HG WELLS THROWS AROUND IDEAS LIKE A GIRL

The second season premiere of 'Warehouse 13' brought in a new villain, which sadly also got rid of the recurring baddie from last year, former Warehouse agent MacPherson. That's a shame because Roger Rees is one of my favorites and he makes for a great ne'er-do-well who's both dastardly and charming.

Anyhoo, the new villain is HG Wells, who had been locked away in the Warehouse, bronzed to keep her imprisoned all these years.

That's right - I said "her". In this show, HG Wells was a woman. She claimed that the HG Wells seen in all those photographs was actually her brother Charles. Charles took the credit while she did all the work. As a result, HG Wells (I believe she said her first name was "Hannah".) was one bleeped-off feminist when she finally escaped her imprisonment.

At first I thought the idea was a charming challenge for Toobworld, one that could be simply splained away: Any time we met the male HG Wells in a fictional setting - 'Timecop', 'Lois Clark', 'Doctor Who' - we were actually seeing Charles Wells, who had come to believe that he was THE HG Wells.

But then that negates "The Infinite Worlds Of H.G. Wells" in which Tom Ward played the author and which provided an imaginative look at his fictional life in Toobworld.

Still there's an easy way out of this, a splainin that will keep 'Warehouse 13' in Earth Prime-Time.

She lied.

Oh, she's HG Wells, alright. The people who've run the Warehouse through the years would never have labelled her bronzed storage as such in the computer system otherwise. But her whole back-story was provided by her and as it often happens in Toobworld, Mika and Pete believed what she told them. (And to me, it did look like she was hesitating every so often as she quickly ran through her story about providing the ideas for the stories and that Charles provided the mustache.)

I never figured on it being so hard to find out biographical details about the real HG Wells online. Every source I checked never said anything about his siblings, other than there were four children in his family. As to their names? Apparently they weren't worth mentioning. So whether or not HG Wells had a brother named Charles, I couldn't verify that. I don't even know if he had any sisters, one of whom I could have claimed was Hannah. (Even if that wasn't really her name, we could have said that her tele-version changed it.)

But there was an outlet for keeping this fictional character in the Wells family and we can thank HG Wells for that - because "the Man Who Invented The Future" couldn't keep it in his pants.

HG Wells had a succession of mistresses and he even insisted to both of his wives that he had the right to have them. Among his conquests were author Rebecca West, by whom he had a son, and feminist/abortion advocate Margaret Sanger. Various online sources claim that Wells fathered at least five illegitimate children. "At least five" - that means there could have been others, including Hannah.

Real life people have been shown to be related to fictional characters in the past in Toobworld:

Art Carney - cousin to Vera on 'Alice'

Tim Russert - cousin to Megan Russert on 'Homicide: Life On The Street'

Josiah Bartlet - ancestor of President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet on 'West Wing'

Franklin Pierce - ancestor of Ryan Pierce on 'West Wing'

Mark Hamill - distantly related to Luke Skywalker, as mentioned on 'The Muppet Show'

So it wouldn't be a problem to add one more kid to the collection of HG Wells.

Even if she wasn't lying about having a brother named Charles, she would still have been lying about having written the novels credited to her "father". (If Charles existed, he was probably a half-brother on either side of her parentage.)

But she could still lay claim to the incredible inventions like the anti-gravity beam and the imperceptor vest. So this HG Wells looks to be a formidable adversary for the 'Warehouse 13' team.

She's just not the author of "The War Of Worlds" and "The Time Machine"......

I wonder if she ever got the chance to meet Dr. Miguelito Loveless before she got bronzed? I bet they would have been great friends - at least until one of them became jealous of the other's scientific achievements, that is.

BCnU!