Warehouse 13: "Personal Effects" Review

Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.

I'll say one thing about this new season so far: it certainly hasn't been boring. Warehouse 13 has found a formula for keeping the viewer's interest piqued throughout a whole hour of television and dropping big hints about the future storyline.

Right from the start, this episode had lots of callbacks to old elements of the series. There was a picture of the Civil War re-enactment Jinks and Claudia went to, and we had the return of the "dead agent" vault. I really like it when this series is self-referential because the writers have come up with an impressive amount of clever ideas over the years and many of them could deserve a little extra screen time. The premise of this story refers back to the huge cache of artifacts that Sykes had and what happened to it, which was one loose end from last season that is neatly tied up here.

This story gets into the warehouse agent action very quickly. Within the first five minutes we've already got Pete and Myka busting into Sykes' house to grab, bag, and tag Sykes' old artifacts only to find that someone else got there first. It turns out to be a dude named Jessie who is portrayed by this week's guest star, Brian J. Smith from SyFy's ill-fated Stargate Universe series. He was a good casting choice since he's got a fair amount of experience with sci-fi stories and acting with CG special effects. He also has this innocuous boy next door charm that's perfect for this role.

Brian's character has a typical background for a Warehouse 13 antagonist: he's not really a bad guy, just a desperate person trying to figure out a way out of a tragic situation when an artifact lands in their lap. Or in this case, a box full of artifacts that he quickly scatters across a North Dakota town via the local pawn shop. Then the crux of this episode becomes an artifact scavenger hunt. What's more interesting than chasing one artifact? Chasing a box of them!

This is a brilliant move on the part of the writers. We get a gaggle of varied artifacts, placing our man cast in a bunch of different situations that bring excitement and that unique Warehouse 13 humor. The best joke of the episode was Artie's, “A jew and a black woman walk into a country club...”. That was beautiful, and made even more perfect by the fact that it's usually not Artie that comes up with these quips. Then we have the lady at the country club with the 9-iron was a hoot too. Some of the jokes weren't such a hit though. When Jinks goes “I'm gay”, and the lingerie clerk girl is all “Oh my god, do you watch Revenge?” I just shook my head and tried to ignore the extreme levels of cheesiness. But that's Warehouse 13 for you -- it straddles that thin line between cute quirky fun and groan-inducing camp, but it's always at least trying.

In the midst of all this action are a couple of dropped hints about the overarching plot points that are going to drive this season. Artie accidentally almost spilled the beans about his trip through time, and it's becoming clear that Claudia and Jinks now share a voodoo kind of bond that makes any damage to Jinks happen to Claudia. This is surely a side effect of the use of the metronome, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays a part in Artie's strange visions of Claudia stabbing him with a dagger.

There's another aspect worth mentioning: the special effects. After a step back last week, this episode comes back strong in the CG department with a number of clean and challenging effects. Thunderstorm effects can be tricky to pull off with a low budget, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that everything came out nice and pretty here. The sets and props work well too. The aftermath of dropping an armored truck through a hole in the ceiling of a warehouse was nicely done.

The only area where I feel this story dropped the ball a bit was the emotional impact of the story behind Jessie's motivation. The "I've got a sick family member and need to pay the bills" idea has been used many, many times in Hollywood and it is beyond cliche at this point. Jessie's ultimate sacrifice is still touching, but one wonders if a donor's heart would still be useful after a lightning strike. Still, overall this is a fun episode with lots of great material, and the flaws don't really detract from an otherwise enjoyable hour of TV.

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What Happens to Your Used Games?

Belching, huffing and heaving, an 18-wheel UPS truck pulls up at the rear-end of a gray concrete, out-of-town warehouse. The driver steps into dizzying 100 degree heat as, noisily, the warehouse’s corrugated door rolls open. Forklifts glide into action, unloading pallet upon pallet, stacking them inside a massive loading area in the shade of the warehouse’s docking bay.

Stacks of identical brown cardboard boxes totter on the pallets, each crammed with used video games, used games consoles and used cell phones. Men with clipboards scurry about checking dockets and making notes.

This is GameStop’s used-game reprocessing plant, situated on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Up to seven of these trucks will roll in every single day, depositing the games and the gear that you take into GameStop stores in exchange for cash or credits.

Tough Trade

Around 80 percent of games traded in stores are resold in the same store. But 20 percent are sent to this Texas facility for refurbishment, usually because they are looking somewhat tattered. For personal information security reasons, 100 percent of all consoles, cell-phones and other devices come to be cleaned up and sent back out. Some 17 million games and one million hardware units pass through this plant every year.

What happens to the games when they arrive here? They are divided and distributed among small teams, each with their own name and game-related mascot (based on classics like Dig-Dug and Shinobi). Each disk goes into an unsightly machine that scrapes away the top 10 microns of cover-material, enough to ‘clean’ the disk of any superficial scratches. They are then buffed for that nice, shiny, sparkly look.

The disks are inspected by hand. Those that still show scratches are tossed into a terrifically noisy machine that breaks them up into tiny pieces, depositing the shards into a huge box that will later be taken away by a specialist recycling company.

Factory Life

This is a factory. It smells and sounds like a factory. Mercifully, there is air-conditioning. There is a sign on the wall. It says ‘Safety is no GAME. STOP and think.’ Clever, no?

Some of the games are taken away at random and run through banks of test consoles stacked upon racks, to make sure the process is working, that the disks are going to load and play when they find their way to your games machine.

The rest are sorted into bundles according to the game title and platform, thousands of individual product identification ‘SKUs’ (Stock Keeping Unit) sometimes going back to the 1990s. There is a large machine, as big as a row of terraced houses, that sorts the games. It looks like one of those glass-fronted, self-service cafeteria deals that you see in old movies with Doris Day and Peter Lawford. What the hell are those things called? Ah, automats.

A man or woman then inspects the box and the packaging. If the artwork is looking iffy, a generic slip is selected and slotted. GameStop has run in-store tests on used games and found that original packaging sells no better than generic packaging but, this plant being all about efficiency, leaving well alone is seen as the best policy. Most people who trade games have the good sense to take care of their currency.

Once ready for market the used games are sent back to retail outlets, according to algorithms based on buying patterns. More shooting games are sent to stores near military bases. More hockey games are sent north.

Back to Life

This is traditionally a secretive company that rarely does any kind of media, let alone guided walk-abouts of facilities. It feels slightly odd to be here, as if this were a tour of some North Korean ‘milk formula’ factory. But instead of gargoyle stiffs in olive-green tunics and peaked caps, the friendly guides are wearing short-sleeve shirts made by Polo and offering up beefy Texan hospitality by the slab.

“

Everything that comes through those doors is currency, loot, scratch, gravy; lovely, lovely moolah.

GameStop’s bosses are obviously tired of hearing about how used games are killing gaming, about how unfair they are on the producers of the games who get nothing from their resale.

One astonishing stat is repeated by three different managers during presentations. 70 percent of income consumers make from trading games goes straight back into buying brand new games. GameStop argues that used games are an essential currency in supporting the games business.

The normal behavior is for guys to come into stores with their plastic bags full of old games, and trade them so that they can buy the new Call of Duty, Madden, Gears of War. GameStop says 17 percent of its sales are paid in trade credits. The implication is clear - if the games industry lost 17 percent of its sales tomorrow, that would be a bad day for the publishers and developers.

Money, Money, Money

GameStop’s reprocessing facility isn’t just a factory, it’s a mint. Everything that comes through those doors is currency, loot, scratch, gravy; lovely, lovely moolah.

High-ticket items are treated with special care. The boxes of iPods and iPhones and Xbox 360s and PS2s and Nintendo 64s go into work areas that are caged. Cameras look down over workers as they begin a process that will wipe hard drives at least three times.

Security is key here. Not just the suspicious-boss kind that prevents anyone from pocketing a couple of iPhones. But the kind that makes sure your gamer-tag records or your credit card details or your girlfriend’s phone number are wiped clean, before the machine is polished and dabbed with Q-tips and sent back out into the world.

GameStop believes there are billions of dollars worth of consoles, iPods and games just sitting in people’s homes, unused and unloved, that could be traded. The company is aching for people to bring their old crap in and turn it into money to spend on new games. They see that this stuff is just as good as greenbacks.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in this age of alternative currencies like Diablo III’s Auction House and Xbox Live points that old games, old consoles, old cell-phones are also cash, but somehow less sexily so, less brave new world of commerce and more Sandford and Son.

Fair Deal?

This opens up the bigger question about this currency, which is, who controls the value of the trade-ins? Many consumers feel a stab of outrage at the value of their trade-ins when compared with the cost of the games when they are resold.

Paul Raines, GameStop CEO says that the margins it makes on used games are necessary to pay for the stores, the staff, the refurbishment. He doesn’t spell it out, but GameStop’s financial info shows that used games make wider margins than new games and without that business, the retail outlets might struggle to survive.

He says, “We know that people don't like selling their games if they think they're getting ripped off. So we spend a lot of time talking to consumers about that. We also spend a lot of time looking at the competition. There's lots of people in buy-sell-trade now, and we think we're pretty competitive with those guys. We have to figure out a way that we can continue to grow the business, keep this operation running, improve the quality.”

GameStop does have a lot of power over the value of your game. Probably, because of its prominence in thousands of malls and retail-strips around the country. But we live in a free market and there are alternatives out there, including online. Shopping around is always a smart way to get the most value out of your money and out of your old games.

Meanwhile, the trucks keep rolling up to the warehouse gates, disgorging yet more of those games, making them ready for people like you and me. We will happily thumb through the used games racks, will find that game some other person grew tired of playing, and we will add it to our own collection. At least until we decide to trade it in.

Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. You can contact me via Twitter or IGN.

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