Warehouse 13 suddenly looks very different. Photo Credit: SyFy.com

***SPOILERS Below***

As a fan of Warehouse 13 from the very beginning, it is great to see the fifth and final season start so well, but also extremely bittersweet to know how close to the end we are. The show has a loving family of fans who all want the show to either continue or immediately have a spin-off, just so long as the story keeps on going. And in its final season, Warehouse 13 started with a bang.

The episode began immediately where the last episode ended. Claudia and Paracelsus are alone in the Warehouse, battling, as the rest of the team is locked out of the Warehouse via a protection barrier. (This leads to some hilarious moments in which Artie and Jinks try to break past the barrier, only to fail every time.) Inside the Warehouse, though, Paracelsus quickly discovers that since Claudia is the new Caretaker, she is technically part of the Warehouse, and he realizes that as such, he can’t kill her, but he can control her, and he happily does so. Claudia is forced to bring several artifacts together for Paracelsus, which end up making a wormhole-time travel device which will allow him to change history.

As Paracelsus works away, Pete picks up Myka from the hospital, where he learns that the cancer she said she had was a benign tumor (and the surgery to remove it went really well), and they join up with Artie and Jinks at the barrier to the Warehouse. Myka immediately schools everyone else on reading the addendums to the Warehouse manual and how easy it actually is to get back into the Warehouse after using the failsafe. Sure enough, the crew quickly gets back inside after that.

Once they’re inside, Paracelsus uses Claudia to attack her friends, since he has full control over her body. So, though she is able to warn her friends about the myriad of weapons she’s got and is being forced to aim at them, they’re still going off and attempting to hurt her friends. Thankfully, no one is injured, and Pete and Jinks are a great distraction for Paracelsus and his control over Claudia, while Artie and Myka make their way back to the Eldunari Chamber to re-light the fires contained within. Once they do so, the link between Paracelsus and Warehouse 13 is broken, and Claudia is able to prevent herself from killing Pete and Jinks.

However, Paracelsus has done what he wanted to do in the mean time, and he escapes through the wormhole-time machine to change the past. Once he does so, the Warehouse completely converts into a bunker that feels just as cold and sterile and impersonal as The Initiative did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even in the new timeline, Pete and Claudia discover the date that Paracelsus went back in time, and with the help of everyone else, they recreate the wormhole-time machine so that Pete and Myka can track Paracelsus down and stop him from making the changes he did to alter things.

After their leap into the past, Pete and Myka immediately find trouble in the form of dead Warehouse 9 agents. An agent of that time, Lisa da Vinci, doesn’t believe that Paracelsus caused the damage himself, as he’s been bronzed earlier that day. Eventually, Pete and Myka convince her of the truth, and they race to save the Regents of that time period and stop Paracelsus. Luckily, they manage to do so, and the present is corrected. Paracelsus is bronzed once again, leading to Warehouse 13 having two “statues” of him. Of course, not everything ends well. In the alternate timeline, Regent Benedict Valda (who had died in Egypt in the real timeline), worked under Paracelsus as a malevolent general. Thanks to the artifact forks that Artie gave Pete and Myka when they went into the past (which protected them from shifts in the timeline), the malevolent Benedict has made it through to the real timeline rather than being stuck in his own alternate one.

I found this episode of Warehouse 13 to be full of everything I love about the show. The humor had me giggling, and the way that the team acted like a family is still absolutely incredible. Anthony Stewart Head plays evil so deliciously that I’m really sad to see Paracelsus gone. I can’t wait to see what happens next week with Regent Benedict and his new, evil persona!

Did you enjoy the beginning of season 5 of Warehouse 13? Do you think Paracelsus is gone for good? What do you think will happen as we head towards the series finale of Warehouse 13? Let us know in the comments!

Warehouse 13 airs on Monday @ 9/8c on The SyFy Channel. Watch full episodes on Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video.