangential energy is that which holds matter together. Radial energy is an anti-entropic force that directs tangential energies to progressively higher degrees of order. His notion was that consciousness is a part of all matter, a fixed quantity of it being contained in the planet earth because of its isolation in space. Living things extract that energy from matter, organize it, and, if they organize it well, like people do, expel it at death in an energy packet into the “noosphere”, which is sort of a cloud of thought. I am oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, but I’m not making this up.
Regent Jane (Kate Mulgrew) brandishes the bracelet that will save WAREHOUSE 13 from the Luftwaffe
If Teilhard’s theories were used as the basis for Warehouse 13, the artifacts might make a kind of sense. I mean, Artie did say that the artifacts used tangential energy. The artifacts do behave as though they are using one form of energy to channel another. For example, in BURNOUT (Season one Episode 6) the Spine of the Saracen uses the electrical impulses from the host body to electrocute people, and clearly is drawing energy from another source. The human body just does not have that much electrical energy. Teilhard would also support the notion that artifacts are extensions of people, as Mrs. Frederick asserted. People’s radiant energy is used to organize and focus the tangential energy of objects. In BREAKDOWN (Season one Episode 10) a literal cloud formed in the Warehouse when the artifact disturbance neutralizer went offline. Perhaps this was a smaller version of the noosphere.
The advantage to this explanation of artifacts is that their properties must conform only to the subjective view of the world held by the originator of the artifact.
SPECULATIONS ON HOW THE NEXT EPISODE MIGHT GO:
The last Season 3 episode of WAREHOUSE 13 (not counting the Xmas episode) ended with a mysterious pocket watch in Artie’s hand. The watch is the implied savior of the Warehouse. Somehow, the watch will “turn back time”, perhaps with Cher singing in the background, and rescind the effects of the nuclear blast that destroyed the place.
Repilca of the Whovian pocket watch
Let’s talk about that blast. I get that the energy was contained by the force field generated by Regent Jane’s bracelet. But inside the force field (and outside the containing bubble of it that saved the show’s main cast members) the blast apparently behaved in its normal, destructive manner. Therefore, one might expect the inside of the bubble to be highly radioactive, but apparently this is not the case, since no one is apparently worried at all about radiation poisoning. Perhaps the artifact responsible, which was a chunk of the British House of Commons that absorbed “the total force of the Luftwaffe” during the blitz, remembered that the Luftwaffe never dropped a nuclear weapon, and therefore the blast was really the CHEMICAL EQUIVALENT of a nuclear blast. I wonder what person that chunk of parliament is an extension of? Hermann Göring?
Now let’s get back to that watch.
The Mad Hatter had a watch of that sort. His was somewhat larger, and did not seem to exhibit any inclination to time travel. But there has recently been another pocket watch in the realm of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It belonged to John Smith, a schoolteacher at Farringham School for Boys. I don’t suppose we dare hope that the watch contains essence of Timelord, because, if that were the case, the Warehouse would probably be a Tardis. Wouldn’t that be a nice twist.
