Tag: liza answers

What do you mean by not liiking the tone of this season?

Well, I can’t tell you for certain what the anon meant when they asked that question, but I can give you a short list of the things about this season I haven’t liked at all, which have worked together to contribute to the problem:

  • the forced development of a romance that makes no sense between Nick and Adalind.
  • the “hexenbiests and zauberbiests can’t help being bad” thing that is the only explanation they’ve given so far for why Team Grimm (and the audience) should forgive Adalind or why Sean is acting so OOC.
  • Sean being completely out of character, while we’re at it, and the show giving no decent explanation for the sudden change.
  • years of character development for Sean and relationship development between him and the rest of Team Grimm thrown out the window.
  • everyone blaming Juliette for what happened to her while never taking responsibility for their part in it (except Rosalee, god bless Rosalee).
  • Adalind getting tons of understanding, support, and the benefit of the doubt from Team Grimm while having done nothing to earn any of it (and in fact having a history that suggests she shouldn’t be given any of those things).
  • Adalind’s entire character and her arc being scrapped with a retcon that waters her down and robs her of nearly all agency (not to mention makes no sense in the context of the rest of the show).
  • the show abandoning several important themes that have always been at the heart of it (the power of choice over nature, for example).
  • Bud Wurstner being nowhere to be found.
  • the lack of trust between the members of Team Grimm (because I absolutely consider Sean a member of Team Grimm); the split and messed up and uncertain loyalties between people who were toasting to their friendship after risking everything to save one of their own barely more than a year ago.
  • the general “sea change without satisfactory explanation” that has been enacted on so many characters, relationships, and world dynamics.
  • the show’s continued inability/unwillingness to acknowledge that men can be victims of rape.

Just to name a few. I’m still hoping the Grimm Writers will pull through in the eleventh hour, but even if they do, some of this will seem just completely unnecessary.

And the really sad thing is, I think they’re doing most of this to try and make the show seem darker. Yet overall, the show is not really any darker than it’s ever been. Just murkier. Nothing makes sense, and not necessarily in a way that feels intentional.

I have a feeling someoneis going to “die” and the grimmstick thing will bring them back. Maybe it’ll be Eve and she’ll be brought back as Juliette? I don’t know but 2 hours of crazy and we litterally don’t know the half of it

I KNOW, RIGHT?!

I mean I honestly never know what’s going to happen but usually I can guess one or two things. This season I literally have no idea what’s going to go down or how, and that whole “so shocking we can’t show you anything from the second half” bit is like…WTF IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Especially since that second bit will be after 10pm, which is when networks expect that the kiddies will be in bed, so they can bring out things like Hannibal.

Which is really worrying because have you seen the level of fucked up that is Hannibal?!

What I’m also worried about is how that whole perilous side of things is going to work. I mean, we haven’t seen any adverse effects on Monroe from being healed, but in most shows/mythologies bringing someone back from the dead is difficult, forbidden, and/or never comes without serious consequences.

Although now I think I would love to see Nick choose to take that risk and use the stick to bring Eve back. 

I love that Grimm keep emphasising the amount of power that Black Claw clearly has. Like, you really don’t know what their limits are and that makes them quite terrifying as they can obviously get to anyone and everyone.

What’s also terrifying is that they seemingly came out of nowhere this season, which suggests they’ve been amassing this kind of power for a while now, completely hidden, and are only showing their faces because they finally believe they are unstoppable.

I mean, they seem to be both global and grassroots. They’re tied up in terrorist organizations, local politics, the foster system…they’re in everything. And it explains why Agent Chavez was so ready to get Trubel on their side last season, too! Perhaps she knew Black Claw would be actively recruiting Grimms as well?

What I never expected was for the way Nick has fought with and helped Wesen to be bent that way, into some indication that he would be willing to side with Wesen against humans if it came down to it.

All the Grimm blogs are scaring me tonight, I haven’t seen it yet (48minutes….) Renard is my favourite character and it sounds like I’m going to scream at my television…

Please accept this virtual hug and huge spoilers under the cut:

Sean isn’t dead or anything but it’s seriously looking like it might go that way. He’s sided completely with Black Claw and seems to actually buy into their idea of a world run by Wesen, and he tried to recruit Nick to their cause and convince him that together they could create a better world (it was all very Luke and Darth Vader at the end of Empire, really).

So now Nick wants Sean dead, pretty much every member of Team Grimm is on board, and the only thing keeping Sean alive right now is the fact that he and Black Claw have Kelly.

Everyone is saying that Nick is angry about Adalind but I saw it that he was angry about losing his son and that is why he reacted the way he has. What do you think?

I think he was angry and hurt about both, but that his focus is on getting his son back right now, because Kelly is the most vulnerable party here (at least until he shows some sign of powers of his own).

I also think that while Nick grew to have an attachment to Adalind, he wasn’t in love with her and he isn’t going to feel that loss as hard as he’s feeling the loss of his son right now. He doesn’t blame her, he knows she truly felt she had no choice…but that isn’t going to stop him from doing whatever he has to do to get his son back, either, even if that puts her at risk.

After this ep, I have a feeling Diana is going to kill both her parents’ love interests. But before she can hurt Nick, Adalind intervenes and ends up dying instead. That way she can die a good person, and Nick Juliette and Kelly can be a happy family.

I’m….not sure that’s how that will work, Anon. For one thing, Nick and Juliette still have a lot they need to sort through, and I think it’s pretty clear after this episode that some part of Eve/Juliette feels betrayed by Nick and the team’s continued compassion, support, and understanding for Adalind when they couldn’t offer any of those things to her when she desperately needed them.

For another, I feel like having Adalind die to save Nick would be just as cheap a cop-out way to redeem her character as all this romance and domestic mess they’ve tried to do all year.

Granted, that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. *sigh*

If Adalind can be forgiven & redeemed, Juliette deserves the same. She can come back from this “Eve” thing. Maybe she can’t be completely Juliette again – she’s been traumatized and Eve will always be a part of her. But I think that Juliette can come back, if more broken & layered & I’d like to see that. It’d be a nice character arc. I’d also like to see her & Nick gradually build trust again and… yes, slowly find the love they lost. Maybe that’s silly of me but its what I want. Your thoughts?

Well, first let me say that I don’t buy that Adalind has been forgiven and redeemed, not completely and even if in the eyes of the characters, certainly not in the eyes of the fandom. There are many who still have a huge problem with Adalind, don’t trust her, don’t believe she’s done anything real to make up for everything she did before, and don’t want to see her with Nick.

That being said, I absolutely believe Juliette can be redeemed, if only because the writers, directors, and Bitsie have done a much better job in her case of showing the conflict and lack of control during her downward spiral as well as the complete disconnect and lack of personal identity within Eve. Every step of the way we have been reminded of these things.

Plus, it was pretty obvious to anyone who didn’t absolutely hate Juliette and want her dead already that the back half of season four was completely beyond her control. That’s how it was acted. That’s how it was written.

That’s why it was so tragic: she was spiraling down into this abyss of uncontrollable rage and pain and reacting without being able to control it, then suddenly coming to the surface and seeing what she’d done and being horrified by it. And she could see it and feel herself being lost, and we as the audience could, but none of the other characters seemed to understand it or care that much unless she was causing them a direct problem, and then they only cared about stopping her, not truly helping her.

So based on the job they did writing that arc, and based on the person Juliette was before all of this, I think redemption is definitely possible for her and something I am also absolutely hoping for, even though I too think Eve will always be a part of who she is (just as the things she did in season four will, no matter how in or out of control she was, always haunt her). You’re right that it would likely make for a much more layered, nuanced character and it would be amazing to watch.

I’m not sure I would want to see anything romantic between her and Nick, at least not for a long time (and we’re no longer as certain as we once were that we have many more seasons to look forward to, unfortunately), but I do think there’s potential there for something, especially since all of the interactions in which Eve seems most like Juliette center around Nick and protecting him.

Now here’s where I have an issue with Adalind’s arc, and forgive me for using your ask to jump on a soap box, but this thing the writers have done with her character really bugs me.

Adalind’s supposed 180 this season is a much more difficult redemption arc for me to swallow than any possible redemption for Juliette. They’ve used a massive retcon (more on that in a moment) and tried a lot of the “pat the dog” technique this season to try and rehabilitate her character (more on that term and what it means here), but to me that’s just…not nearly enough.

It’s all well and good to start saying now that all hexenbiests and zauberbiests (not just the one completely unique case of an ordinary human turned into one overnight by experimental magic’s side effects) are out of control and destructive, but the fact is we have direct evidence to the contrary spanning the entire show.

The retcon is so obvious it’s almost laughable. It’s kind of difficult to bring that explanation in at the eleventh hour, just when they want us to like and forgive this character for all she’s done, and make it believable. Not to mention it robs Adalind of all her agency, calls her entire character and arc into question, and takes away any chance of real redemption for her in the future.

It’s especially difficult to buy when the way Adalind’s arc was written showed her, up until the very end of season four, not only reveling in the chaos she caused with no remorse or conflicted feelings whatsoever, but gloating about the pain she inflicted on others repeatedly.

In fact, mere episodes before she was suddenly all contrite and wanting to help save Juliette and give up her own powers for her child’s sake, she was attacking Juliette in her home, bragging to Juliette about how much fun she had raping Nick, and using the pregnancy that resulted from that rape to coerce and manipulate Nick into helping her.

It was so disingenuous a switch that even fans who adored Adalind didn’t fully buy it. Many of them were sure she was running some kind of long game of her own, for god knows what purpose.

Not only that, but a lot of the messed up things Adalind did, as has been pointed out again and again by so many people in this fandom, she did while she had no powers at all to blame her actions on.

So it’s just…harder to make that explanation stick when you apply it to all hexenbiests and zauberbiests, especially when that runs directly counter to literally every core theme of the show, than if they had just confined it to Juliette’s ultra-unique circumstances. And I think the net result has been a fundamental fucking up of both characters’ arcs that I’m not sure how the writers plan to fix.

So TL;DR: While I definitely think Juliette is redeemable and moreover deserves that redemptive arc, I also think the writers screwed up royally with trying to use the same mechanism that made Juliette’s downward spiral forgivable to also retcon Adalind’s entire character arc, because it just doesn’t make any sense with everything else we already know from previous seasons.