The SyFy Channel Universe that Never Was

I have a habit of dying on hills no one cares about. I’m a very opinionated person, and I like to share those opinions with people.1 If you were to wander through old Rebooted episodes, you’d probably pick up on at least a couple unhinged rants and unpopular opinions.2 Since Andrew Sears was kind enough to call out one of my favorite things as a deadly sin, I felt like I had no choice but to stand upon my soapbox and defend my honor. Or maybe just rant…I mean, reminisce about missed opportunities.3

I love shared universes and massive worlds with sprawling timelines and interconnected stories. Watching disparate storylines converge in crossovers and team-ups is what I live for.

I gobble up everything the MCU has to offer. I watched the Arrowverse shows every week (in the proper order), because I didn’t want to miss a single moment. Were they perfect? No. But they were fun.

Great. What does that have to do with SyFy Channel? I'm getting there. Meandering historical context is also kind of my jam, so bear with me.

Arrow started in 2012. The same year Marvel released The Avengers, and the same year that Syfy’s Alphas ended.4 The shared universe thing was arguably just getting started. It wasn't new, but it also wasn’t the “everyone else is doing it" trend we have now. Avengers was the big moment that Marvel had been building toward, and over the next few years, Arrow would expand to a bunch of spinoffs rife with annual crossover events, and I'd gleefully watch as superheroes all but conquered the industry. (Maybe I’m overselling this a bit?)

SyFy's Alphas didn’t get a fair shake. The whole streaming service thing was still maybe new enough that the decision-makers weren’t paying attention to the right metrics, and execs pulled the plug without the full picture.5

The timing of Alphas is actually kind of interesting, looking back. NBC’s Heroes ended in 2010 with a rather lackluster sendoff that never fully recovered from the writers’ strike. A year later, Alphas launched on SyFy with a pretty similar vibe, and (in its fifth episode) an appearance from Dr. Vanessa Calder, a character that Warehouse 13 fans would recognize as the love interest of one Arthur Nielsen.

At this point, Warehouse 13 and Eureka had already done the crossover thing a few times, and when Alphas entered the mix, it honestly felt like SyFy was building something exciting. They had (foolishly) canceled Stargate Universe, and I’ll admit that dropping Alphas into the Warehouse/Eureka world kind of softened that blow, because I was hooked on all things MCU, and chomping at the bit for SyFy to make a run at its own shared canon.

Obviously, they failed me.

Alphas was ahead of its time. Not because the show was anything groundbreaking. More because viewers weren’t ready for it. The MCU was doing well, but I’d argue it was still in its infancy, because we were still waiting for the big team-up.

One of the biggest things that made Alphas so interesting to me was the fact that the characters were at least kind of grounded. They were ordinary people, and most of them were struggling in one way or another (both with their powers and their lives in general).

The show tried to science their way through the abilities of its characters. Bill's super strength, for example, stemmed from an ability to control the production of adrenaline. He basically triggered extreme fight-or-flight responses to unlock superhuman strength, but that sudden rush was absolutely terrible for his heart.

I was hooked on Alphas because it felt like Heroes. SyFy had proven they could give us compelling content, and a Heroes-like show from the network that gave us the BSG reboot was all kinds of promising.

Ok, but why 2015, specifically?

Easy. 2015 was the year we got the first season of Jessica Jones and Daredevil. The notion of “mundane" (relatively speaking) street-level superheroes was on the rise, and Alphas would have slipped into that mix perfectly. Factor in the almost mutant-adjacent premise behind their powers, and suddenly you've got the kind of thing that fills a very specific Xavier shaped hole in the MCU.

Where things really get interesting is how the inclusion of Alphas impacted characters in SyFy's other shows. Most notably, Warehouse 13.

My wife will tell you that I’m reaching here, but there are (at least) three characters in Warehouse 13 who were absolutely alphas, and the best part is that this wasn’t a retcon.6

From the very beginning of the show, (I’m talking season 1, episode 1), Pete would get “vibes.” He couldn’t see the future exactly, but he always seemed to know in his gut that something bad was going to happen, and his vibes were always right. In fact, Pete's vibes were the very thing that led him to cross paths with Artie in the first episode.

He talked about it like it was a sort of sixth sense, and it wasn't a one-off thing. Pete's vibes played a part throughout the entire series.

Steve Jinks was a “human lie detector.” He knew when someone was telling the truth, and (like Pete’s vibes), he was never wrong. He didn’t use an artifact or any kind of special tools. He just knew.

Leena could read auras. As the show went on, we eventually learned that this included artifacts’ auras. She had an innate ability to understand an artifact’s energy and could use it to determine where every incoming artifact should be stored to prevent dangerous reactions between different items.

Warehouse 13 didn’t introduce new character traits when Alphas started. These characters were written that way from day one. I can't say for sure the writers planned it this way, especially since none of these were ever confirmed on screen, but all the signs are there.

It's super easy to write them off. It's a science fiction show about magical artifacts. Is it that much of a stretch to think people can have some special abilities too?

If Alphas never aired, all three of these characters would have been exactly the same. But Alphas did air, and SyFy did tease that connection, and now it’s (head)canon.

Here's where the rant really picks up steam.

The Warehouse era of SyFy channel is home to some of my favorite shows and a number of really bad decisions about them. William Shatner's run on Haven was (shockingly) a blemish on an otherwise perfect show. The final season of Warehouse dragged its narrative feet and then rushed to tie up loose ends in a rather anticlimactic way. Have I mentioned canceling Alphas and Stargate Universe?

SyFy missed a golden opportunity to dive into the Warehouse and its history with alphas. Maybe the artifacts gave off some kind of energy that alphas were naturally drawn to. Hell, an episode of Alphas where Pete finds out he's a real-life superhero and teams up with Gary and Bill basically writes itself.

But that's not even the most egregious failing Warehouse had to offer. Halfway through season 4, the writing staff of Warehouse 13 had the audacity to off Leena.7 Leena's death in Warehouse 13 was almost as narratively meaningless as impaling Wash at the end of Serenity.

Here's the thing about Leena. She was an integral part of the operation. From the very beginning of the show, it was clear that Leena's connection to the Warehouse was special somehow, but the writers decided not to explore any of it until after she was dead. And then they decided to rub salt in the wound.

The Keeper was introduced in the second half of season 4. Mrs. Frederick, the Caretaker, was unwell, and Claudia (the “Caretaker in training”), was in mortal danger. There was a way to save her, but it depended on a topper-than-top-secret piece of information that no one had access to. Except the Keeper.

What does the Keeper do? Well, according to the wiki:

The Keeper is a vital generational failsafe position tasked with holding the absolute, classified history and expunged records of all the Warehouses that ordinary records omit.

The header put the cart before the horse here, but it should have been Leena.

When the Keeper’s role was revealed, I was certain that it would be. I expected that to be part of the drama. Leena was the Keeper of Warehouse 13. It’s part of the reason she was so connected to the warehouse. It’s why she owned the bed & breakfast. How do we recover that information now that she was gone?

We'd already seen Artie escape death. Jinks had come back from the dead at that point, and Pete and Myka had traveled through time. There had to be something in the warehouse that could bring Leena back, even temporarily.

The keeper of the warehouse could have been an important member of the team who had been there from the beginning. A character with a strange, but otherwise unexplained connection to the Warehouse, and instead, we got some rando that no one cared about.

I suppose technically Abigail Chow wasn’t strictly a rando. She’d been brought in to take over the B&B, and she’d been working with the team (particularly Artie) as a grief counselor/therapist after Leena’s death. Frankly, I would have been satisfied with a one-off line from Abigail that acknowledged she’d inherited the position from Leena through some mystic artifact-powered chain of succession. I'd be mad that Leena was dead, but at least we'd have some meaningful answers about her character.

What kills me is that the characters of Warehouse 13 and Alphas would have played off each other perfectly. Pete’s inner child would have been comically insufferable if he found out he was an alpha.

We could have explored the history of the Warehouse and how it had a tendency to draw those with “special characteristics.” Maybe this is a little too X-Men, but Paracelsus could have been revealed as the first alpha.

Claudia would have been weirdly obsessed with Gary’s powers. She’d be determined to become his best friend because she desperately wanted to understand how they worked, and Gary would be completely weirded out by her energy.

Pete and Gary would actually become best friends, and they’d play video games together on the regular. More specifically, they’d play the VR adventure game that Fargo and friends were working on earlier in the series, because they obviously finished it after the artifact drama was resolved.

Myka and Bill would bond over their experience being partnered with children,8 while Artie and Dr. Rosen would respect each other but secretly kind of hate each other because they could never see eye to eye on how best to steer their respective “families.”

Nina and Pete would have bonded because Pete’s vibes made him somehow immune to her mind control. Insert some techno babble about his body being able to sense that something was off and actively counter the effect.9

At some point, we’d get a multi-part crossover event. Someone somewhere was making “artificial alphas” using a combination of Warehouse artifacts and stolen tech from Eureka. The device worked, but the affected individuals eventually suffered a brain aneurysm. Rosen and Dr. Vanessa would work together on a cure or at least some way to stabilize the adverse effects (likely with Rachel’s help).

Everyone else would split into teams to track down different leads. Bill & Gary would roll with Pete & Myka. Hicks & Nina would team up with Claudia & Jinks, and Artie would coordinate everything from the Warehouse.

They’d figure it out in the end, but in the process, Rosen and Vanessa would discover that whatever they’d created to help cure the artificial alphas could be altered to unlock alpha traits genetically without the risk originally posed by the artifact.

Roll credits, see you in the fall for Alphas season 3!

Anyway…I think I’ve rambled and ranted long enough for one week. Now I want to hear from you.