grimmmviewing

[grimmmviewing]

S1E14: “Plumed Serpent”—C/C+ (Watched 3/30/24)

“Til then, you might as well go home and get a little… rest.”

Now here is the (sort of) continuation of the Nick and Juliette conflict from “Last Grimm Standing,” in the sense that a certain rockiness in their relationship is the focus. It needs to be said, though, that doing this sort of episode with a temptress/stalker character endangering their relationship was a pretty obvious avenue to take. I more or less guessed that was the angle from the description alone (“Nick’s latest case threatens his relationship with Juliette”). It would have been more surprising to not do a story like this at some point!

Ariel is clearly written to fulfill this role from her very first verbal interaction with Nick as well, which makes the obvious trope-y-ness even more annoying. The fact that the parallels between Juliette’s eventual abduction by the draconic villains of the week and the classic damsel abducted by a dragon scenario are explicitly acknowledged by Monroe in terms of archetypes further undermines some of the cleverness of the situation. It’s not exactly deeply-hidden to begin with.

It’s not that the episode is without fun or deft touches: The concept of a dragon expelling a biological accelerant created from its own fat before breathing fire grounds the fantastical just enough in the plausible to make it cool/satisfying. I was not expecting the link to ketosis and the keto diet reference in Monroe’s explanation of the process, though. In a similar way, the real-world issue of people stealing copper for profit gets twisted to tie in with the draconic treasure obsession, and it results in some fun designs for the father’s and daughter’s respective living spaces—his junk-strewn cave with its ominous entrance, and her house with the many roof rods and an interior that’s eventually revealed to be positively wrapped in strands that curl across the ceiling. Replacing a pile of gold with something more modern and accessible while still being valuable was a solidly subversive idea.

These are fun visuals that resonate with the creatures’ fantastical nature and that also represent a certain continued care and attention to detail in the series overall. They could have just had a traditional house or cave with maybe a bunch of jewelry or bits and pieces of copper, but both are instead dressed with some intricate-feeling care that no doubt made the filming process some degree more complicated. The visual of the father’s little junk-accentuated, downright Mad Maxian, cart that he drives along the train tracks was also cool and fun in this same vein. And ditto a certain prominent warm/orange slant to the lighting (reminiscent of fire) in this episode as well.

When I break “Plumed Serpent” down into the little details or moments, that’s when I start to feel much more positively about it. There’s that sense of something like care, again, where the creators clearly know how to make fun or cute moments happen. Take Nick initially finding Monroe at the club watching Ariel perform her sexy fire dance show—It’s a subversion of the standard arrangement where he’s just at home, essentially waiting to dispense information, and it also results in him being embarrassed about having been caught patronizing such an establishment. It speeds the episode along thanks to the convenience but also creates something warm and entertaining as well with the two characters.

Monroe finally getting to meet Juliette is also well-handled, despite the brevity of their interactions, and the relationship drama’s climactic conversation in the car, post-rescue, also feels quite thoughtful and relatively grounded given the events that led to it. Although the writing can be heavily expositional or “fast” out of the necessity of fitting everything into 40 minutes, I’d go so far as to say the characterization is probably consistently the best part of the show and that it’s a shame it ends up subservient to a monster-of-the-week plot here that just feels kind of meh to me.

I really loved how Nick immediately calls Juliette to tell her when he has to go back to Ariel’s again to get out in front of any further misunderstandings. He assures her that Hank is coming too and has Hank speak into the phone himself to confirm it. I’d say that this earnestness is both a lot of fun but also maybe a weakness—that the writers do (at least for the time being) treat the Nick-Juliette relationship as sacrosanct rather than, say, making Ariel less of a Crazy Stalker and over-the-top sexpot and instead pitching her as an actual, serious option, even if only in passing, in ways that could have enhanced the conflict. After all, she doesn’t have Juliette’s ignorance of Nick’s true nature or her human frailty and, unlike other Wesen, she doesn’t see him as a threat. Maybe it’s actually a shame that fascination is so obviously leading somewhere negative from the jump…

(Also, I don’t feel like you should be allowed to use a Baldwin (Daniel, here) in an inconsequential part like they do in this episode. The face and voice are just too distinctive to blend seamlessly into the passing impressions these types of characters need to leave. Or maybe he was supposed to be a red herring, as I thought there was no way he didn’t have some further relevance to the plot, only to be completely wrong about that.)

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

S1E13: “Three Coins in a Fuchsbau”—C+ (Watched 3/12/24)

“Damn, I know this place. Bought my second engagement ring from this guy.” – Hank (just in case we ever forgot he’s been married multiple times)

While the title of this episode has some heist-y, Coen-brothers-film-like energy, most of what we get here is much more lore/series plot related. It’s not that this stuff isn’t also interesting—or that there aren’t some fun standalone moments in the mix—but just that this is a less whimsical or charming episode than the title suggests and that feels serious in ways that even previous episodes with darker subject matter didn’t.

I haven’t really talked performances too much in these reviews, but Titus Welliver as Farley Kolt does a great job handling some of the more critical elements of this episode’s plot. He has a lot of information that he needs to convey with gravitas—about the seductive ancient coins at the heart of the story and about Nick’s background, which is closely tied to the pursuit of the coins. Welliver manages to make it all feel important and believable while coming across as someone with a lot of confidence and secrets. He really sells this character who’s meant to dance on a knife’s edge between trustworthy and untrustworthy. Among the other details, we learn a smidge more about the power Grimms wield (resistance to the coins), which is nice, given that so far it’s been kind of a question mark, apart from seeing Wesen as they are and maybe some nebulous sense of extra strength.

Using the coins to explain historical events like the disasters that befell Roman emperors is a fun, ultimately harmless bit of fantastical worldbuilding, but the reveal that Adolf Hitler was A) in possession of the coins and B) a Wesen creates… complications. It’s a lot harder to accept this bit of history being dressed up with Grimm fantasy than the stuff about Rome, in part because it just feels closer/more modern and also because it offers what amounts to an excuse for Hitler’s actions: He was under the influence of the coins, which makes him not entirely responsible.

Making Hitler a literal monster further undermines the reality—that he was a man (a human), aided and abetted by still other men, who did horrible things. “Evil” is perpetrated by humans, and the way in which Hitler has already been as good as mythologized as some sort of unique case is part of why more contemporary instances of authoritarian or genocidal behavior aren’t taken seriously, I think (I’ve heard other people say in the past). We’ve been conditioned to see that sort of evil as something titanic and aberrant to the point that it could only ever be recognizable as what it is, but it starts somewhere, sown from perfectly unremarkable human actions, and by the time it’s in full flower, that’s when the problem has gone on too long.

I think 2012 was a different time, though, when white nationalism and conspiracies were still seen as fringe elements of American culture—the former being powerless and the latter maybe just fun(ny) and not to be taken seriously. Over time, of course, the climate has changed. White nationalism is on the rise, and both it and conspiratorial thinking feel more mainstream and dangerous than they have in my lifetime. I never thought I’d see anti-vax sentiment be such a widely-held conviction, for example, but here we are! Obviously, Grimm is, at most, being kind of problematic here. I don’t want to oversell it as some sort of affront in and of itself. It’s just a lot harder to indulge in the “what ifs” these days. When I first started this project, I was actually shocked at the reminder of how long Grimm had run. It was only six years, but between 2011 and 2017, it feels like so much changed about the American political and cultural landscape. It started during the Obama years and ended under Trump, what feels like a titanic shift in what constituted our “normal.”

Leaving aside any real-world discomfort, though, I still think the full Hitler reveal on the old film at the end of the episode feels like too much. It’s meant to be this ominous image—perhaps a look at where Renard could have ended up if they didn’t get the coins away from him, or even just a generally chilling thing. Instead, it feels a bit too goofy. Leaving it as a brief mention from Kolt probably would have worked better. I think the far more emotionally impactful moments come before this: Nick with the dying Soledad Marquesa (more on that below), Nick seeing just how rattled and desperate Renard is when he finds out he’s lost the coins, and Nick confronting Kolt one last time to take the coins back into a Grimm’s protection. This sequence of character- and coin-related moments was perfectly strong enough to end the episode on.

Back to Marquesa: Nick grabs the mortally wounded man—this individual he’s only just learned was responsible for the deaths of his parents—and demands more information, but Marquesa doesn’t even seem to be aware of who Nick is or what he’s suggesting about the way their lives have intersected before. Instead, he just pleads with Nick to let him hold the coins one last time as he dies. It’s emotionally impactful for how it denies Nick information about his past and for how it shows the power the coins hold. (It’s also narratively convenient for delaying further reveals for the time being.)

Marie coming back into story via Kolt, this heavy focus on Nick’s parents—“Three Coins in a Fuchsbau” doesn’t feel like a continuation of the previous episode like I thought it might (given that Nick and Juliette seem fine here), but it is a very direct continuation of the earliest episodes of the season. What does feel like an extension of “Last Grimm Standing” is Renard’s story, where his mysterious leadership status plays into the allure of the coins. I kind of love that he is so affected by them given that he’s been characterized so far as this secretive, powerful, calm mastermind sort of figure. His dream of power after he takes the coins home is very striking and a very BIG visual for the show—He advances through his darkened apartment as we hear the roars of a crowd, and when he looks out onto the city streets below we see them completely filled with people waving flags, all loyal to him. The scale is surprising.

The medical examiner Dr. Harper also gets a surprising little plot of her own too. She’s the first one on the team to be attracted to the coins after finding them in the old shop owner’s stomach, and her somewhat more subtly “off” behavior is foreshadowing for the more extreme stuff from Hank and Renard. She also gets targeted and interrogated by Marquesa, giving her a more active role than usual. It’s always nice to see the other character do their own thing away from Nick.

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

I generally don't worry too much about spoilers since I'm all about the journey/"execution" with most things.

I haven't looked much into the behind-the-scenes details, so what you were saying about the writers' approach (with Renard and otherwise) is pretty interesting, especially with what I was claiming about this episode sort of "looking ahead." I guess, regardless of whether they actually had any concrete plans at that point, that was the vibe that I got, and presumably they tried to tie things together so that this foreshadowing felt coherent looking backward. It felt that way based on the scant details I remembered/picked up from later on.

That sounds like a pretty stressful way to write a show like this, though! It's been interesting to see how most episodes do have some sort of hint at a larger plot, when I was expecting them to eventually do a lot more purely Monster of the Week-like stuff. That probably would have been safer if they were just making it up as they went along...

(I actually do have the next review--ft. Hitler!--written but just need to polish it up.)

S1E12: “Last Grimm Standing”—C (Watched 3/11/24)

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Uh, no, just you.”

“Do you want me with green beans or asparagus?”

This episode begins strong, with a flurry of activity in the cold open—first, a posse on horseback which initially made me anticipate some flashback action, but then an old man and his wife are killed at their very modern house by a Wesen, who is himself being hunted by the posse. The concept of a Grimm fight club is pretty interesting, but it just didn’t quite work for me in the end.

In all honesty, I was hoping for human culprits rather than the lion men I got. I ultimately liked how they were costumed and styled to given off leonine vibes even in human form, but I thought it would have been more interesting to get some humans aware of and exploitative toward their Wesen neighbors— Some old bigotry to go with the old-school weapons and ritualistic fighting. The way the combatants are essentially, literally de-human-ized to make them fight, including feeding them the remains of killed fighters, feels like the sort of behavior that would fit with a prejudiced human antagonist, someone who only saw Wesen as beasts and wanted to force them to conform to that image. But I’m backseat writing here!

Adaptationally, “Last Grimm Standing” also doesn’t feel that ambitious, at least as far as I can tell. One subversion is how the lions are not themselves combatants here. Another could be how Monroe pulls the equivalent of a thorn from the hand of the top fighter (who is some sort of reptile), but then pulling the thorn doesn’t do the expected thing of softening the other Wesen’s regard for Monroe when they’re pitted against one another. It’s cool to see Nick fight physically in this one, sans gun, but it’s all pretty straightforward.

The most evocative, upsetting, and, also, interesting thing in the episode is probably the image of a bunch of white men on horseback lassoing and dragging a Black man. Of course, these are all technically Wesen in this universe, but the uncomfortable historical echoes here, along with the contrast of modern and not, obviously feels resonant. This is just another one of those things the show feels not at all equipped to do much with…

In terms of charming bits and goofs that could be considered charming, we’ve got the name “Leo Taymor” for the head Lowen, which I did not catch until quite late in the episode (and groaned when I figured it out). Nick also points out the appropriateness of “Leo” (to Leo himself) just in case anyone in the audience missed out. I found myself wondering if the lowlifes who presumably attend and bet on the fights actually understand Latin, though, or if Leo is just as good as speaking gibberish at them when he announces and commences these bouts. Whatever “wrath” Renard brings down on him in the end sounds an awful lot like a comedy badger, from Ernest Goes to Camp, maybe.

Maybe part of the “problem” is that “Last Grimm Standing” ultimately feels like an episode on its way somewhere else. The plot of the week does take up a sizeable chunk, but the way that the episode spotlights Renard in his own parallel story involving the fights (that he’s apparently kind of in charge of them) is obviously texture and characterization leading somewhere else. This is where we start to run up against my lack of knowledge outside this first season, but the Latin, the John Wickian secret honorable society stuff, Leo referring to Renard as “highness” and “royalty”—The antiquated vibe is a unifying element of the episode (Monroe emphasizes the historical value of the stuff in Aunt Marie’s trailer as well), but it’s also gesturing toward the larger plot, at least what I remember of it.

This is also the vibe with the ending: Renard gets his revenge on Leo for crossing him, leaving the audience with a lot of questions about his whole deal, while Nick is on his way home very late on his anniversary with Juliette, having missed dinner and left her in the dumps. This too is a gesture toward larger/longer plot threads, further putting emphasis on stories to come rather than this one. And that’s fine! I just wish I had felt a little better served by the story of the week to balance things out.

[grimmmviewing]

S1E12: “Last Grimm Standing”—C (Watched 3/11/24)

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Uh, no, just you.”

“Do you want me with green beans or asparagus?”

This episode begins strong, with a flurry of activity in the cold open—first, a posse on horseback which initially made me anticipate some flashback action, but then an old man and his wife are killed at their very modern house by a Wesen, who is himself being hunted by the posse. The concept of a Grimm fight club is pretty interesting, but it just didn’t quite work for me in the end.

In all honesty, I was hoping for human culprits rather than the lion men I got. I ultimately liked how they were costumed and styled to given off leonine vibes even in human form, but I thought it would have been more interesting to get some humans aware of and exploitative toward their Wesen neighbors— Some old bigotry to go with the old-school weapons and ritualistic fighting. The way the combatants are essentially, literally de-human-ized to make them fight, including feeding them the remains of killed fighters, feels like the sort of behavior that would fit with a prejudiced human antagonist, someone who only saw Wesen as beasts and wanted to force them to conform to that image. But I’m backseat writing here!

Adaptationally, “Last Grimm Standing” also doesn’t feel that ambitious, at least as far as I can tell. One subversion is how the lions are not themselves combatants here. Another could be how Monroe pulls the equivalent of a thorn from the hand of the top fighter (who is some sort of reptile), but then pulling the thorn doesn’t do the expected thing of softening the other Wesen’s regard for Monroe when they’re pitted against one another. It’s cool to see Nick fight physically in this one, sans gun, but it’s all pretty straightforward.

The most evocative, upsetting, and, also, interesting thing in the episode is probably the image of a bunch of white men on horseback lassoing and dragging a Black man. Of course, these are all technically Wesen in this universe, but the uncomfortable historical echoes here, along with the contrast of modern and not, obviously feels resonant. This is just another one of those things the show feels not at all equipped to do much with…

In terms of charming bits and goofs that could be considered charming, we’ve got the name “Leo Taymor” for the head Lowen, which I did not catch until quite late in the episode (and groaned when I figured it out). Nick also points out the appropriateness of “Leo” (to Leo himself) just in case anyone in the audience missed out. I found myself wondering if the lowlifes who presumably attend and bet on the fights actually understand Latin, though, or if Leo is just as good as speaking gibberish at them when he announces and commences these bouts. Whatever “wrath” Renard brings down on him in the end sounds an awful lot like a comedy badger, from Ernest Goes to Camp, maybe.

Maybe part of the “problem” is that “Last Grimm Standing” ultimately feels like an episode on its way somewhere else. The plot of the week does take up a sizeable chunk, but the way that the episode spotlights Renard in his own parallel story involving the fights (that he’s apparently kind of in charge of them) is obviously texture and characterization leading somewhere else. This is where we start to run up against my lack of knowledge outside this first season, but the Latin, the John Wickian secret honorable society stuff, Leo referring to Renard as “highness” and “royalty”—The antiquated vibe is a unifying element of the episode (Monroe emphasizes the historical value of the stuff in Aunt Marie’s trailer as well), but it’s also gesturing toward the larger plot, at least what I remember of it.

This is also the vibe with the ending: Renard gets his revenge on Leo for crossing him, leaving the audience with a lot of questions about his whole deal, while Nick is on his way home very late on his anniversary with Juliette, having missed dinner and left her in the dumps. This too is a gesture toward larger/longer plot threads, further putting emphasis on stories to come rather than this one. And that’s fine! I just wish I had felt a little better served by the story of the week to balance things out.

#nbc grimm #i swear Nick says “Dimitri SANTOS” rather than “Skontos” at one point #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

It's good to get the thoughts of someone more familiar with the entire series! I watched all (or most?) of season one back in 2011 and then only saw bits and pieces beyond that point. Going back to finish it has been on my to-do list for a bit, but I'm very aware that I'm working with incomplete knowledge where more long-term things are concerned. That you've gotten something out of these little reviews means a lot!

I do love the show for even its clumsy attempts at dealing with tough topics. Something I've missed about watching a series like this (I think the last time was with Riverdale season two or three?) is how politics and culture get imperfectly, sometimes awkwardly, incorporated into a 40-minute story that's trying to do so much in so little time.

S1E10: “Organ Grinder”—B, I think… (Watched 3/9/24)

“You know, I’ve been at this job a while, but it seems like this town is just getting weirder.” – Hank (brushing up against the revelation that he’s a character in a weekly fantasy procedural series)

First, the Hansel and Gretel connection: After the opening quote, I actually forgot until a scene later in the episode where Nick and Juliette approach a homeless brother and sister and I made the connection between this “Gracie” and “Hanson” and the fairy tale. That was a fun little jolt. I did wonder how well this story about a newly-introduced kind of Wesen harvesting human organs was going to dovetail in any sort of way with the source material aside from just the concept of children being some type of cannibalized, but then Hanson ends up using bits of the puka shell necklaces that had been present throughout the episode to leave a trail for the cops to find when the brother and sister are themselves abducted at the climax. I groaned when I realized what was happening. Like, it… works, but it still has that little bit of cringe in its modernization that really makes it (and Grimm as a series doing this adaptational thing episode after episode) sing.

One thing that both has to be addressed about this episode but that also feels kind of awkward to bring up in a casual, little write-up like this, though, is the depiction of the “Geiers” (henceforth, “Gs,” just to be safe)—a species of hook-nosed monsters that abduct human children to harvest their blood and organs for Wesen medicinal use. I thought I might be misremembering the exact particulars of the antisemitic concept of blood libel, but after a post-viewing Google and Wikipedia… I have mixed feelings about rating this one too highly.

I’m obviously not going to claim that Grimm is intentionally deploying that conspiracy to some sinister end, just that there’s an incredibly unfortunate combination of imagery and plot in this episode. There are some early mentions of vampires, for example, and my one thought was that the Gs might have been meant to resemble Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (the vampire itself potentially being an antisemitic design), and the exaggerated nose was added as some sort of “original character, do not steal”-style measure that just made things even worse. Or maybe it’s a visual synthesis of Orlok and the hooked beak of a vulture given the apparent association between “G” and that animal, though the relationship between the concept of a vulture and the word/name and Jewish stereotypes stills seems fraught. However the combination of the elements, visual and narrative, in Grimm was achieved, the end-result does not look good. I was tempted to say “This episode hasn’t aged well,” but it really seems to have just been born old, in this regard.

On a lighter note, here’s an exchange between Captain Renard and Sergeant “Comrade”(?) Wu that I enjoyed a lot, after they find a bunch of human organs drying for processing (a pretty strikingly grotesque image): “Well, whichever way you look at it, it’s still cannibalism.” / “Uh, I think it’s pronounced ‘capitalism.’” 

The fact that it’s the clinic—part of the American healthcare system, a notoriously blood-thirsty branch of capitalist living—that’s ultimately revealed to be keeping the vulnerable kids healthy just to cut them up for parts to be sold in a sort of apothecary with a certain upper-class vibe (to a secret race of non-humans, but I’m not dipping back into that again) feels like it could be taken for something meaningful: Raise up and support the youth just enough to cannibalize/capitalize on them, literally consuming their lives.

If I wanted, there’s plenty of fun stuff here to recount, like the premise of flipping the exotic animal parts as… “enhancement” to be animal-like beings using human parts for that purpose. That Monroe tells Nick this and also throws in a quick mention that, actually, there’s no truth to the exotic animals thing is fun for me since it feels like the writers/people behind the show coming through in the writing a bit. Almost like they felt a moral responsibility to throw in a quick mention, like activism in miniature. It’s cute.

This bit from Monroe during the aforementioned conversation is also very cute: “You probably didn’t know that your testicles— I mean, not your testicles specifically. . . .” This is over a little dinner with some wine, too!

There’s some great Juliette stuff in the mix. The episode focuses pretty hard early on about whether Nick should tell her the truth since her not knowing is becoming dangerous. Then, we get this sequence where Nick and Juliette take Gracie and Hanson out to dinner, and Nick more or less ends up interrogating them, cop-style, but we can see that Juliette is picking up on something he isn’t, and she figures out Gracie liked one of the other boys who disappeared and is then able to get more information by empathizing than Nick was with his more forceful approach. When he compliments her afterward, we can read between the lines to connect back to the conversation with Monroe—Nick’s clearly wondering if Juliette can handle This, and in the strained silence they enter into just before he gets an interrupting phone call, you can feel him trying to decide whether to tell her or not.

When I saw the intense shaky camera in the woods during the opening scene of kids on the run from their captors, I thought the show might be losing its touch, but despite some further goofiness with the visuals (like the use of slow motion when the head G is about to fall into her own bonfire while fighting Nick), it still has this deft hand with weaving together visuals and plot elements or themes that make me want to just recite my full list of Fun Bits I couldn’t help but write down as they happened.

[grimmmviewing]

S1E11: “Tarantella”—C+ (Watched 3/10/24)

Woman on the phone: “What do you think?” (of an art opening)

Cut to man’s perspective looking at a blonde woman: “Not really my taste.”

After the problematic landmine that was “Organ Grinder,” this episode of Grimm comes as something of a relief. It’s just such a reasonably solid episode of the series but not remarkable for the most part. It’s relatively comfortable watching by comparison. I wouldn’t even say that the C vibe of it is bad absent the contrast—It’s a very fine episode, but it’s also telling that I have so few notes for it when some of these recent pieces have been creeping steadily higher and higher in terms of word count since there’s so much I want to cover.

Maybe it feels ironic to call an episode that opens with attempted sexual assault “comfortable,” but I really don’t think there’s too much tension or fear here since the way that the lead-up is framed, together with the opening quote and maybe the title, sets up pretty obviously that this is a “classic” predator-prey reversal cold open (deal)—a man and a woman, an amorous and/or dangerous setting, but Who Is Really The Hunter Here? Nick and Hank more or less walk through this premise explicitly once they’re on the case: “So who was seducing who?”

Exactly how original any of this story is, I can’t say for certain, but having consumed media like this for years, it certainly feels familiar. There’s kind of a twist in that Lena is a reluctant murderer, though the concept of a killer who strikes in clearly-defined cycles, essentially giving the cops a clear time window in which to either solve the case or risk her slipping through their fingers, feels not exactly novel. Her husband also being a Spinnetod felt like a nice late-game surprise, though. Nick ultimately catching Lena by knocking her into a net at the docks (an obvious web substitute) is very cute, and her fleeing from him during this sequence by climbing and jumping fares better visually than Billy Capra’s similar attempted escape back in “Lonelyhearts” since this scene takes place at night, making the action look a little more credible.

The ending feels appropriately ambiguous: It’s Nick realizing Lena’s daughter is also a Spinnetod (and the episode leaving unspoken what that entails for her future) and Lena herself in jail, emerging from the shadows of her cell to reveal she’s rapidly aged since she failed to complete the cycle. This really is a solid way to end things, rather than having anyone verbalize a moral or else maybe including some nod to the series’ overarching narrative or anything like that. The creatives behind the show exercise something like restraint or a light touch here.

One critical note I did take down, however, was how they have the cleaner/housekeeper who finds the second victim’s body do the classic try-the-light-switch-but-it-doesn’t-work thing—presumably to heighten the horror of the moment, though the cliché really stands out here because… Why doesn’t the light work? I guess Lena scrabbled up to the ceiling and… removed the bulb or something? I think it would have been better/less goofy to have the woman not try the light and just go to open the curtains and find the body in the process.

I don’t think this other note really “counts,” but when Charlotte, the reformed Spinnetod, tells Nick her age as a dramatic reveal of the consequences of not doing the ritualistic feeding, I immediately thought of The Simpsons bit at the top of this post. It’s a fun twist and maybe a little inherently goofy even without that Simpsons knowledge. It is also nice to get some Wesen info from someone other than Monroe, which has long felt like a narrative get out of jail free card, just like the veritable library of books in Aunt Marie’s trailer.

Seeing Nick interact in a non-violent way with the wider Wesen world is very nice. My favorite parts of this episode are definitely the ones that continue to push on the concept of Nick being the weird creature/monster from their perspective. “You’re not real, you’re a scary story we tell our kids,” says Monroe at one point. I didn’t care for the scene where Nick finally pays a visit to the seemingly harmless Wesen that have been spying on him, though, since he ends up threatening them and just behaving like an asshole (read: like a cop?) instead of trying to prove through his actions what he claims when he tells Monroe he’s not like those Grimms they’re all afraid of.

Or, to reach a little, maybe it’s intentional: Like the Spinnetod creatures are compelled to be what they are, so too is Nick compelled to be what he is. Maybe being antagonistic toward even goofy rodent folk is in his blood somehow? It just doesn’t have the same sense of tragedy to it in the episode itself, however.

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

I do think I remember the Hitler-was-a-Wesen twist now that you mention it. Poking around online, it seems like he was a Blutbad or Schakal. I think this is actually the next episode I need to watch! Him being a G would certainly have been an interesting choice, in terms of muddying the waters around them and their design and, obviously, given the actual history.

It feels like there's an interesting angle to the naming and associations for someone with a better grasp of the language and history to explore. The Wikipedia article for "Geier" was where I started, but it has a flag on it for containing "original research," though looking up the surname on Google was returning similar associations, I think. It's hard to tell how much of this stuff is just recycling the same material. Even though these little reviews were meant to be done with a quicker turnaround, I did sit with this one a bit longer to try to hopefully not spread misinformation exactly and because it was obviously a sensitive subject. My searching also didn't return anything about "Geier" being a slur like that same Wikipedia page suggested, but I decided to be careful with it, just in case.

S1E10: “Organ Grinder”—B, I think… (Watched 3/9/24)

“You know, I’ve been at this job a while, but it seems like this town is just getting weirder.” – Hank (brushing up against the revelation that he’s a character in a weekly fantasy procedural series)

First, the Hansel and Gretel connection: After the opening quote, I actually forgot until a scene later in the episode where Nick and Juliette approach a homeless brother and sister and I made the connection between this “Gracie” and “Hanson” and the fairy tale. That was a fun little jolt. I did wonder how well this story about a newly-introduced kind of Wesen harvesting human organs was going to dovetail in any sort of way with the source material aside from just the concept of children being some type of cannibalized, but then Hanson ends up using bits of the puka shell necklaces that had been present throughout the episode to leave a trail for the cops to find when the brother and sister are themselves abducted at the climax. I groaned when I realized what was happening. Like, it… works, but it still has that little bit of cringe in its modernization that really makes it (and Grimm as a series doing this adaptational thing episode after episode) sing.

One thing that both has to be addressed about this episode but that also feels kind of awkward to bring up in a casual, little write-up like this, though, is the depiction of the “Geiers” (henceforth, “Gs,” just to be safe)—a species of hook-nosed monsters that abduct human children to harvest their blood and organs for Wesen medicinal use. I thought I might be misremembering the exact particulars of the antisemitic concept of blood libel, but after a post-viewing Google and Wikipedia… I have mixed feelings about rating this one too highly.

I’m obviously not going to claim that Grimm is intentionally deploying that conspiracy to some sinister end, just that there’s an incredibly unfortunate combination of imagery and plot in this episode. There are some early mentions of vampires, for example, and my one thought was that the Gs might have been meant to resemble Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (the vampire itself potentially being an antisemitic design), and the exaggerated nose was added as some sort of “original character, do not steal”-style measure that just made things even worse. Or maybe it’s a visual synthesis of Orlok and the hooked beak of a vulture given the apparent association between “G” and that animal, though the relationship between the concept of a vulture and the word/name and Jewish stereotypes stills seems fraught. However the combination of the elements, visual and narrative, in Grimm was achieved, the end-result does not look good. I was tempted to say “This episode hasn’t aged well,” but it really seems to have just been born old, in this regard.

On a lighter note, here’s an exchange between Captain Renard and Sergeant “Comrade”(?) Wu that I enjoyed a lot, after they find a bunch of human organs drying for processing (a pretty strikingly grotesque image): “Well, whichever way you look at it, it’s still cannibalism.” / “Uh, I think it’s pronounced ‘capitalism.’” 

The fact that it’s the clinic—part of the American healthcare system, a notoriously blood-thirsty branch of capitalist living—that’s ultimately revealed to be keeping the vulnerable kids healthy just to cut them up for parts to be sold in a sort of apothecary with a certain upper-class vibe (to a secret race of non-humans, but I’m not dipping back into that again) feels like it could be taken for something meaningful: Raise up and support the youth just enough to cannibalize/capitalize on them, literally consuming their lives.

If I wanted, there’s plenty of fun stuff here to recount, like the premise of flipping the exotic animal parts as… “enhancement” to be animal-like beings using human parts for that purpose. That Monroe tells Nick this and also throws in a quick mention that, actually, there’s no truth to the exotic animals thing is fun for me since it feels like the writers/people behind the show coming through in the writing a bit. Almost like they felt a moral responsibility to throw in a quick mention, like activism in miniature. It’s cute.

This bit from Monroe during the aforementioned conversation is also very cute: “You probably didn’t know that your testicles— I mean, not your testicles specifically. . . .” This is over a little dinner with some wine, too!

There’s some great Juliette stuff in the mix. The episode focuses pretty hard early on about whether Nick should tell her the truth since her not knowing is becoming dangerous. Then, we get this sequence where Nick and Juliette take Gracie and Hanson out to dinner, and Nick more or less ends up interrogating them, cop-style, but we can see that Juliette is picking up on something he isn’t, and she figures out Gracie liked one of the other boys who disappeared and is then able to get more information by empathizing than Nick was with his more forceful approach. When he compliments her afterward, we can read between the lines to connect back to the conversation with Monroe—Nick’s clearly wondering if Juliette can handle This, and in the strained silence they enter into just before he gets an interrupting phone call, you can feel him trying to decide whether to tell her or not.

When I saw the intense shaky camera in the woods during the opening scene of kids on the run from their captors, I thought the show might be losing its touch, but despite some further goofiness with the visuals (like the use of slow motion when the head G is about to fall into her own bonfire while fighting Nick), it still has this deft hand with weaving together visuals and plot elements or themes that make me want to just recite my full list of Fun Bits I couldn’t help but write down as they happened.

[grimmmviewing]

S1E10: “Organ Grinder”—B, I think… (Watched 3/9/24)

“You know, I’ve been at this job a while, but it seems like this town is just getting weirder.” – Hank (brushing up against the revelation that he’s a character in a weekly fantasy procedural series)

First, the Hansel and Gretel connection: After the opening quote, I actually forgot until a scene later in the episode where Nick and Juliette approach a homeless brother and sister and I made the connection between this “Gracie” and “Hanson” and the fairy tale. That was a fun little jolt. I did wonder how well this story about a newly-introduced kind of Wesen harvesting human organs was going to dovetail in any sort of way with the source material aside from just the concept of children being some type of cannibalized, but then Hanson ends up using bits of the puka shell necklaces that had been present throughout the episode to leave a trail for the cops to find when the brother and sister are themselves abducted at the climax. I groaned when I realized what was happening. Like, it… works, but it still has that little bit of cringe in its modernization that really makes it (and Grimm as a series doing this adaptational thing episode after episode) sing.

One thing that both has to be addressed about this episode but that also feels kind of awkward to bring up in a casual, little write-up like this, though, is the depiction of the “Geiers” (henceforth, “Gs,” just to be safe)—a species of hook-nosed monsters that abduct human children to harvest their blood and organs for Wesen medicinal use. I thought I might be misremembering the exact particulars of the antisemitic concept of blood libel, but after a post-viewing Google and Wikipedia… I have mixed feelings about rating this one too highly.

I’m obviously not going to claim that Grimm is intentionally deploying that conspiracy to some sinister end, just that there’s an incredibly unfortunate combination of imagery and plot in this episode. There are some early mentions of vampires, for example, and my one thought was that the Gs might have been meant to resemble Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (the vampire itself potentially being an antisemitic design), and the exaggerated nose was added as some sort of “original character, do not steal”-style measure that just made things even worse. Or maybe it’s a visual synthesis of Orlok and the hooked beak of a vulture given the apparent association between “G” and that animal, though the relationship between the concept of a vulture and the word/name and Jewish stereotypes stills seems fraught. However the combination of the elements, visual and narrative, in Grimm was achieved, the end-result does not look good. I was tempted to say “This episode hasn’t aged well,” but it really seems to have just been born old, in this regard.

On a lighter note, here’s an exchange between Captain Renard and Sergeant “Comrade”(?) Wu that I enjoyed a lot, after they find a bunch of human organs drying for processing (a pretty strikingly grotesque image): “Well, whichever way you look at it, it’s still cannibalism.” / “Uh, I think it’s pronounced ‘capitalism.’” 

The fact that it’s the clinic—part of the American healthcare system, a notoriously blood-thirsty branch of capitalist living—that’s ultimately revealed to be keeping the vulnerable kids healthy just to cut them up for parts to be sold in a sort of apothecary with a certain upper-class vibe (to a secret race of non-humans, but I’m not dipping back into that again) feels like it could be taken for something meaningful: Raise up and support the youth just enough to cannibalize/capitalize on them, literally consuming their lives.

If I wanted, there’s plenty of fun stuff here to recount, like the premise of flipping the exotic animal parts as… “enhancement” to be animal-like beings using human parts for that purpose. That Monroe tells Nick this and also throws in a quick mention that, actually, there’s no truth to the exotic animals thing is fun for me since it feels like the writers/people behind the show coming through in the writing a bit. Almost like they felt a moral responsibility to throw in a quick mention, like activism in miniature. It’s cute.

This bit from Monroe during the aforementioned conversation is also very cute: “You probably didn’t know that your testicles— I mean, not your testicles specifically. . . .” This is over a little dinner with some wine, too!

There’s some great Juliette stuff in the mix. The episode focuses pretty hard early on about whether Nick should tell her the truth since her not knowing is becoming dangerous. Then, we get this sequence where Nick and Juliette take Gracie and Hanson out to dinner, and Nick more or less ends up interrogating them, cop-style, but we can see that Juliette is picking up on something he isn’t, and she figures out Gracie liked one of the other boys who disappeared and is then able to get more information by empathizing than Nick was with his more forceful approach. When he compliments her afterward, we can read between the lines to connect back to the conversation with Monroe—Nick’s clearly wondering if Juliette can handle This, and in the strained silence they enter into just before he gets an interrupting phone call, you can feel him trying to decide whether to tell her or not.

When I saw the intense shaky camera in the woods during the opening scene of kids on the run from their captors, I thought the show might be losing its touch, but despite some further goofiness with the visuals (like the use of slow motion when the head G is about to fall into her own bonfire while fighting Nick), it still has this deft hand with weaving together visuals and plot elements or themes that make me want to just recite my full list of Fun Bits I couldn’t help but write down as they happened.

#nbc grimm #dude there is a friggin BREITBART article of all things about this episode #chekhovs puka shell necklace apparently #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

That's the kind of detail I wish I was better able to catch! There are elements of the editing or scripting that can feel like they were (surprisingly) so finely considered, but seeing things like that has to take away from the experience a bit. I wonder what/how much instruction they were given for those scenes?

S1E5: “Danse Macabre”—B+ (Watched 2/16/24)

“You cops?”

“Yeah, we’ve been called worse.”

There’s a lot to like about this episode: a pretty grody-looking corpse; plenty of shots of adorable rats scampering around; character interactions, like Sergeant Wu and Hank together at a bar or Monroe trying to mentor the hot-headed Roddy, that feel like a treat since they happen outside Nick’s immediate orbit; the hapless rich teens descending into what looks like such an obvious trap while essentially bragging to one another about how many times their parents have tried to call them for some delicious dramatic irony; Roddy playing what amounts to electric violin to direct his rat army in this massive underground room lit with candles. The combination of his rave-hosting “DJ Retchid Kat” tech and big, goofy, pink cat mask-head with the ominous, old timey light sources and the visual of the multitudes of rats in this space that’s got this turquoise and orange look is a real potent mix. The show continues to be quite entertaining, and particular lines or visuals demonstrate a certain flair and sense of fun or creativity.

This one is almost great—I just wish it had more to say about some of the themes it flirts with, even though I’m not exactly surprised, given that this is network television.

Maybe I thought I’d make it longer without using the word “copaganda,” but here I go (using it). Grimm is part of a long tradition of media that gives cops a whole lot of credit. I know it’s also a fantasy show where your refrigerator repair man turns out to actually be some sort of man-sized rodent… man, but it’s still got all the usual police procedural baggage, and outside the context of a fantasy show, the irritation and desperation Roddy and his dad express about their treatment by the system/police is pretty messed up (and accurate). The courtesy call Roddy gets late in the episode, where a dispassionate male voice tells him “I have to inform you, your father was injured when he refused to enter his cell,” is just so brutal: Like his dad just got stepped on by the universe or something and wasn’t abused by human beings doing their so-called jobs?

“I’d like an answer before politics screw things up,” says Nick’s boss at one point, which is… great.

Classism is another theme here that is ultimately not exactly paid off satisfactorily. Roddy was targeted for being too poor to have such talent or a rich girlfriend:

“You’re gonna pay.” / “Some of us can afford to.”

“That boy does not belong in our school.” / “Or in your neighborhood?”

(That second pair comes from a rich white mother and Hank, the show’s nearly singular Black character.)

Those are some excellent lines that feel perfectly barbed in the moment but are perhaps gesturing at things that are a bit too big (and dangerous) for this show to do anything meaningful with them. It’s a bit like Monroe’s blustery, abortive man-to-man talk with Roddy in that it says some things but misses a whole lot as well.

#nbc grimm

[grimmmviewing]

Some sort of agency definitely feels like the unifying thread for this episode since Juliette is also doing her own thing/disobeying Nick. Writing things like this, I always wonder how much might be intended!

I agree about Nick and Hank's treatment of Natalie. I initially took it as maybe some kind of foreshadowing (since I misremembered her being a Wesen as well and somehow more connected to the murder), but it ends up just being, as you say, a kind of accurately uncomfortable look at real-world cop behavior again. Kind of in the vein of the systemic issues "Danse Macabre" touched on.

S1E9: “Of Mouse And Man”—A (Watched 2/29/24)

“It’s people’s lives falling apart—What’s left when the good times are over. It’s the death of dreams.” – Hank, doing his best True Detective impression, describing a junk shop

My feelings about this episode of Grimm evolved very much like how they did for “Game Ogre,” with a sense that it just got better over the course of the runtime. The difference is that “Of Mouse And Man” has noticeably fewer issues that ultimately undermine its more interesting aspects for me. Further, while “Game Ogre” has noteworthy elements that mostly work within the full context of the series—and this episode does have some of those too—“Of Mouse And Man” also tells its own more complete and compelling fairy tale story using the fantasy and procedural elements, similar to “Bears Will Be Bears” and “Let Down Your Hair,” which is what pushes it even higher.

It starts with just some competent little bits of execution, like the tense opening scene with its orange and sickly green lighting, which is a sort of signature color scheme for the series. There’s a shot from inside the dumpster where the body du jour is… dumped that has the lid closing at night and then, without an obvious cut, opening again on daylight and a garbage truck.

Hints of mouse-ish-ness in an episode about mouse people are also seeded consistently throughout: Both the Marty and Natalie roles feel like they were cast looking for actors with a somewhat mouse-like appearance, and the Natalie character’s last name is even “Haver” “straw,” but she’s not actually a Wesen and is a symbolic rather than literal mouse. There’s an exchange between Nick and Juliette at one point where he calls raccoons “rodents,” which Juliette argues is untrue and says “We’re all mammals here.” As a second body is being dragged to a second dumpster, we see a sign on said dumpster literally depicting a mouse. During the climactic engagement with Marty at his junk shop, there’s a large doorway that looks very much like a giant traditional mouse hole, with the ragged edges along the wall as if it were chewed.

When Marty is really finally feeling himself and he takes Natalie out to dinner, he says, “You got to think bigger, Natalie. The only thing that’s holding you back is you,” which is fun dramatic irony since he’s obviously talking about himself too (or even primarily).

The choice to have each of Marty’s victims briefly turn into his father is a fun visual twist that starts so subtly that I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. I noticed that the first victim’s face looked different at one point in the opening, but then I thought it must have just been some quirk of the lighting or something when the corpse looked normal later. It becomes more obvious and prominent as the episode goes on, culminating in Marty seeing that same face on every man at the restaurant where his final breakdown begins. This scene ends up being genuinely unsettling in a way the show’s fleeting horror elements often aren’t. It doesn’t feel like an original concept, but the way it builds all episode is very nice and works well. That Marty ultimately becomes abusive toward Natalie—a woman he wanted to save from domestic violence initially—and then sees himself as his father in the junk shop mirrors during his standoff with Nick and Hank just makes for such a satisfyingly complete-feeling arc.

“I know who you are,” Nick says to a felled Marty, by which he means a Wesen, but Marty is too far gone to understand and takes it more generally, tragically: “Oh, no, you don’t. Nobody does. Nobody knows me.”

“At least I know who you are,” Juliette says to Nick as well at the end. Which is more dramatic irony, perhaps in more than one way at once, since A) she’s doesn’t, actually, and B) it echoes that earlier line that we heard but she didn’t.

It’s just all really good! The domestic violence is described but not depicted, which makes this not as queasy (in maybe a bad way) as it could have been. And there are still other fun details or elements as well, like a chatty landlord character and especially like Juliette doing her own little investigation into who’s spying on her house and Monroe ending up in a surprise B/C plot that ultimately affirms his own agency as well—that he will continue working with Nick because he wants to and not because he’s been pressed into it. If there’s a negative in there somewhere, they probably could have explicitly connected Juliette’s extreme vigilance and desire to protect herself and Nick back to Oleg Stark attacking them in their home in the previous episode to make this feel more powerfully like character development for her.

#nbc grimm

[grimmmviewing]

S1E9: “Of Mouse And Man”—A (Watched 2/29/24)

“It’s people’s lives falling apart—What’s left when the good times are over. It’s the death of dreams.” – Hank, doing his best True Detective impression, describing a junk shop

My feelings about this episode of Grimm evolved very much like how they did for “Game Ogre,” with a sense that it just got better over the course of the runtime. The difference is that “Of Mouse And Man” has noticeably fewer issues that ultimately undermine its more interesting aspects for me. Further, while “Game Ogre” has noteworthy elements that mostly work within the full context of the series—and this episode does have some of those too—“Of Mouse And Man” also tells its own more complete and compelling fairy tale story using the fantasy and procedural elements, similar to “Bears Will Be Bears” and “Let Down Your Hair,” which is what pushes it even higher.

It starts with just some competent little bits of execution, like the tense opening scene with its orange and sickly green lighting, which is a sort of signature color scheme for the series. There’s a shot from inside the dumpster where the body du jour is… dumped that has the lid closing at night and then, without an obvious cut, opening again on daylight and a garbage truck.

Hints of mouse-ish-ness in an episode about mouse people are also seeded consistently throughout: Both the Marty and Natalie roles feel like they were cast looking for actors with a somewhat mouse-like appearance, and the Natalie character’s last name is even “Haver” “straw,” but she’s not actually a Wesen and is a symbolic rather than literal mouse. There’s an exchange between Nick and Juliette at one point where he calls raccoons “rodents,” which Juliette argues is untrue and says “We’re all mammals here.” As a second body is being dragged to a second dumpster, we see a sign on said dumpster literally depicting a mouse. During the climactic engagement with Marty at his junk shop, there’s a large doorway that looks very much like a giant traditional mouse hole, with the ragged edges along the wall as if it were chewed.

When Marty is really finally feeling himself and he takes Natalie out to dinner, he says, “You got to think bigger, Natalie. The only thing that’s holding you back is you,” which is fun dramatic irony since he’s obviously talking about himself too (or even primarily).

The choice to have each of Marty’s victims briefly turn into his father is a fun visual twist that starts so subtly that I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. I noticed that the first victim’s face looked different at one point in the opening, but then I thought it must have just been some quirk of the lighting or something when the corpse looked normal later. It becomes more obvious and prominent as the episode goes on, culminating in Marty seeing that same face on every man at the restaurant where his final breakdown begins. This scene ends up being genuinely unsettling in a way the show’s fleeting horror elements often aren’t. It doesn’t feel like an original concept, but the way it builds all episode is very nice and works well. That Marty ultimately becomes abusive toward Natalie—a woman he wanted to save from domestic violence initially—and then sees himself as his father in the junk shop mirrors during his standoff with Nick and Hank just makes for such a satisfyingly complete-feeling arc.

“I know who you are,” Nick says to a felled Marty, by which he means a Wesen, but Marty is too far gone to understand and takes it more generally, tragically: “Oh, no, you don’t. Nobody does. Nobody knows me.”

“At least I know who you are,” Juliette says to Nick as well at the end. Which is more dramatic irony, perhaps in more than one way at once, since A) she’s doesn’t, actually, and B) it echoes that earlier line that we heard but she didn’t.

It’s just all really good! The domestic violence is described but not depicted, which makes this not as queasy (in maybe a bad way) as it could have been. And there are still other fun details or elements as well, like a chatty landlord character and especially like Juliette doing her own little investigation into who’s spying on her house and Monroe ending up in a surprise B/C plot that ultimately affirms his own agency as well—that he will continue working with Nick because he wants to and not because he’s been pressed into it. If there’s a negative in there somewhere, they probably could have explicitly connected Juliette’s extreme vigilance and desire to protect herself and Nick back to Oleg Stark attacking them in their home in the previous episode to make this feel more powerfully like character development for her.

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

A really good point--After reading this, I remembered him using someone else's fingerprints, and how he rigs one vehicle to explode and then immediately starts helping an old lady across the street to become inconspicuous and get a new car, and how he tries to run Hank down with a car first rather than take him head-on despite his near invulnerability… I hate that I missed praising that part of the character. The contrast with the seeming oafishness is so fun!

I thought this was Harbour too at first, but it seems to be Eric Edelstein.

S1E8: “Game Ogre”—B/C+ (Watched 2/29/24)

“No record of where he was born, no record of a family. It’s like this guy just fell out of the sky.” – Hank re. an ogre/giant (Got a, not exactly unhappy, groan from me!)

“Just the facts, right?” – Monroe to Nick/Hank re. the ownership of an important watch (Bonus points for Dragnet reference?)

Exactly how much silliness I find charming and at what point the goofiness should result in some sort of deduction for review purposes are questions I find myself thinking about a lot while watching Grimm. Even the episodes I’ve scored as “A”s have their Moments. And if I had to sum up my feelings about “Game Ogre” I would say that it starts as a fine enough monster of the week story but then, perhaps fittingly for an episode that prominently features a watch early on, it accumulates enough “complications” that it becomes genuinely interesting or noteworthy.

First—the central role of Oleg Stark, an ogre. I did love the very physical performance, which has a lot of stiff-bodied stomping around and grunting and growling. It had to have been fun to try to play that role and to try to make yourself seem as big, burly, and dense (in more than one sense) as possible. The way the camera frames this big boy and the way that shots of him getting physical are filmed and edited to make him feel as large and powerful as possible is just very entertaining. Definitely goofy, but also definitely fun in a C+ sort of way.

Another entertaining C-sort of goofy detail is how the initial murder victim is a judge, and we know that because he’s just got a gavel sitting out on his desk at home. It’s used in his murder to help suggest that the crime was personal, of course, but the placement is still such a ridiculous way to communicate the man’s profession, especially when you consider that we’re also explicitly told he’s a state judge when Sergeant Wu and his partner are investigating the scene of the break-in.

There are some similarly unnecessary-feeling, awkward quick flashbacks in the mix—back to Nick being brutalized by the ogre in his house and to the ogre-killing poison and gun in his trailer. Of course, one way of looking at these is as part of the TV series package: Commercials are a thing, and people come in late. You have to catch up the late-comers and maybe re-establish a sense of drama and of the critical details for folks after the ads. This is one of those things I struggle to identify as a positive or a negative in my subjective assessment since Grimm being so obviously What It Is is absolutely part of the charm and was part of what I wanted out of this whole experience.

And there are a couple of plot oddities here, too, like just how long it takes for someone (Wu) to put together the idea of using Hank as bait for the vengeance-seeking Oleg. Captain Renard going along with Hank to a suspect’s place probably shouldn’t feel weird, but it does since, as far as I remember, this is new behavior for him.

It’s the mounting “complications” that ultimately elevate the episode, though, because of their novelty. Actually seeing Nick kind of shaken and vulnerable after he’s hospitalized from Oleg’s attack offers a new emotional angle from which to view him. He hasn’t been this badly beaten by a Wesen before. Hank similarly gets pushed emotionally in this episode, and the exact nature of the strain on him ends up being a nice twist, with how he and the DA colluded to “lose” evidence that might have gotten reasonable doubt for Oleg at his trial years ago.

The trust that Nick places in Monroe, a Wesen, by revealing the trailer to him is very much understated and great for it. The fact that Monroe ends up being the one who has to put Oleg down is also a cool, interesting wrinkle. The focus on the .600 caliber “elephant gun” bullets that are over 100 years old in the final scene with Renard and Hank is just a delightful little bit of quirkiness and suspense. That the weapons from the trailer are actually deployed here is something I was glad to see. It certainly makes sense for Nick to use his service weapon rather than swinging around a sword or flail or something, but that armory has been essentially teased up to this point, and it was just good to see some of it put to use.

#nbc grimm

[grimmmviewing]

S1E8: “Game Ogre”—B/C+ (Watched 2/29/24)

“No record of where he was born, no record of a family. It’s like this guy just fell out of the sky.” – Hank re. an ogre/giant (Got a, not exactly unhappy, groan from me!)

“Just the facts, right?” – Monroe to Nick/Hank re. the ownership of an important watch (Bonus points for Dragnet reference?)

Exactly how much silliness I find charming and at what point the goofiness should result in some sort of deduction for review purposes are questions I find myself thinking about a lot while watching Grimm. Even the episodes I’ve scored as “A”s have their Moments. And if I had to sum up my feelings about “Game Ogre” I would say that it starts as a fine enough monster of the week story but then, perhaps fittingly for an episode that prominently features a watch early on, it accumulates enough “complications” that it becomes genuinely interesting or noteworthy.

First—the central role of Oleg Stark, an ogre. I did love the very physical performance, which has a lot of stiff-bodied stomping around and grunting and growling. It had to have been fun to try to play that role and to try to make yourself seem as big, burly, and dense (in more than one sense) as possible. The way the camera frames this big boy and the way that shots of him getting physical are filmed and edited to make him feel as large and powerful as possible is just very entertaining. Definitely goofy, but also definitely fun in a C+ sort of way.

Another entertaining C-sort of goofy detail is how the initial murder victim is a judge, and we know that because he’s just got a gavel sitting out on his desk at home. It’s used in his murder to help suggest that the crime was personal, of course, but the placement is still such a ridiculous way to communicate the man’s profession, especially when you consider that we’re also explicitly told he’s a state judge when Sergeant Wu and his partner are investigating the scene of the break-in.

There are some similarly unnecessary-feeling, awkward quick flashbacks in the mix—back to Nick being brutalized by the ogre in his house and to the ogre-killing poison and gun in his trailer. Of course, one way of looking at these is as part of the TV series package: Commercials are a thing, and people come in late. You have to catch up the late-comers and maybe re-establish a sense of drama and of the critical details for folks after the ads. This is one of those things I struggle to identify as a positive or a negative in my subjective assessment since Grimm being so obviously What It Is is absolutely part of the charm and was part of what I wanted out of this whole experience.

And there are a couple of plot oddities here, too, like just how long it takes for someone (Wu) to put together the idea of using Hank as bait for the vengeance-seeking Oleg. Captain Renard going along with Hank to a suspect’s place probably shouldn’t feel weird, but it does since, as far as I remember, this is new behavior for him.

It’s the mounting “complications” that ultimately elevate the episode, though, because of their novelty. Actually seeing Nick kind of shaken and vulnerable after he’s hospitalized from Oleg’s attack offers a new emotional angle from which to view him. He hasn’t been this badly beaten by a Wesen before. Hank similarly gets pushed emotionally in this episode, and the exact nature of the strain on him ends up being a nice twist, with how he and the DA colluded to “lose” evidence that might have gotten reasonable doubt for Oleg at his trial years ago.

The trust that Nick places in Monroe, a Wesen, by revealing the trailer to him is very much understated and great for it. The fact that Monroe ends up being the one who has to put Oleg down is also a cool, interesting wrinkle. The focus on the .600 caliber “elephant gun” bullets that are over 100 years old in the final scene with Renard and Hank is just a delightful little bit of quirkiness and suspense. That the weapons from the trailer are actually deployed here is something I was glad to see. It certainly makes sense for Nick to use his service weapon rather than swinging around a sword or flail or something, but that armory has been essentially teased up to this point, and it was just good to see some of it put to use.

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

S1E7: “Let Down Your Hair”—A (Watched 2/24/24)

“We’re not cops! We own a doggie wash!”

This one hooked me immediately and just got better from there: It starts with an obvious, goofy, classically amorous Cold Open Couple in the woods who get accosted by a violent weed-grower when they stumble onto his turf, but then that guy goes to investigate a noise and gets lassoed (and killed) by some very long, very thick hair. The physicality of the titular “hair” comes as such an arresting novelty after so many episodes of just facial transformations denoting monstrousness/fairy tale creature status.

There are also some very fun and interesting bits and pieces of world- building and deepening here—like Monroe casually establishing that the Santa Claus of the Grimm universe is actually a Wesen. Beyond that pleasing tid-bit, he also talks Blutbad childhood, socialization, and maturation, giving us some insight into what it’s like to be born and grow up as something more than human. The fact that this episode is about Blutbaden again, but with this feral long-missing child twist, rather than introducing another new, conveniently Rapunzel-like creature is great since, as I said, it “deepens” rather than “broadens” the established universe. The pattern of each episode introducing a new creature for Nick to read about and Monroe to explain casual-like was getting a bit bland.

The hair as a weapon, trees/a treehouse in place of a conventional tower, a lost rather than imprisoned girl—It’s a satisfying-enough adaptation of iconic Rapunzel elements. And there’s also something about this particular story of finding and struggling to communicate with this nearly nonverbal girl, protecting her from dangerous humans, and ultimately bringing her back to her mother after she was initially taken into the woods years ago by a neighbor that just feels more fairy-tale-like in its own right than any of the previous plots. The way that it kind of side-steps the exact nature of Jimmy Addison’s intentions for the extremely young Holly Clark also just feels much better than similar material in “Lonelyhearts.” It’s a grim (ha…) take, but it preserves enough of the whimsy and structure of a fairy tale to just feel Right.

While this is a very busy episode—to the point that half of the initial couple in danger is still technically left tied up in a basement somewhere, after being abducted by the grower’s brothers, when the story is over—it still has room for some great moments for characters other than Nick. Both Monroe and Hank get to have their time as characters in their own right: Hank as he returns to this emotional missing person case that he was unable to solve before, and Monroe as he tries to be a mentor, if not father figure, to a confused Blutbad child who can’t even speak, much less understand what she is. Hank in particular benefits here, as the character gets to go deeper than the joke-making sidekick for what feels like the first time, to me.

On a lighter note: The refrigerator repairman from “Danse Macabre” and his buddies spying on Nick because they can’t believe Grimms are actually real is extremely cute. I love how Nick is treated like the fantastical creature here from their perspective.

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch #amazon calls it “let down your hair” and thats what im going with “let your hair down” just sounds gross and wrong!

[grimmmviewing]

S1E6: “The Three Bad Wolves”—B- (Watched 2/22/24)

There are things in Grimm that strike me as well-handled and fun, like a wolf growl transitioning into the roar of a motorcycle taking off. However, there is also stuff that’s pretty silly and that leaves me with more mixed feelings. On the one hand, the fairy tale riff at the heart of this episode feels very “Bears Will Be Bears”-like. This could be another really compelling episode where the combination of the fantasy and procedural elements and the “Three Little Pigs” subversion really sings, but it’s held back by certain elements.

In a more minor sort of way, the presence of a Shake Weight in the opening scene is more fun-silly than anything else. Like the show’s treatment of social media and flash mobs and raves, it feels very Of It’s Time in a way that’s definitely going to become even sillier than intended with time but that is also just charming for how it captures a pop cultural moment.

And yet, “Same thing happened to him last month with him in it” is a real “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died”-ass line. It’s pretty silly in a bad way, but it’s also obviously a result of the limitations of the runtime. It’s trying to get the episode rolling quickly because it’s a very “full” episode in a good way.

I love that Monroe is really critical to the plot this time. While he’s had a role in the previous episodes, he was also mostly acting as a sidekick and source of info for Nick. Here, his backstory and character get filled in, and he feels important and complicated. It adds some nuance to the hipster wolfman characterization that’s been defining him. And the episode ends in this tense, kind of melancholic place—where Monroe resists Nick trying to pull him into the search for his wanted ex Angelina, and then he finds her family photo that’s appeared throughout the episode left outside his house by her as a lonely wolf howl sounds. It is kind of goofy, still, but there’s a functional emotional core to it as well.

But then you’ve got the Hap character who is very obviously a stoner sans the weed in an awkward sort of way, and that performance, which is good-bad with how incredibly archetypal it is, serves as a centerpiece of the episode. And there’s this exchange between Angelina and Monroe at one point: “Why do you gotta act like such a hardass?” / “You liked my hard ass pretty good last night.”

“All this restriction is like its own compulsion” could be a great line in a different context, but stuff like the above undermines it. It’s this contradictory mixture of quality that’s part of the soapy fun, though—the reach for genuine drama undercut by some level of silliness, intentional or unintentional.

Like, Angelina tempting Monroe into a sexy beast man night run is kind of cool (and goofy), but it would have been less detrimentally silly if the two had just been rendered as wolves for it in place of these shots we get of two human figures galumphing along with this hardcore musical accompaniment. I’m a fan of the sex that’s being set up here, but the literal run up to it needed a bit more “wolf” and a bit less “were.”

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

S1E5: “Danse Macabre”—B+ (Watched 2/16/24)

“You cops?”

“Yeah, we’ve been called worse.”

There’s a lot to like about this episode: a pretty grody-looking corpse; plenty of shots of adorable rats scampering around; character interactions, like Sergeant Wu and Hank together at a bar or Monroe trying to mentor the hot-headed Roddy, that feel like a treat since they happen outside Nick’s immediate orbit; the hapless rich teens descending into what looks like such an obvious trap while essentially bragging to one another about how many times their parents have tried to call them for some delicious dramatic irony; Roddy playing what amounts to electric violin to direct his rat army in this massive underground room lit with candles. The combination of his rave-hosting “DJ Retchid Kat” tech and big, goofy, pink cat mask-head with the ominous, old timey light sources and the visual of the multitudes of rats in this space that’s got this turquoise and orange look is a real potent mix. The show continues to be quite entertaining, and particular lines or visuals demonstrate a certain flair and sense of fun or creativity.

This one is almost great—I just wish it had more to say about some of the themes it flirts with, even though I’m not exactly surprised, given that this is network television.

Maybe I thought I’d make it longer without using the word “copaganda,” but here I go (using it). Grimm is part of a long tradition of media that gives cops a whole lot of credit. I know it’s also a fantasy show where your refrigerator repair man turns out to actually be some sort of man-sized rodent… man, but it’s still got all the usual police procedural baggage, and outside the context of a fantasy show, the irritation and desperation Roddy and his dad express about their treatment by the system/police is pretty messed up (and accurate). The courtesy call Roddy gets late in the episode, where a dispassionate male voice tells him “I have to inform you, your father was injured when he refused to enter his cell,” is just so brutal: Like his dad just got stepped on by the universe or something and wasn’t abused by human beings doing their so-called jobs?

“I’d like an answer before politics screw things up,” says Nick’s boss at one point, which is… great.

Classism is another theme here that is ultimately not exactly paid off satisfactorily. Roddy was targeted for being too poor to have such talent or a rich girlfriend:

“You’re gonna pay.” / “Some of us can afford to.”

“That boy does not belong in our school.” / “Or in your neighborhood?”

(That second pair comes from a rich white mother and Hank, the show’s nearly singular Black character.)

Those are some excellent lines that feel perfectly barbed in the moment but are perhaps gesturing at things that are a bit too big (and dangerous) for this show to do anything meaningful with them. It’s a bit like Monroe’s blustery, abortive man-to-man talk with Roddy in that it says some things but misses a whole lot as well.

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch

[grimmmviewing]

S1E4: “Lonelyhearts”—B (Watched 2/15/24)

“They live for the rut.”

“The what?”

“The rut!”

This one won me over very quickly with some rapid-fire moody/ominous imagery (intriguingly out of context at first), as well as hallucinations of an octopus monster and lamp-turned-buzzsaw. It just Goes. It lost me a bit, however, during the early stage of the investigation when Nick and Hank interview a dead woman’s abusive husband. The pretty conventional, unremarkable (for the procedural genre) conversation gets further undermined by the husband's performance. It’s “bad” in that way where you can see the acting happening, that he’s reaching for this complicated mix of feelings and is getting there but in a way where you notice the seams, so to speak.

Thankfully, we spend a lot more time in fun, fantasy territory after this point, though maybe stuff like the name “Billy Capra” (a truly wonderful alias for a secret goat man) does feel somewhat tonally ill-fitting given the nature of his crimes. Clearly Grimm is meant to be… grim, but there’s something about Billy goat-hop parkouring his way away from police pursuit or gas-induced visions of ferocious doorknobs that feels out of place with the skeevy crimes of sexual assault and mass impregnation.

Still, there are some very cute moments here, like how a woman leaving Billy’s bed and breakfast seems to mistake Nick and Hank for a couple (which is super fast and unremarked-upon and even cuter for it), or how Monroe ends up accidentally getting charmed while trying to spy on Billy in a bar for Nick. His gentle spirit and little car also feel like such an odd match for a crime that amounts to Law & Order: SVU: Narnia.

It’s an uncomfortable mix of subject matter and tone overall if I think about it much, despite also being a logical union of the police procedural and fantasy halves of the show...

Bonus points for Billy getting hit by a car while running from Nick and Hank as a fitting bookend for a story that begins with one of his victims being struck while fleeing from him. And for showing what looks like it could be the waterfall where the climactic chase eventually occurs at the very beginning with this episode’s opening quotation.

DEDUCTION for showing me Nick and Juliette in the thumbnail (on Amazon) and making me think I’d get to see more of them together as a couple in an episode called “Lonelyhearts.”

#nbc grimm #tv series #review #rewatch