Kyle’s Review

I think this Wesen of the week played better than last week’s—but not that much better—while the ongoing stories grew stale. We’ll get to the Wesen of the week in a bit but let’s check in with Juliette, Adalind, Renard, and Nick first.

The Juliette and Nick story marked time. Juliette officially moved out but she was already gone before this week, so this wasn’t a surprise. I still don’t buy her animosity toward Nick. I guess she blames Nick for becoming a Grimm again but she was the one that insisted he regain his Grimm powers. He’s trying to make it work, while she’s pushing him away after all they’ve been through. It doesn’t work and I see the creative team thrusting the two back together artificially in the not so distant future. Then, I wonder who cares about Adalind’s baby?

With Adalind pregnant with Nick’s baby, she’s all but abandoned her missing child for trying to find a sugar daddy. Thankfully, the royal family put the kibosh on that but Renard already doesn’t want to find their child and now it looks as though Adalind doesn’t either. That leaves the royal family as the only ones giving a squat about the Adalind and Renard kid. Of course, we got more of Renard’s near-death experience this week but this story never worked for me. Juliette’s hexenbiest side effect happened close to enacting the spell but Renard’s spell side effects took half a season. Sure, this is a fantasy but fantasies aren’t devoid of logic: they have their own internal logic and Grimm abandoned it with this story line.

Finally, we come to this week’s Wesen. She’s a tragic one—and that’s always preferable to the mean-spirited Wesen—but Grimm took on battered women again. That’s not a bad thing but the show has done this story once, or twice, every season, so it had to bring something interesting to the conversation and it didn’t. The resolution was too on the nose and the woman finds love after losing her Wesen-ness, which in turn, made her look like she had a face tattoo and the only person who could love her in return was a man with a face tattoo. Again, this was a little too on the nose. While Grimm shouldn’t retire the battered woman story, they should find a new angle for it. And I must say that I loved Grimm’s story arcs against bigotry this year. I can’t help but see moments where they could reintroduce Monroe and Rosalee’s turbulent lives into a story, because the Wesen of the week lends itself to drawing parallels to these two, and this week was no exception. My only hope is that Grimm doesn’t tease us with this all year with no follow through. It doesn’t have to be right away. I can wait until the season finale.

Verdict:

One of the weaker episodes this season, let’s hope Grimm finds a way to make their ongoing arcs relevant and reintroduce one that worked well earlier this year.