I watched the season finale of Sanctuary, which at least they telegraphed that it would all be a setup and they were going to steal the stuff once the good guys went to the trouble of getting it.
It seems like they were going for their own League of Extraordinary Gentlement ... except that Amanda Tapping's character is the odd one out in that she's really nobody, and her "power" to live forever was matched by two others, plus a vampire. They even hung a lampshade on this.
Had they started with that stuff sooner, it might've been a little more interesting. But maybe not.
Well, I think the fact that Amanda Tapping’s character ended up being ‘nobody’ actually makes sense because she was the only woman, and women really didn’t get far as far as scientific progress went - almost all the famous women from that period were famous because they were royalty or politicians’ wives or writers or something like that.