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A new kind of maintext: Are WAREHOUSE 13’s Bering and Wells the new Mulder and Scully?

If Fox had pulled the plug on The X-Files before Mulder and Scully’s first real kiss in season seven, would they still be considered one of the greatest couples in TV history? Of course they would. If NBC had called it quits with The Office before Jim confessed his feelings to Pam at the end of season two, would we have doubted their love for one another? Not even a little bit. Sam and Diane, David and Maddie, Chuck and Sarah, Jack and Kate, Booth and Brennan, Luke and Lorelai. No matter where their stories ended, they were always going to live on in our imaginations as characters who were desperately in love. No questions. No doubts. They didn’t need to say it because we saw it.

But what if any of those pairings had been comprised of two women? Would we have written them off as good buddies? Would we have labeled them “subtext” and shelved them with Xena and called it a day? Or would we have delighted in a will they/won’t they dynamic charged with sexual tension, fraught with misunderstandings, strewn with an obstacle course of doubts and hopes and fears, and layered with story after story that proved they were so much more than just friends?

Well, it’s not a hypothetical question anymore because Warehouse 13 has given us a new kind of maintext in HG Wells and Myka Bering – and after tonight’s season four finale, Syfy has granted the show only six episodes to wrap up the entire series.

Warehouse 13 has long existed in a place of fandom purgatory. Unlike, say, Rizzoli & Isles, or Glee, or Once Upon a Time – all of which feature fandom-favorite pairings that the writers and actors insist are super-straight friends played by people who just happen to have good onscreen chemistry – Jaime Murray and Joanne Kelly have never been shy about saying that their characters are in love, nor have they shied away from playing HG and Myka as two women who are deeply smitten.

The story goes that when Jaime Murray was watching on-set playback of her first episode as HG Wells, she told the writers she thought Myka was more HG’s type than Pete. At Comic-Con in 2011, Jo Kelly told the panel that HG and Myka “fell in love a little bit.” She also told a red carpet interviewer that the the romance in Myka’s future was “only with HG.” At Comic-Con in 2012, Kelly again told the audience, “Myka will always love HG.” And again on the red carpet, she said “We’re in love!” to an interviewer who asked about HG and Myka’s chemistry. When co-star Eddie McClintock added “In a non-scissoring way,” Kelly corrected him: “Definitely scissoring … Why does everyone always think, ‘When are Pete and Myka gonna get together?’ What an interesting twist, to have Myka fall for a woman.'”

Warehouses 13’s writers have offered up some mesmerizing, heart-wrenching, layered storytelling for the two women – HG refusing to destroy the world because she cared too much for Myka’s life, Myka refusing to destroy HG’s life even though it would have meant saving the world – but have often danced around defining their attachment to one another. So when Syfy announced that it was only bringing back the show for a six-episode final season, I asked showrunner Jack Kenny to be straight up with me about the nature of Myka and HG’s relationship. I asked if he considered the characters just pals, or if he, like us, sees them as a modern-day Mulder and Scully trapped in a delicious tug-of-war.

“The HG/Myka relationship is absolutely a will they/won’t they tug-of-war,” he told me. “We have definitely leaned into the playfulness of that since the beginning. But theirs is a relationship that goes beyond physical or sexual attraction.”

But sexual attraction is part of it, right? We’re not imagining that they want to rip off each other’s clothes, are we? HG self-identifies as bisexual. “Many of my lovers were men,” she says early in season two. And Kenny told me he thinks Myka “falls somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey Scale.” When I asked him if Myka is uncomfortable with the idea of being bisexual or sexually fluid, if that’s what’s keeping her from pursuing something romantic or sexual with HG, he said: “I definitely do not think it’s discomfort. I think it’s an unusual feeling for Myka, but she knows what it is, and isn’t afraid of it.”

When I was chatting with Kenny, who, by the way, was very gracious with me as I peppered him with question after question about our beloved Bering and Wells, I was struck by the oddest thought: I never read an interview where someone asked The X-Files showrunner Vince Gilligan to please specifically define Mulder and Scully’s relationship in black and white. I never read an interview with The Office showrunner Greg Daniels where someone asked him if Pam and Jim wanted to have sex. Mulder and Scully were in love, but they were so much more than in love. Pam and Jim wanted to do it, but they were so much more than their desire to see each other naked. Why is it so much harder to relax into that story when the characters are two women?

Why, when Jack Kenny told me “HG and Myka’s feelings about each other play out on a higher plane than [just sex]” did I feel the urge to say, “But sex, too, right? I’m not imagining their attraction, am I? It’s for real, isn’t it?”

I mean, I have eyeballs. I can see for myself that, yes, HG and Myka’s relationship is absolutely fraught with sexual tension. Jo Kelly said HG and Myka have a “definitely scissoring” kind of love on the Comic-Con red carpet for heaven’s sake. You can’t spell it out much more clearly than that.

Part of the trouble is that our whole society is geared to be a performance for dudes – just take a quick peek at the advertising and magazine industry if you don’t believe that – and it’s hard to believe that a TV show is letting something authentic and organic develop between two women without any payoff for the patriarchy. Part of it is the stigma that comes from the word “subtext” because we throw it around all willy-nilly these days to the point where it’s been diluted to mean “two same-gendered characters who stand close and make eye-contact when they talk.” But most of it, I think, is that queer women have been so starved of television visibility for so long that we’re terrified of anything without labels.

If a TV character doesn’t make it onto GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are on TV” report, does it count as Visibility? If a TV character doesn’t say the word “gay” out loud, can she change society’s perceptions and misgivings about gay people? If two lady trees fall down on top of each other in the forest and no dude tree is around to get off on it, does it really make a sound?

A lot of people will say it’s 2013 and it’s a full-blown cop-out to have a relationship like HG and Myka’s on TV without a sexual payoff, without an on-screen confession that will allow us to bag them and tag them and call them our own. But, to me, HG and Myka’s story has been more engaging and real and raw than a dozen uninspired ones we can proudly hoist over our heads and wave like a rainbow flag.

House featured a bisexual Thirteen who made out with a woman one time for a nanosecond. 90210 gave Adrianna Tate-Duncan a three-episode lesbian arc that was as banal and lifeless. The rebooted Melrose Place did the same thing with Ella Simms. Bones did the same thing with Angela Montenegro. The O.C. flirted with the idea of Marissa and Alex, but it was pretty obvious that storyline was a last-ditch ratings ploy to keep the series afloat. Gay lady TV history is absolutely littered with stories like these.

Were they necessary to move the Visibility meter forward? Maybe. But they played out as pedestrian. I’ll take the delicious, convincing, heartrending, gut-checking glory of Bering and Wells over perfunctory storytelling any day.

Look, we need The Fosters. We need Grey’s Anatomy. We need Glee. We need Pretty Little Liars. We need firm labels and proud storytelling about lesbian and bisexual characters. If we lose those stories and those characters, we, as a community, lose our voices and our reflections. But we also need to step forward to a place where not everything has to be shaken down and parsed out and labeled and shelved. Any ol’ TV couple can have sex. But it’s the delirious foreplay that works like a magical artifact on our souls.

Jaime Murray will make an appearance in the final season of Warehouse 13 (which is good because leaving her trapped in hetero-suburbia would be worse than what Doctor Who did to Donna Noble!), but it’s not Kenny’s plan to end the show with HG and Myka walking off into the sunset.

“If the series were to go on,” Kenny told me, “we would have explored [HG and Myka’s] relationship further, but given only six episodes to wrap up the series, there really isn’t the time for peripheral characters like HG or Jane Lattimer or Hugo or MacPherson, as much as I adore them all!” But he also told me: “I don’t think Myka would ever say never [to HG], and would concede that sometime down the road, who knows? Myka has learned that there are a lot of meanings to the term ‘Endless Wonder.'”

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