Today I'd like to talk about one of my favourite genre shows right now, Warehouse 13. (And let me just say SPOILERS!) It's The SyFy Channel's highest rated series, which is a bit of a shame in that I'm also a great fan ofStargate Universe, which isn't doing as well, and the fact that more happy go lucky fare is going great guns may pose problems for the grittier show. What unites these two series (and my other favourite, Fringe, Doctor Who, as I always say, looming too large for me to regard as a mere TV show) is an intelligence about avoiding cliche. W13 didn't start out like that, being, in its first season, a bit 'will this do?' like a lot of SyFy's own movies still are. The charming cast and odd sense of humour were present, but some episodes felt lacklusture, and the central bad guy was generically snarling and generically British. But at the start of season two something changed. The premise of W13 is that famous historical objects have the power to alter reality, that we're living in a world where reputation contributes to physics. And someone has to tidy up. The relationship of our heroes to authority is, of course, this being now, a touch incoherent: they work for the government and yet not exactly, rather for an ancient order of 'regents', who are sometimes scarily authoritarian, sometimes just getting the job done. The problem with any character 'going rogue' against this establishment is that, in order to keep the show going, they'd have to take the titular warehouse of artefacts with them. Still, I'm sure any future 'all the Watchers die' moment will be regarded as exciting rather than predictable.

However, that business of not knowing how it feels about authority is the only trope where the series falls into the traps of modern television. Consider the matter of 'will they/won't they?', a staple of, well, everything, forever. Will our male and female leads get together? No, says W13, they won't. The affable, enthusiastic Pete has a girlfriend in town who's a meaningful character, and the brittle, rather nervy Myka is utterly happy for him. This seems to also be a feature of Haven, the newest of SyFy's three 'weird precinct' shows. (When one of W13's characters went to visit the oldest show, Eureka, in a crossover episode, she was told outright that everything there works by science, and I'm hoping for similar with Haven, where everything works by slight horror, the three shows being the Towns of Clarke, Bradbury and dilute Stephen King). There, again, lead Audrey is only somewhat romantically interested in the town's roguish rogue who never breaks the law, and not at all in her, again girlfriended, partner. It feels like a memo went round. And it actually makes all these leads more relatable and less defined by others.

I think that Fringe doesn't get enough feminist kudos for its inversion of gender types, with it's tough female action hero and soft man who looks after family and test tubes. That goes vastly moreso for Warehouse 13. Of its seven leads this season, five were women. Two of them of colour (though one of those gets nothing to do). When Myka takes hip geek Claudia out in the field, to learn about the business of bagging and tagging dangerous artefacts, they talk about rites of passage, about screwing up, about their age difference, but not at all about men. That an episode that so heartily passes the Bechdel Test feels so weird and interesting because of it says that there's still a long way to go for modern society.

This Year's episodes saw a clever use of audience expectations to convince us that, while Pete was indeed hallucinating, he'd uncovered an entirely plausible secret villain, and a body swap episode that just did the fun bits (letting the actors show how good they are, the central motivation of Dollhouse), before realising this was ancient stuff and quickly moving on to something else. I laughed out loud several times (particularly at the quite sad moment where we see that Myka's greatest desire is to be enthusiastically thanked by her boss over some really good coffee) the banter and byplay looking like the product of directors who have time to work up things that play around the dialogue. I was pleased at the way that the gravity of the artefacts allows sudden seriousness in what's generally a bouncy (some would say steampunk, I wouldn't, for this is actually good, hee hee!) atmosphere. An artefact with dour consequences speaks of the tears of history, as when the show touched on Jewish extermination under Stalin. Our mentor hero, Artie, is literally a traitor to his country, for reasons that aren't (completely) whitewashed. His character speaks of the complexities of the past, saying that that wise bearded professor in sandals might have done drugs and bombs, and that now we (sort of, sometimes) forgive that. But the best walking grey area was H.G.Wells, the premise of whom (did for real most of the stuff in the novels, jolly British toodle pip) made me cringe, but who turned out (as the secret female author partner of a front man) to have such layers that when she tries to actually destroy the world, we're just a bit on her side.

It's not Kubrick. It's not trying to be. But it's not fluff either. It's thoughtful entertainment of the sort where Jack Kirby's belt can give one super powers. And it's radical, without ever saying so out loud. Hopefully, there'll be something in next season that might attract Hugo interest. Anyway, I love it.

Tomorrow: more Paul and Mike, more festive blather, more stuff! Cheerio!