I’m cheating a little with this one, but I love this show so much, how could I not.
Warehouse 13 was a SyFy channel original series about a secret facility which housed objects that had taken on mystical properties based on who had owned them or events the objects had been involved in. A team made up of Pete (Eddie McCliintock), Myka (Joanne Kelly), Claudia (Allison Scagliotti), and Artie (Saul Rubinek) track down the objects before the emotions and magic attached to them wreak havoc.
I say I’m cheating a little because Edgar Allan Poe does not appear in this episode, but it is an episode about writing, but also about the Poe’s own fears and insecurities effecting the world around him even after death.
The bad guy in this season was a former Warehouse agent named MacPherson (Roger Rees) who steals Poe’s notebook and quill in order to threaten the current agents. The threat includes sending one of the artifacts to Myka’s father, a bookshop owner who she’s always had a strained relationship with. A notebook once belonging to Poe infects Myka’s dad with words (literally - ink is moving across his skin and making him sick). Meanwhile, pen once used by Poe overtakes young man at a prep school who starts to use some of Poe’s favorite fictional tortures on his bullies. Since the pen and notebook are connected, all of the teenagers angry actions become the father’s fever dreams. The two objects are filled with Poe’s own paranoia, rage, unrequited love, and feelings of inadequacy.
Spoiler Alert but it’s some good details:
One way to keep her father alive is Myka reading to him from his favorite books. Her mom reveals that her dad wrote a novel, then rewrote it eleven more times. Never being happy with it, he eventually asked his wife to burn the whole thing. Being a woman who understands that a writer might regret this decision someday, she hid the manuscript away. Those are the “words he loves more than any other in the world”.
This episode was all about the idea of “words have power” and an author’s own words can greatly effect how they feel when they hear someone else read them aloud. Even those this is a science fiction show about haunted artifacts, I more believe this reality of a story having the power to save more than in The Notebook. You can keep someone safe or empower them, but you can’t cure Alzheimer's sixty seconds at a time.
As far as the story of the teenage boy is concerned, I think you are supposed assume that Poe’s pen was drawn to him because he was ignored and awkward. I get the sense that Poe probably felt the same at that age.
