I don’t think it’s too much to ask. Apparently the writers disagreed.
But at least we’ll always know that Bitsie and David are happy together in reality.
And hey, even if Nick and Juliette didn’t end up together in the end of the show, we do see that Juliette is still a part of Eve, and that Nick and Eve still hold a sincere affection for one another. I think we can safely assume they will always be a part of each other’s lives, no matter what happens.
Okay, so this was extremely challenging because that episode aired like a year and a half ago, and they likely bought the coat the fall before that if not before, soooo we’re looking at an item that was most likely available two years ago.
But Admin D was more than up to the challenge! After some digging, she came up with the following two sources:
Nau Clothing: If you’re looking for the most likely candidate for the company that made Nick’s jacket, look no further than Nau. Nau is a Portland-based clothing company that specializes in high-quality clothing made from sustainable materials. Their selection of men’s jackets for Fall 2017 may not have the exact item Nick wore in the episode, but I’m sure you’ll find the styling familiar. I can easily imagine Nick, Hank, and even Monroe bundled up for cooler weather in some of their recent items.
Old Navy: If what you want is a more affordable option for cosplaying Nick Burkhardt, Old Navy’s sweater-fleece shirt jacket for men is available in light gray or hunter green for $55. The pockets and the color aren’t quite the same as the one he wore in the episode, but the collar is just as pop-able, and the overall design of the jacket still fits that “Portland Grimm” aesthetic quite nicely.
You’re definitely not the only person who ships Adalind and Meisner! Check out our Madalind tag for all the shippy goodness! You can also check our our Grimm Aesthetic posts for Adalind and Meisner.
True story: Admin Liz and I made these completely separately without discussing it with each other, and she included Meisner in Adalind’s, while I included Adalind in Meisner’s! Sigh. I really wish we had gotten to see more of those two together in the show. They really had something.
As for Meisner and Trubel…that one I don’t know about. I mean, I’m sure someone out there ships it, it’s like a fandom rule, but I don’t think we have a tag for it here. I personally never thought of shipping them just because he’s SO much older than her and was like…her commander in H.W.’s army or whatever. Similar reasons to why I never shipped Trubel with Nick…just too many power imbalances there for me to get past.
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.
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.
I feel you, anon. It’s been months and I still feel you so hard.
A little yes, and a little no, anon. Let me see if I can explain.
There were definitely arcs where I felt Nick behaved very out of character. And in the Juliette/Hexenbiest arc at the end of season four, I felt that everyone behaved out of character without any good explanation (except for Juliette, who had all the reason in the world). It was almost like they made the entire team thoughtless and incompetent just so they could force Juliette’s arc, when there were definitely better ways to make that happen.
Granted, some of Nick’s writing during this time was par for the course–emotional avoidance, disregarding Juliette’s feelings, making things about him that so very were not–but the beauty of the show was that the characters’ flaws often balanced each other out. Nick’s tendency toward emotional avoidance and self-centeredness was balanced out by Juliette’s insistence on facing things head on and Hank’s tendency to point out the problems in his actions. Monroe’s pigheadedness was balanced by Rosalee’s level-headedness. The entire team’s collective gooeyness was balanced by Renard’s ruthless pragmatism…and occasionally Rosalee’s, depending on the subject. They all had skills and strengths that worked well with the rest of the team, and they were (mostly) good at communicating when it mattered.
But in that arc, suddenly, no one was balancing anyone out. No one was reacting to anything the way they usually would. Everyone was being ridiculously obtuse and not talking about shit and it was infuriating to watch. They basically all fell back to letting Nick do whatever he wanted–similar to how they acted in season 2, actually–and the end result was Juliette dead and Diana in the wind.
But overall, I thought Nick’s writing was fine in seasons 5 and 6, with the exception of one particular subplot (you know the one) in which the writing, acting, everything felt forced and stilted and just wrong. So wrong that up until the final episode I was sure it had to be some kind of spell causing him to act completely out of character. It wasn’t just that he was displaying traits that seemed unusual for him, it was that he was portraying certain emotions in a way that Nick Burkhardt definitely did not express himself, with no plausible explanation given as to why.
So. Yeah…I kinda feel you. But there were also moments that Nick felt every bit the Grimm we all know and love. Notably, his solo interactions with Hank, Monroe, and Juliette/Eve were super in-character and smacked of season one so hard that I had to swallow a nostalgic lump in my throat at times. And although sometimes his actions as a Grimm made me sad, they were also part of a clear progression that had been building for a few years, so I understood them as (not necessarily positive) character development, rather than OOC writing.
I feel the same. I mean…Diana adored Sean. And in spite of everything, he ended the series in a pretty good place with all of Team Grimm. So while I guess it’s possible that as she grew up, he might have messed things up OR she might have grown close enough to Nick to start calling him dad as well, it just makes more sense to me personally that she would have continued calling Nick by his name and Sean as “dad” or “daddy.”
Come to think of it…maybe that’s it. Maybe she does call Sean “daddy” and Nick “dad.” That could make a lot of sense. And she might call Monroe and Rosalee Aunt Rosalee and Uncle Monroe, even though they’re not technically related. Likewise Uncle Hank, Uncle Drew, and Auntie Eve.
Yeah…I think the fandom is basically split down the middle in this regard. Either they loved the last two seasons or hated them.
For me personally, I feel like the show was still good up to about 2/3 of the way through season 4. And to be fair, it was still good after that, too, in some respects. It still had some great moments with all of the characters I loved, good dialogue, fantastic acting. Several episodes in season 6 were at least as good as season 1, and the whole season had the same feeling the show had in season 1 as well.
But it also had its bad points, things the writers wanted to happen but didn’t put in the time to make work within the story and characters they’d already built. And the big payoff to the whole mytharc that started in the very first episode feels rushed, cobbled together, and a little underwhelming, in retrospect. Then again, I’m not sure there’s anything they could have given us after 5 seasons of buildup that would have felt completely satisfying.
So I feel you, I really do. As much as I love some parts of the show, I’m only able to accept others because of all the headcanon room the writers left us in the final episode. Which at least says something about the writers themselves…that they knew their audience well enough to know that they would never be able to please everybody, and cared enough to give as many of us as possible something to walk away happy with at the end.
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