Kyle’s Thoughts

“Into the Schwarzwald” started off with a nice puzzle Nick and Monroe had to solve, and that paired well with the intrigue caused by the murder of Portland’s leading mayoral candidate, the Portland PD and Hadrian’s Wall (the government issue wesen). But then the episode fed us a lot of plot devices.

You could refer to these plot devices as hands of god. In fact, one of the devices could literally be the hand of god. We’re entering spoiler territory, so if you haven’t seen “Into the Schwarzwald” and don’t want to know any more details, avert your eyes. The plot device in question is the one Nick and Monroe found in the box they had retrieved from Schwarzwald. It was a stick. Everyone was upset at their discovery and lost hope. Conveniently, Monroe had been bitten by one of the wesen chasing he and Nick in Schwarzwald and his wound had gotten infected by the time Team Grimm opened the box. They used the stick as one part of a tourniquet and the stick magically healed him. Like I said, convenient.

The second plot device shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler. Grimm has set up Adalind regaining her hexenbeist powers for weeks and they pulled the trigger this week. But they did so in an obvious manner. A bully from Rosalee’s past, who I vaguely remembered, hounded Rosalee for assistance. When she didn’t comply, the bully attacked Adalind, and that’s when her powers jumpstarted.

My issue with both plot devices is that they were choreographed. I knew what would happen a good two or three minutes before it happened, so the suspense Grimm wanted to build never grew higher than a whimper.

The Renard story line worked a little better than I thought I would this week. I haven’t cared about Renard’s arc because his existence reminds me that we aren’t getting a story about the royals. Sure, most of them have died, but there’s still intrigue in Europe and Grimm isn’t giving up the goods.

I never bought into Renard becoming Mayor and could see his ascension to that position from the start. Again, “Into the Schwarzwald” pulled the trigger on this plot thread and tied Renard to the Black Claw. This was a nice development but Renard putting together the pieces fell flat. He discovered that the mayoral candidate’s publicist was looking in the direction of his shooter before shots were fired. I saw her do that last week and figured that would tie into a conspiracy, and that’s what we got, a conspiracy. But I’m not that upset about the deliberate nature of Renard’s story. Sure, I saw it coming, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.

Grimm continues to feel around for its story this season, and while there have been some great individual episodes, the overarching stories have been clunky. Thankfully, the characters are still ones fans can and should care about, but Grimm needs stories that match its dynamic characters.