Grimm: Season 2 Premiere

NBC made a smart move premiering Grimm’s second season right after the Olympics ended, in a temporary Monday timeslot and weeks ahead of most other fall premieres. Looks like the ad campaign capitalizing on all those Olympics eyeballs paid off: Grimm’s season two premiere garnered the dark fairy tale show’s second highest ratings since the series premiere.

The episode “Bad Teeth” kicked off with an unnecessary rehash of the final moments from the season one closer. Nick (David Giuntoli) was ferociously fighting Wesen coin hunter Kimura (Brian Tee) in his own home, only to be confronted with and then joined by a mysterious woman in black: the long-presumed-dead Mama Grimm (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). I can only imagine producers chose to include this clip to help draw in new viewers. Although watching Nick kick ass and take names is plenty of fun, the clip was tiresome for seasoned fans who just wanted to find out where the show would take us next.

So Mom’s not dead after all; she’s been traveling the world for the past eighteen years, searching for the people who killed her husband (along with her best friend in her stead). Turns out Aunt Marie (Kate Burton) had known that her Grimmy sister was alive the whole time, and Nick’s not super happy to learn of dearly departed Marie’s deception. Despite the shock of finding out that his mother is a very much alive Grimm, Nick takes the situation in stride. While he’s off investigating murders, Mom is at home making sorry-I-pretended-to-be-dead pancakes, making burnt toast (I guess hunting for murderers doesn’t allow for much time in the kitchen), and cleaning Nick’s house.  Nick seems to trust his mother pretty quickly; I’m not sure if I as a viewer trust her. Grimms are supposed to be fighting the bad guys, but who knows—she could have gone rogue over all those years of trying to exact revenge. Time will tell.

Let’s not forget that Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) is still in her coma. Rosalee (Bree Turner) has determined that Hexenbiest-enchanted evil kitty poisoned Juliette with something called l’esprit ailleurs, which literally translates as “the spirit elsewhere” in French. In addition to sporting some Supernatural-style black demon eyeballs*, Juliette’s memory will degrade to the point of dementia unless Rosalee and Pilates Wolf Monroe (the hilariously dry Silas Weir Mitchell) can concoct the antidote and get it into her system ASAP. When Rosalee started talking about “memory loss” and “dementia,” all I could think was, “Writers, please don’t pull the old soap opera amnesia cop-out just after Nick admitted his Grimm heritage to Juliette!”

This episode took a turn from the show’s typical procedural format (what David Giuntoli referred to as Law & Order: Special Fairy Tales Unit on a recent Today Show appearance), spending more time on the Nick-Mama Grimm storyline. Captain Renard (Sasha Roiz) was his usual mysterious self, dropping miniscule bits of info about his character like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs in the forest. It’s fun trying to figure out what seemingly wicked things he’s up to and how exactly he’s tied to the Grimms. Nick’s partner Hank (Russell Hornsby) is still hanging out in his easy chair with a shotgun, popping pills, after his first encounter with a Wesen at the end of last season. How his normally lighthearted demeanor will be affected will be interesting to watch, and I imagine it’ll offer Hornsby a much meatier acting challenge. Pilates Wolf, as usual, had the best line of the night when talking about the brutality of family reunions: “Our last one, we lost two cousins. And a sheepdog. I mean, nobody missed the cousins, but…” I’d like to see Pilates Wolf and Sergeant Wu (Reggie Lee) in a one-liner faceoff—I bet the writers would have a blast with those two together in a room.

The family reunion allowed for some important mythology-building that we don’t always get in the procedural episodes, with Nick’s mom revealing details about the key that Aunt Marie gave him before she died. Turns out the Grimms were actually a sort of Wesen police way back during the Crusades, keeping the monsters in line on behalf of the Royal Families. Nick’s key is part of a group of keys that create a map when put together—a map to a massive treasure hidden by the ancient Grimms. And someone has sent a really nasty killing machine-type monster called a Mauvais Dentes (the “bad teeth” from the episode title) to kill Nick and take his key.

Overall this was a solid episode, less amusing than others but heavier on plot development. The Mauvais Dentes was a pretty awesome creature and due to The Wire season two-style “girls in the can” crime scene in this episode, we got a good dose of blood and guts—always appreciated by us horror and gore fans. While “to be continued” moments can be cringe-inducing, I think the one that came at the end of this episode was pretty well executed and I’m already looking forward to seeing how Nick gets out of this next Wesen attack.  

*TV execs: Pretty please can you make a Grimm–Supernatural crossover happen? Nick plus Sam and Dean fighting monsters…I think it’d be a huge hit. Just saying.