Quick Take: Grimm, "Bad Teeth"
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned..." – WB Yeats, The Second Coming
Review: Grimm, "Bad Teeth"
(S0201) NBC and their audience have a love-hate relationship – we love to hate NBC, and they hate showing their love for us (or at least our money). Fans all but pour their hard-earned money and, sometimes, their more valuable time, into saving their favourite shows. And yet, NBC responds with the historically-proven, blutbad of bungles: they pull a show from its regular time-slot, and seemingly pick names out of a hat to decide when and where it will air.
Take Grimm for example – after a very consistent freshman season that aired during Friday's freight of fright (Grimm, Fringe, Supernatural), NBC decides to bring it back less than three months later, entirely eschewing the traditional Fall programming schedule, while giving it a painfully longer title card. (Unless you're on HBO, your title screen shouldn't be so long that I want to open up Reddit while I wait for something exciting to happen).
The Season Two premiere picks up on last season's cliffhanger: Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) is still in a coma from a magical cat scratch, Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell) and Rosalee (Bree Turner) are working to find the cure, Hank is becoming more and more paranoid after having caught his first and second glimpses of the Wesen, and Nick (David Giuntoli) finally confronts the man who murdered his parents – or rather, parent, as Nick's mother reappears, entirely alive, hunting the same man.
But the Grimm's aren't the only hunters making their mark in Portland. We already know about the seven royal families known as the Verrat, and the Reapers they send to take care of those Grimms who interfere with the Verrat's agenda. As we saw last season, Nick is more than capable of matching multiple Reapers at once, and so the Verrat has sent a new sort of creature to recover the empire-establishing gold coins infused with Wesen magic: the mortdevant.
The tusked frenzy known as the mortdevant is the first Wesen introduced that has strayed from the show's typical German etymology. My amateur and outdated knowledge of the French language can roughly translate the creature's name to mean "in front of death" – that's pretty badass, right? After escaping from a shipping container at the Portland dockyard, the mortdevant leaves a trail of butchered and dismembered bodies, the likes of which Nick's mother seems to know and fear.
The premiere leaves us off on another cliffhanger, with Nick getting jumped by the mortdevant with only forty-five minutes to meet Rosalee and Monroe at the hospital, where they're waiting with Juliette's antidote. Although "Thank Grimm it's Monday" doesn't have the same ring to it, Grimm will be back in its regular day and time next month – next year may be a different fairytale, however, if NBC continues to play Jenga with their programming schedule.
