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Grimm: Bad Teeth

Grimm is back! The action picks up right where we left off last spring - well, actually 10 days before that. I'm not sure why the intro had to back up and show all the 10 days, yesterday, one hour ago stuff? I think we could have figured it out, though I guess it shows that the cargo container, with its vicious surprise, traveled to Portland from far away. This new kind of Wesen, Mauvais Dentes, is pretty gruesome, truly embracing its saber-tooth-tiger-like side. It's worth noting that this is one of the few kinds of Wesen on the show that don't have a German-based name.

And then we're back to last season's big end fight between Nick, Kimura, and the woman in black - who we now know is Nick's not-dead mom, Kelly Burkhardt.

Kelly didn't kill Kimura like I assumed she did all summer, just drugged him. He didn't last long beyond that, though. But who killed him right under the nose of the police? Captain Renard seemed content with letting justice take its course. Kelly wanted him alive to get answers. The manner of death looks an awful lot like the reaction to the bee venom in season one - what have the Mellifer been up to since we saw them last? Though in this case, the delivery system for the toxin is different.

David Giuntoli as Nick does a superb job of conveying his emotions in this episode - from the initial shock of finding out his mother's alive, to the pain and anger at realizing both she and his Aunt Marie let him mourn her for 18 years.

Grimm did a great job of casting Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in the role of Kelly Burkhardt. She looks a lot like Aunt Marie and somewhat like Nick. Her warrior-woman stance and abrupt appearances show her decades of training, but also make her seem creepy. What would leaving your child for 18 years do to a person? Especially right after tragically losing a spouse and a good friend?

After a year of getting used to Monroe partnering with a Grimm, it's  a bit of a shock to remember that other Grimms don't really see that as a good thing. I loved how hilarious the scene was where Monroe and Rosalee met Kelly, and of course Monroe gets the best lines:

Monroe: Isn't she supposed to be like not so alive?

Monroe: Family reunions can be brutal. Our last one, we lost two cousins and a sheepdog. Nobody missed the cousins.

I know Nick's mom is probably on the good side, but I'm not quite ready to hand the coins over to her. She seems sort of an ends-justifies-the-means person, and that usually means individuals pay the cost. Kelly doesn't have much reason to care about Monroe, Rosalee, Juliette, or Hank, and she let Nick think she was dead for almost two decades, so she's willing to let him suffer if she thinks it's for the best. I finally felt a little sympathy for Kelly during the breakfast scene. Come on, couldn't Nick see that she was trying and take some part of the meal to go?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot Hank's still dealing with having seen two Wesen in their true form. He seems to hold it together pretty well during the day, though.

Feds taking over an investigation is a crime show staple, but it gets a cool twist with this show since they are so out of their depth with the Wesen world. Their part of the story is kind of boring, but it's an effective way to show how dangerous the Mauvais Dentes is without killing off any of the main cast.

The coins have to be taken where they were forged to be destroyed? Oh, how Lord of the Rings of you, Grimm.

James Frain really does a good job at playing so over-the-top-evil they're hilarious villains (The Cape, True Blood). I'm glad he's joined the show for at least part of this season. I want to root for Sasha Roiz's Captain Renard to be the dangerous guy with an honorable streak, but that means we need a real villain in the mix as well. Though Adalind's mom seems pretty evil as well:

Nick: She says she doesn't know where Adalind is.
Kelly: Did you threaten to kill her?
Nick: Yeah, of course.
Kelly: Want me to take a crack at her?

I just love the Grimm-style mother/son bonding of that scene. As well as how impressed Kelly is that Nick was behind the delivery of the three Reaper heads.

This episode ends on a cliffhanger just as the Mauvais Dentes, having lured Nick in with the two FBI agents, leaps to attack. A promising start for the new season.

Katie Hart

5 comments:

  1. SO happy Grimm is back! Excited for future instalments and hopefully finding out more about those royal families...

    Interesting that they went for a French name instead of German, perhaps because it was (supposedly) Renard's brother who sent him so they're all French? Thing is, it should be MauvaisES Dents (dent = tooth is feminine in French!), the DentES makes me think more of Latin, but my Latin is too rusty to evaluate it...

    Just how much will Juliette have forgotten when she wakes up? (no ifs there, too soon to lose a major character) I presume she will have forgotten Nick since he kind of disappeared in her dream... now that was a creepy sequence!

    And yeah, loved Nick's mom's reaction to Monroe and Rosalee! :D

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  2. Welcome to the site, Katie! I just started watching Grimm (when the season one DVD was released just recently) so I can't quite read this review yet, but I definitely will soon -- I'm DVR'ing season two.

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  3. I too am thrilled that Grimm is back(though if it's starting this early, are we going to get a longer season, or a big gap in the middle?). Nick's mom was cast brilliantly, and getting a significant name gives me hope that we'll see a fair bit of her in the future.

    I'm a little concerned about how the Juliet plot will resolve(I've seen the 2nd ep by this point, but will try not to spoil anything). As soon as Rosalee mentioned that whatever Adeline used causes memory loss, I groaned. I hate hate HATE when shows do a big reveal/confession like that and then pull a "never mind" twist shortly thereafter. If Juliet's gonna have memory problems, it needs to be a bigger deal than just forgetting what Nick told her about Grimms and Wesen.

    The meeting between Monroe, Rosalee & Nick's mom was just as awesome as I expected it would be. Silas Weir Mitchell is really the MVP of the show. He does for Grimm what Bruce Campbell does for Burn Notice. He can take the simplest line and make it 10 times funnier than it would be on paper(e.g. "I got it, I got it. Be cool. Wear pants.").

    Having Nick's mom appear was a good excuse to give Nick(and thus, the audience) an info dump about what's going on in the greater Wesen world. I guess we've got our MacGuffin for now in this set of keys that supposedly points the way to something super-important. Whatever it is, I hope the writing team already has some ideas for it. It's ok if they left some room to add details and subplots that may come to them, but if you're going to do a big arc like this, you gotta know where you're going and at least roughly how you're gonna get there, or the story is at risk of collapsing under its own weight. Yes, I'm looking at YOU, Lost.

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  4. I caught up on DVD! And how Alias of them to bring in a Mom that can out-grimm Nick.

    I didn't like this one as much as the season ender, which I really enjoyed, but it looks like there is plenty of cool set up for season two. I'm definitely on board and so glad you joined us, Katie. If you hadn't, I might not have tried Grimm again. :)

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  5. I've been watching season one off and on for a while, but it never really excited me all that much -- until the story lines of Hank/Adalind and Monroe/Rosalee kicked off. All of a sudden, I was hooked and found that I just had to know what was coming next. I thought the final third of last season was simply wonderful.

    This was a great start to the new season. Like Billie, I had a massive Alias flashback when Nick said "Mom" at the end of last season, but I am looking forward to this twist and how he will explain it to the humans in his life.

    You are so right about Monroe getting all the great lines in this episode. I have found that he gets most of them in any episode. One of my favorite characters in a long, long time and it was he that kept me watching through the first two thirds of last season.

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