“I wasn’t really a believer in love at first sight until I met you. Although, to be honest, it wasn’t really love at first sight as much as love at first brick… because if you hadn’t hit that guy when you did, I don’t think I would be standing here today.”
Monrosalee – 1×15 and 3×22
I agree that everything felt a little rushed, and we know from previous interviews with the writers that they definitely had a lot more story and worldbuilding than they could fit into 13 episodes.
It’s not my least favorite season, as that dubious honor goes to season 5. But I do think it suffered from some pacing issues due to the shortened length, and I also think the big endgame was a bit of a letdown after five seasons of gradual build-up.
But given where they were at the end of season five, and given what time they had to work with, I still think it was a strong season overall, and it was full of moments I enjoyed. It will never be one of my favorite or most memorable series endings, and it certainly wasn’t how I imagined it ending…but it fit the tone of the show, in a weird way.
I’ve been thinking of rewatching it myself!
With October coming up in less than 2 months, my brain keeps thinking “almost time for more Grimm!”
…and then I remember.
And then I do this:
- Actual Disney Prince Nick Burkhardt, who buys an engagement ring with a smile on his face because he’s in love and believes in happily ever after and is only getting married once because his love story is forever.
- Profiler Nick, pre-Grimm abilities, who could look at a person for five seconds and tell you all sorts of cool shit about them.
- “I didn’t know you couldn’t sing.”
- Marie Kessler is Vice President Sally Langston.
- DEAD FROG IN THE MICROWAVE, NICK? REALLY?
- The introduction of the key, the Reapers, and the trailer.
- And Captain Sean Renard, who we briefly thought was just the Captain.
- “When they lose control, they can’t hide.”
- Thinking Monroe might be a kidnapper and murderer, and then he invites Nick in for a beer and basically tells him everything he needs to know.
- Monroe correcting Nick’s grammar in German.
- Also being a teeny bit star struck over seeing his very first Grimm and living to tell about it.
- All the heavy insinuations that Monroe used to be all about some hunting and killing people.
- Wolfsbane.
- “I already cried wolf once, you think they’re gonna believe me?” Oh Nick. You’re hilarious.
- Hank was the one to make the connection when he hear the man humming “Sweet Dreams.”
- GOD. That scene with Adalind in the hospital! Still one of my top five uses of music in a TV show ever.
Would you mind me suggesting some additions (‘cause I freaking love Pilot!):
- Nick’s first shooting.
- Marie told Nick his parents were killed, the car crash wasn’t an accident.
- Nick had made his first drawing (the Reaper in full woge) before he saw all the journals in trailer. Grimmstinct! (Theresa did the drawings too.)
- Aunt Marie worked as a librarian. Right. Of course. A librarian.
- Despite Nick is a newbie, he seems to have no fear of Wesen. He furiously attacked a Blutbad in woge (Monroe) without a second thought. Grimmstinct?
- Monroe’s marking his territory :). That’s what leads Nick to conclude there’s another Blutbad.
- Nick’s asking Monroe if there’s a way to stop becoming a Grimm. (Yes, there is, Nick, you will learn 😦 ).
- Nick’s threatening Monroe: “Listen, pal, I’m not a Blutbad, I’m a cop!”. (*dies of cuteness).
- “Do I need something like silver bullets?”
Yes! All of this! Plus Monroe’s unamused reaction to Nick’s silver bullets question! xD
Grimm has had some interesting episode titles over the years. These names range from the painfully punny to the highly intriguing, but don’t always mean what we think they’re going to mean in either case. Below are some of the episode titles that turned our anticipation (or in some cases dread) up to 11…only to turn out not to be about what we expected at all.
Season 1, Episode 12: Last Grimm Standing
This sounded as though Nick would be going head-to-head against another Grimm in some kind of badass, epic showdown. But no. That didn’t come until later. (And don’t even get me started on the fact that every time we do see Nick fighting a Grimm, it’s a member of his own family. Ouch, Grimm Writers. Ouch.)
Season 2, Episode 2: The Kiss
Ooooo is Nick going to kiss Juliette and wake her up from her enspelled sleep because he’s her Prince Charming??? :3 No. Instead, the kiss that breaks the spell comes from…Renard?!
Season 2, Episode 3: Bad Moon Rising
Werewolves, of course! Right? Wrong. Instead, we got kidnapping and attempted rape/forced marriage. Grimm writers, why?! Even all the extra Hank in this ep and Mark Pellegrino as a guest star couldn’t make up for that nasty plot.
Season 2, Episode 12: Season of the Hexenbiest
A lot of us were giddy for this ep, thinking it would finally reveal Adalind as the True Big Bad of the series and we would get to see her do more than take orders or react to situations. Instead, Adalind got herself arrested “for protection” and the big midseason finale cliffhanger was that Renard had found the trailer.
Season 3, Episode 12: The Wild Hunt
With a title like that, this episode was obviously going to be about the actual Wild Hunt, right? An order of supernatural hunstmen, the Wesen world equivalent of ghosts or faeries. Sadly, that was not the case. Still…this episode was a big Monrosalee developer, which took most of the sting out of the disappointment.
Season 3, Episode 21: The Inheritance
Given that we were at the end of the third season and all, we thought for sure we were finally going to get more information about how Grimm powers were passed on and activated. And…we kinda did, just not quite the way we wanted to. This episode gave us an aging Grimm named Rolek and his skeptical son, Josh, i.e. the unofficial Fandom Puppy and possibly the character with the most fandom-bestowed epithets (Muggle Josh, Josh the Squib, Rubbish Josh, etc.). While it did spawn some great meta on how Grimm inheritance might work, it ultimately gave us few solid answers.
Season 4, Episode 18: Mishipeshu
This one doesn’t really belong here, because it wasn’t so much the title itself as it was the title in conjunction with the promo that had us waiting for Friday night with baited breath. Those glowing eyes on Hank had us all sure that the show was finally going to Kripke a long-standing fan theory (based mostly on his last name and the Grimm Writers’ complete inability to not make heinous puns) that Hank was in fact Wesen, though perhaps unaware of it. But it turned out Hank was merely temporarily possessed by a spirit, which was frankly annoying because most of the fandom agrees: Hank gets enspelled, possessed, controlled, and violated way too often.
Season 4, Episode 22: Cry Havoc
We thought for sure this was going to be the start of some big, epic war between the Royals, the Verrat, the Wesen Council, etc. All the pieces seemed to be moving into place. Instead, the writers gave us a much smaller war, and a heartbreaking conclusion to Juliette’s arc that had even some of those who didn’t like her feeling sad.
Season 5, Episode 1: The Grimm Identity
Okay, we thought. It’s season five. They’ve teased it a few times before. Surely, surely they’re finally going to reveal all the mysteries of how Grimm powers work. Once again, we were sorely disappointed. Instead, we got an off-the-rails Nick, a missing Trubel, and the introduction of a sinister new threat. Not a bad episode overall, but not as exciting as what the title seemed to be hinting at.
Season 5: Episode 5: The Rat King
Roddy. Geiger. That’s all we wanted. A return of the angry young Reinigen from season one who could charm armies of rats to do his bidding with his beautiful violin music. We wanted to see one of the Wesen Nick had helped early on, see if Nick and Monroe had managed to make a positive difference for him…or if ultimately, the harsh divisions in the Wesen world had driven him to use his abilities in nefarious ways just to survive. The real story was much weirder, and kind of gross: a massive rat creature created through the merging of many Reinigen at once, used in times of fear and danger to defend against predators.
Season 6, Episode 3: Oh Captain, My Captain
Let’s be honest here: we all thought Renard was gonna bite it in this episode, possibly with some final heroic act that would redeem him while making his descent into Black Claw all the more tragic in retrospect. Thankfully, they didn’t do that to us. Instead, we got to see two Sasha Roiz pretend to be Nick pretending to be Sean…and it was hilarious.
Season 6, Episode 8: The Son Also Rises
There was a nail-biting few weeks there where we thought “The Son” referred to Kelly, and there was a lot of speculation about what “rises” might mean. Was he going to age up quickly, like Diana? Were we finally going to see his powers in action? Was he going to turn out to be Team Grimm’s greatest ally…or were he and Diana going to be the final Big Bads of the series, in a heartbreaking turn of events for all concerned? As it turned out, the Grimm writers had lulled us into a false sense of security. The episode turned out to be another of their heinous puns.
Season 6, Episode 10: Blood Magic
At this point there was very little of the show left, and we were just dying for them to explain the strange and squicky relationship between Nick and Adalind, and make good on all the hinting around they’d done about a connection between Juliette/Eve and Adalind. Two other episode titles made me think it might finally be time to address that elephant in the room (The Seven-Year Itch, Blind Love), but this one was the most disappointing, both because it seemed to hint at a potential Kripke-ing of certain fan theories, and because with only three episodes left once it was over, it felt like the writers’ last chance to course-correct that horrendous subplot. Sadly, and to many Grimm fans’ indignation, they never did.
So there you have it, Grimmsters! For better or worse, I think the one thing we can say is that the Grimm writers kept us guessing constantly. For six years, we tuned in excitedly on Friday nights, never quite knowing what that next episode would bring. And to be fair, for every episode that was disappointing, there were many more that not only met, but exceeded, our wildest expectations.
What about you? What episodes surprised you (either in a good or bad way)? What episodes were much better than you ever thought they’d be?
We really need to talk more about how Wu is able to control his werewolf transformation just because Hank puts hands on his shoulders and asks him to. Like that needs to be a thing that receives all the shippy meta and fanfic until the end of time. I’m still not over it, that was just fucking beautiful.
GUYS. I JUST REMEMBERED:
Image source: (x)
She’s definitely up there in my top ten. Just the sheer weight of the tragedy of her story alone is enough to put her there, because as much as I hate thinking of it like this, it’s clear that as far as Eve is concerned, Juliette Silverton died during the events of “Cry Havoc” or shortly thereafter, and Eve was resurrected from her ashes. And although the place she’s in at the finale is strong, it isn’t necessarily happy.
What I love most about her, I think, is the way that each “iteration” of Juliette is made stronger through addressing the issues that the previous iteration had.
Juliette Prime, or season one Juliette, was already intelligent, resourceful, and compassionate…but she was also far too trusting and completely naive about what the world she lived in was really like (though to be fair, Nick was working pretty hard to keep her that way).
Amnesia Juliette, or season two Juliette, was much more wary of the motivations and intentions of those around her, and much more pointed and resolute in her questioning of things. At the same time, though, she was off-balance and reactionary for most of the season…again, mostly because the people in her life were working too hard at “protecting” her to actually give her any useful information.
Team Player Juliette, or the Juliette we get in season three and half of season four, is less reactionary, more measured and careful and considering of everything. She’s still intelligent and kind, but she’s less credulous and more apt to question Grimm things beforehand instead of just reacting to them later, because she finally has enough information to do so. At the same time, she’s still extremely selfless to the point of often ignoring her own needs and burying her own emotions in favor of helping her friends with what she sees as their more important problems.
Jujubiest, or “my guilty favorite Juliette,” that we get in the back half of season four is basically a raw, exposed nerve. Every need Juliette ignored in favor of helping her friends, every motion she buried, all just came pouring out in bouts of uncontrollable rage and pain, directed at the very people who she once would have willingly died for. I could write an entire meta on this Juliette alone (and I kind of have) but the point is that she was no longer selfless to a fault. But the hexenbiest magic caused her to lose all control, leading to destruction and despair rather than the acknowledgement and healing she so desperately needed.
Eve, on the other hand, is ALL control. Or all controlled, really, since she doesn’t really seem to have any will of her own. She was so traumatized and horrified by her prior actions that the only way to deal with them was to shut off her emotions all together, to bury them even more deeply than they were before. HW helped her do that, but they also trained her to focus only on their mission and nothing else…which basically meant that she had control over her own emotions, but not her destiny.
And then we finally get to my precious Julieve, who is as kind and compassionate and intelligent and dedicated to her little found family as she has ever been, but who also knows how to set healthy boundaries for herself. She gets space from Nick and chooses not to pursue the connection they still have any further because she knows it would not be good for her. She is able to feel things again without letting it consume her, and she’s able to control her powers without having to shut out all her emotions.
She’s much more balanced, and while she may still be horrified by her past actions she is able to deal with it and move on from it. But she still isn’t ready to fully accept her former identity, professes that she never will be in fact, and to some extent she has given up on the notion of ever being happy, convinced herself that it doesn’t even matter whether she’s happy or not.
So while I love her arc SO MUCH, I also hate that this is where it ended…in a place that’s much more healthy but not remotely happy, in a place that’s resolved but also a little resigned, not fully healed from her past wounds and with very little in the way of hope ahead of her. I hate to think of Juliette or Eve (because really, they’re one and the same) in that situation forever. I mean, everyone else got their happy ending…I feel like Juliette deserved to get one as well.
I’d like to think that if we’d gotten another season, it would have involved more character development for Eve, more healing, more resolution with Nick and the rest of the team…and that eventually, she would have fully found her way back to Juliette Silverton, and been able to look to the future with hope for happiness the way the rest of them could.
YES. YES I DO. I remember this:
AND THIS:
AND THIS:
But do you also remember the way Nick sobbed like a broken child when he thought Juliette was dead, how he had freaky dreams about it and basically had a breakdown and had to leave his house because he couldn’t bear to be surrounded by all the memories of their life together knowing she was gone?
And then all of the significant looks and painful suppressing of their feelings toward each other and literally dropping everything/kicking everyone’s ass ever to protect each other and bringing out a level of emotion in each other that no one else quite can and always responding to the other calling their name like immediately nothing else mattered and going to ridiculous lengths to protect each other and always feeling like protecting each other was as instinctual as breathing and being ready to risk everything including their own lives for each other and guilt and forgiveness and redemption and clutching desperately at each other in some nightmare hell forest ready to face down the devil himself together????
Because I have a LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THAT SHIT.
Continued-where do the spell books come from? Only hexenbeist? Are all hexenbeist witches? Why is hexenblood so powerful? why are they so different from other wesen? Could you have a wesen hybrid?What happened to the Royals/Sean’s future as a King? What happened to Sean? Not to mention monrosalee and their family and silverhardt & the potential of a new start. And a Meisner and Adalind reunion, CAUSE MEISNER IS ALIVE SOMEWHERE. (Prolly in the Black Forest) TBC
Continued-IN FACT WHAT IF WE FREAKING HAD GRIMM AND WESEN TEAMING UP AGAINST THE BLACK FOREST BECAUSE IT WAS THREATENING OUR WORLD AND ALL THE WEIRD, FULL!WESEN WHERE COMING THROUGH AND MAYBE WESEN HERE WERE BEING AFFECTED AND MONROE WAS HAVING TROUBLE SHIFTING, AND JULES TOO, AND THERE WOULD BE A GIANT GRIMM/WESEN TEAM THAT TAKES ON THE BLACK FOREST AND IS STUCK THERE FIGHTING IT COULD BE SO GOOD – Lowkey cause they could ruin it big time… But okay. There’s so much story still. End rant.
There really is a TON of material for a potential sequel show, spin-off, or prequel. I would LOVE to see something about the first Grimm, personally. I want to know if my theory about the first Grimm being a woman is true (Grimm Writers, if you’re listening: THE FIRST GRIMM SHOULD TOTALLY BE A BADASS WOMAN).
Or maybe they could do a Trubel spin-off that starts with Trubel trying to find out more about her family tree (thus giving us the story of how they found out she and Nick were cousins), and she ends up uncovering all of these amazing secrets and all these really arcane knowledge about the history of Grimms, and it’s really Trubel who re-populates that trailer that we see in the flashforward at the end of the show, with all the stuff she learns along the way.
And this is occasionally interspersed with flashback scenes or even whole episodes that are about the First Grimm, who is also played by Trubel because Television Does That Sometimes, and how she got her Grimm powers. Maybe it would show why Grimms, Hexenbiests, and Wesen are considered opposing forces, and how that all came to be. Maybe in the process we’d also get to learn a LOT more about hexenbiests.
And maybe we get a couple of cameos from the rest of the cast. Maybe we even get teenage Diana because she keeps aging quickly, and she goes on some of Trubel’s adventures with her. And maybe Eve returns as a main character, and some great one-off characters from the original series show up eventually…like Holly and Roddy. And we would FINALLY get answers to some of those Big-M mythology questions that the writers never made good on, like what activates a Grimm’s freaking powers?!
Ahem. But yes, I think it’s safe to say I agree with you that there is a TON of material there, there’s SO much they could do, and they should do it immediately because it’s only been a few months and I already miss Grimm SO MUCH.
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