Producers Preview Secrets of “Warehouse 13”

After months of speculation, the new series “Warehouse 13” will debut tonight at 9 p.m. EST on SyFy.

The series, which follows two  Secret Service agents find themselves abruptly transferred to Warehouse 13: a massive, top-secret storage facility in windswept South Dakota that houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic, fantastical object and supernatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government.

Producer David Simkins said the decision to use the number “13” in the title wasn’t an arbitrary one.

Rather, the “13” will directly tie into the history of the enigmatic building housing all the powerful objects gathered by a covert government agency

“We just finished a document that sort of tracks the chronology of the warehouses,” Simkins told SciFi Wire. “In our mythology, the first warehouse was created by Alexander [the Great] in an effort to keep hold of the artifacts that he collected on his wars. And it didn’t last long, because Alexander died young, but then the library at Alexandria was a warehouse, too, where research and development and things were stored, and books. And so we’ve tracked the chronology of empires, and our feeling is that the warehouse has moved from empire to empire throughout the ages, moving to the country that was best able to protect it. It was in the Western [Roman] Empire, the Hunnic Empire, the Byzantine Empire, all the way up through the Russian Empire, the British Empire and then, finally, the United States.”

Simkins elaborated on the show’s deep backstory. “It was in one of the early warehouses in iterations where it established that a board of directors essentially would be in charge of it, an ever-changing sort of Supreme Court called the Regents,” he said. “And the Regents were in charge of deciding when and where to move the warehouse. I think the longest it lasted was in the Western Roman Empire for about 500 years, and the shortest was about 14 years in … I think it was the Khmer Empire. So, yeah, we’ve established this long history of the number of warehouses that have gone through the ages, and eventually, when we get it all polished up, it will maybe show up on the Web site or something.”

“Warehouse 13” debuts tonight on SyFy.