Warehouse 13 has not grown on me. It’s not entirely Warehouse 13’s fault – I’ve been watching Slings & Arrows this weekend, a completely great, super-literary drama about a troupe of Shakespearean actors from Canada. Each season is about a Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear), and about the surrounding culture of theater, the arts, actors and directors, stage production, madness, mortality, comedy, sex, etc. etc. etc. As you’d expect, whatever happens onstage influences the tone and themes of the other plotlines, and there’s a nice collection of compelling minor characters to round out the less subtle main character arcs.

It’s not just that a show like Warehouse 13 looks petty and fluffy in comparison. They’re completely different shows, and it’s unfair to force them into an apples/oranges situation. The bigger problem is that Slings & Arrows has made it clear for me why exactly Warehouse 13 doesn’t work.

Let’s look at season two of Slings & Arrows briefly. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen it; the point is going to be reasonably superficial. Okay, so we’ve got a Canadian theater troupe putting on a Shakespeare festival, and this year they’re doing Macbeth. It’s a big show, everyone’s freaked out about it and whether or not it’s cursed, there are major conflicts between the probably crazy director and the actor playing the lead role, and everything’s hanging by a thread. On the small stage, a different director is putting on Romeo and Juliet. He’s doing all sorts of torturous things to the production and yelling stuff like “they’re not characters, they’re signifiers!” and in the middle of it all, the actor and actress who play Romeo and Juliet fall in love. (Romeo started the season thinking he was gay, but whatever).

Joanne Kelly on Slings & Arrows

Look at that cute young ingénue playing Juliet. Isn’t she adorable, ridiculously nervous and happy? Okay, she looks a little weird in that last shot, but in the context of the episode, she’s feeling moved by her co-star’s sexual awakening. Anyhow, she was great in Sling & Arrows.  Haven’t I seen her somewhere else?

Joanne Kelly on Warehouse 13

Oh right! Here she is, Joanne Kelly, playing the lead actress in Warehouse 13! Except now she’s all dressed in official jewel-tone lady-FBI-agent-wear, and she looks much less happy. Sure, her character’s not really supposed to be happy, but there’s so much less sparkle and effervescence. This is really my problem with most of Warehouse 13: I get that it’s a fun show about wacky historical artifacts causing trouble in the modern world, and I love the steampunk aesthetic, but I don’t get nearly enough sense of the capability and teamwork from the two main characters that makes these buddy-cop genres work. She’s straight edge and he’s all instinct, and together the idea is that they make a great team. In reality, though, any conflict between them falls flat, so that when they do manage get on the same page, it doesn’t feel special.

Honestly, my favorite thing about Warehouse 13 at this point is still the opening credits, which almost single-handedly rescue the show by including this gem:

Wouldn’t that just make an excellent blog banner?

Two new science fiction programs premiered last week – the BBC’s absolutely incredible miniseries Torchwood: Children of the Earth, and SiiiiiighFy’s new hopeful network-builder, Warehouse 13. It was a big week for science fiction television, but the coincidence of their simultaneous releases draws attention to the surprising parallels between the shows. BBC’s Torchwood has already run for two seasons, an uneven spinoff of the British national television treasure that is Doctor Who, and this miniseries extends and thoughtfully develops the show’s original premise. In a Doctor Who universe, extra terrestrial contact with earth has been occurring for centuries, and Torchwood is a secret group of scrappy in-the-know conspiracy nuts with a mission to protect earth from aliens (and often, vice versa). Under the noses of regular folks, Torchwood contains, destroys or befriends any non-human Earth dwellers, allowing us all to go on with our incurious quotidian lives. Over on Warehouse 13, two misfit FBI agents get reassigned to an enormous secret bunker in South Dakota, a well-hidden vault for all things alien, mystical, superhuman, or just unexplained. After initially grumbling about their unusual job descriptions, Pete and Myka get down to the business of tracking down weird, magical stuff so that good hardworking Americans don’t have to expand their worldviews. Fear not, citizens! Avert your eyes from the strange, eerily seductive older woman with that fetching comb in her hair, she’s just being possessed by the spirit of Lucrezia Borgia.

Strange possessed hair accessory, Warehouse 13

It’s not a terribly original premise (see most memorably, X-Files, Men in Black, also The Matrix, The Middleman, etc. etc.), but what makes these two shows so interesting in juxtaposition is their perspective on who watches these valiant, insightful, open-minded watchmen. On Warehouse 13, Pete and Myka may have left their ladder-climbing FBI careers, but they’re still important members of a federal system. Although dismayed by the new assignment, they are persuaded to trek out to South Dakota because it’s a “matter of national security.” Your friendly neighborhood weird-things experts, Pete and Myka’s job is to help the government protect us from stuff we won’t be able to cope with. The first two seasons of Torchwood also used a lot of that “we worry so you don’t have to” rhetoric, but Children of the Earth takes a turn toward the paranoid (and certainly more interesting). When children across the world start speaking in unison, Torchwood would love nothing more than to jump into action, but other factions within the British government label them a threat and order them assassinated. Doctor Who often strides into official buildings, reassuring everyone that he’ll save the day, but the members of Torchwood spend this miniseries fleeing capable Black-Ops assassins intent on their deaths.

Torchwood headquarters, the government is watching

Science fiction has always given us access to explore fears about the unknown, and has often famously been an opportunity to create allegories of our more familiar, less frighteningly authoritarian governmental overlords. 1984 and Brave New World are classic warnings against human complacency, cloaked in premises that feel fictional enough to still be enjoyable. But like Eureka, both Warehouse 13 and Torchwood: Children of the Earth capitalize on the coexistence of our known world with a cooler, weirder parallel reality, which makes the reassuring competency of Pete and Myka extra-cozy and the possibility of chilling governmental mercilessness and self-interest way more scary. Of the two, Torchwood is undoubtedly the better, more thoughtful, and more gripping television experience, and I think it’s largely because of the show’s willingness to disassociate its characters from any feel-good national interest. They didn’t get a shiny new popular President across the pond, and it’s not hard for them to believe that a government can turn against its people while whistling a happy tune. Warehouse 13, on the other hand, begins its pilot episode with Pete and Myka protecting an unseen President from what turns out to be a blood-activated killer mask. Guess which show makes for stronger, more intelligent television.