Note: I’m so sorry that I suddenly fell off grid with this. My personal life kind of imploded, but I’m okay 🙂 and back into the swing of things now

So, we’ll be looking at Sebastien this week, because he brings some interesting information.

Wait, Sebastien? Oh yeah. Look at his hand.

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/grimm/images/a/a2/Spy3.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/185?cb=20121104195143&format=webp

That there, is the Royal ring. All the male Royals have it. Nobody else. Not even the female Royals – although we’ve only seen one. The assumption was that Mia was very low in the hierarchy and so didn’t ‘earn’ one. But! Sebastien wears one, and he’s so far down the hierarchy that it’s never really mentioned he is in fact a Royal. And as far as I know, no employee of the Royals wears the ring, so Sebastien must be of Royal Blood.

Gender seems to be the only exclusionary point on the rings – Bastien wears one, Sean wears one, Eric wears one, as do Viktor and Kenneth and Frederick.

So, wandering into meta territority here, who is Sebastien? He wouldn’t necesserily be closely related to Sean to be Sean’s ally, since Sean’s close family want him dead. It’s likely they were educated at some point together, and kept some contact. They don’t seem especially close, in a way that would suggest they’ve spent a lot of time together – they clearly cared about each other, but they weren’t ‘friends’.

Sebastien works for or with Sean, against the Royals. There’s this idea that everyone that works against the Royals is part of the Resistance, which simply isn’t true. Sebastien doesn’t want to work with the Resistance and in fact warns Sean against working with them.

He doesn’t seem comfortable being a spy. Admittedly, we only ever see him in high stress situations and Sebastien doesn’t appear to have been trained or groomed by the Royals in any specific way, but he always looks worried. The only time he doesn’t look worried is when he gives his life up for Meisner and Adalind and Diana. It’s also the only clear-cut altruistic thing he does – it’s never clear why he’s giving information to Sean, or takes Sean’s orders to save Adalind. This is because it’s not clear what Sean’s prerogative is. Sebastien reminds me a lot of Josh – an ordinary guy who walked into Hell and had to survive. That, and his closer-then-it-seemed relationship with Sean makes his death all the sadder.

 And I don’t mean to imply that because Sebastien isn’t a Meisner or a Burkhardt or a Griffin hero type he’s a bad person, because that’s not right at all. He could have had a blessed life, and yet choose to spy, withstood torture and then gave his life for people he barely knew.

He could have had a nice life with the Royals, he didn’t appear to be bullied in any particular way, so it was Sebastien’s choice to work against them. Again, why is something we don’t know. Considering his constant fear, it’s possible that it’s simply because of how brutal a regime the Royals run, rather than personal reasons like the attempted murder of Sean.

We’ll never know for sure.