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'Warehouse 13': The SYFY series’ 10 most magical, memorable guest appearances
From Pete’s past squeezes to Myka’s dad, a ton of famous faces joined the agents’ artifact-chasing hunt.
With a different mystery to track down each week and five seasons of screen time to do it, Warehouse 13 threw more at SYFY's sleuthing magic relic protectors than just wacky artifacts. Agents Pete (Eddie McClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly) came across tons of fascinating people on their globetrotting treks to keep danger under wraps, and of course that meant encountering more than a few new faces.
Like any proper sci-fi serial that constantly finds new ways to raise the supernatural stakes, a ton of guest actors rotated in and out of Warehouse 13’s ever-evolving storylines. Appearances from well-known guest stars sometimes ran their complete course in the space of a single episode, while others became entwined with long-running sub-plots that made the actors feel like integral parts of the show.
With all the memorable one-offs plus a handful of longer-running guest characters, it’s a lot to keep tabs on — which is why we’re here to help. From Star Trek veterans to a 1980s Brat Pack pushover who found his grown-up mean streak, here are our picks — in no particular pecking order — for the most memorable guest appearances on SYFYS’ relic-chasing series. For the next few weeks, you can catch ‘em in action each Friday at SYFY, where Warehouse 13 is blasting back from the past as part of the network’s nostalgia-themed SYFY Rewind marathon.
1: Kate Mulgrew
Star Trek fans know her for breaking new ground as Cpt. Kathryn Janeway, the Trek franchise’s first-ever female lead from the late-1990s series Star Trek: Voyager. But Kate Mulgrew made herself equally at home down on Planet Earth, dropping in on Warehouse 13’s third season in a guest appearance as Pete’s mother, Jane Lattimer — and then she ended up sticking around. In all, her recurring role on the show extended across Seasons 3 and 4, where she not only helped Artie (Saul Rubinek) and Myka keep Pete in check, but even ascended to the role of the Warehouse’s Guardian Regent — a sort of failsafe sensei whose job it is to protect the protectors.
2: Michael Hogan
Battlestar Galactica viewers had no trouble spotting Michael Hogan when he turned up late in Season 1 for a Warehouse 13 guest spot as Warren Bering, a seemingly innocuous bookstore proprietor and, more importantly, Myka’s father. In keeping with the bookish theme of the episode (appropriately titled “Nevermore”), Warren gets ensnared in a magical missed connection between a mysterious notebook and Edgar Allan Poe’s personal pen. On Galactica, of course, Hogan played Col. Saul Tigh aboard Ronald D. Moore’s deep-delving space vessel; later on, he took on recurring roles in SYFY’s 12 Monkeys and stalked creatures of the night as werewolf hunter Gerard Argent in MTV’s Teen Wolf.
3: Jaime Murray
We know, we know: Jaime Murray was so vital to Warehouse 13’s success that she was basically an honorary main cast member. In all, Murray’s fan-favorite portrayal of Helena “H.G.” Wells spanned a surprisingly sparse 15 episodes, which just goes to show how much of an impact H.G. actually had on both viewers and the agents themselves. After making a memorable Season 2 entrance as a potential villain (not to mention hilariously deflating Pete’s gobsmacked ego), H.G. became a semi-regular, with a backstory whose lore ran as deep as any character on the show. Murray leaves an indelible mark just about everywhere she turns up: Since Warehouse 13, she went on to become a familiar face on SYFY’s Defiance, ABC’s Once Upon a Time, The CW’s The Originals, and Fox’s Gotham.
4: Judd Hirsch
Judd Hirsch is such a recognizable face that the only double-takes viewers made when he showed up for a late Season 2 guest spot on Warehouse 13 were the disbelieving kind. With Pete and Myka already getting drop-ins from their parents, the series decided it was finally Artie’s turn, and Hirsch — a piano-playing professor estranged from his artifact-hunting son because Artie chose against a musical career — played Isadore “Izzy” Weisfelt with exactly the sort of gentle family gruffness and impatience the situation demanded. A TV icon from his days of playing Alex Reiger on ABC’s Taxi (as well as another key father-figure role on CBS’ NUMB3RS), Hirsch also put in unforgettable big-screen performances in Independence Day, Ordinary People, and A Beautiful Mind, among many more.
5: Lindsay Wagner
The Bionic Woman, it turns out, knows a thing or two about patching up other people who find themselves atop the operating table. As Dr. Vanessa Calder, Lindsay Wagner became a recurring character over the course of six Warehouse 13 episodes that also tapped into her specialized role as a staffer at the Centers for Disease Control. Even though Artie’s appendicitis hypochondria tested the limits of her loyalty to the Hippocratic Oath, Vanessa ended up dating Artie regularly on the show. Wagner also brought her character over to Alphas, one of two Warehouse 13 spinoff series (along with Eureka), where Dr. Calder crossed over to help investigate a mysterious string of deaths in a small Pennsylvania town.
6: Brent Spiner
Through reams and reams of artifact research, Warehouse 13 was never exactly short on data. But that didn’t stop Data of a different kind — the Star Trek kind, to be precise — from stopping in for a six-episode appearance as one of the series’ most mysterious nemeses. Star Trek: The Next Generation alum Brent Spiner was far from android territory as Warehouse 13’s Brother Adrian, a shadowy Vatican operative with ties to the secretive Brotherhood of the Black Diamond. His role on the series was deep and kinda complicated; after a series of wild events caused by the powerful Magellan’s Astrolabe relic, Brother Adrian was revealed not to be such a bad guy after all…though he still insisted that Artie and the gang were messing with powers best left to the artifact-protecting pros back in Rome.
7: Jeri Ryan
Ready for even more Star Trek connections? Warehouse 13 cleared out space for a guest appearance from Star Trek Voyager’s Jeri Ryan (who, incidentally, has turned up lately on Star Trek: Picard to reprise her Saturn Award-winning Borg-drone Seven of Nine character at Paramount+). Myka and Pete were eternally single on the show as lonely, loyal Warehouse 13 protectors, and Ryan’s guest appearance midway through Season 3 (in the “Queen for a Day” episode) shed at least a little light on Pete’s romantic past. Ryan played Pete’s ex-wife Amanda Martin, popping up after divorcing Pete long ago to ask that he hand back a sentimental ring…just so she could get hitched to someone new. In a final guest appearance (“The Ones You Love”), though, she finally confessed to Pete that her love for him had never died.
8: James Marsters
Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum James Marsters took on a three-episode guest stint for Warehouse 13 as the Count of St. Germain, an 18th-Century, alchemy-obsessed adventurer who was hiding in plain present-day sight in the body of Bennet Sutton — a Columbia History professor with a lust for immortality. Already familiar to fans at the time as Spike from his Buffy role (which later crossed over to Buffy spinoff Angel), Marsters went on to play alien supervillain Brainiac along with Professor Milton Fine and Brainiac 5 on Superman spinoff Smallville, as well as Cpt. John Hart on Torchwood, and terrorist Barnabas Greeley in SYFY's Caprica.
9: Tia Carrere
Wayne’s World heartthrob Tia Carrere came to Warehouse 13 for a pair of guest episodes toting a seriously artifact-savvy acting résumé. In addition to tormenting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis as an ice-cold, high-end relic launderer in True Lies, she also starred as treasure-taker Sydney Fox on the Canadian series Relic Hunter. On Warehouse 13, Carrere set off Pete’s love vibes in her first appearance as agent Kate Logan, one of his old flames who ends up working out of the agency’s Chicago field office. In a later episode, she shows up to help unravel a murder mystery that turns out to be a long-game revenge plot against Artie (hey, when you take people’s magic gadgets, you tend to make a lot of enemies.)
10: Anthony Michael Hall
It’s still weird seeing the dark side of Anthony Michael Hall, one of the most geekily endearing personalities from the mythic Brat Pack of teenage actors who defined a whole generation of coming-of-age movies in the 1980s. But Hall made a deliciously complex and convincing villain in the role of Walter Sykes, the wheelchair-bound millionaire who masterminded most of the artifact-related mishaps in Warehouse 13's Season 3 storyline. Even after he’d finally been dealt with once and for all, Walter’s hidden secrets had a way of keeping Pete and Myka playing relic whack-a-mole in later seasons, all to finally rid the world of his vengeful legacy.
For a full rundown of all the Warehouse 13 goodness leaping to SYFY Rewind, check out the full schedule here.
