I decided to analyze those episode together, because they are all about the same fairy tale (“Sleeping Beauty”) and as a three-parter, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to see them isolated from each other. The nukuu of “Woman in Black” and “The Kiss” are both from “Sleeping Beauty”, but “Bad Teeth” (and the season) starts with a quote from the poem “The sekunde Coming” kwa W. B. Yeats :
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon, kozi cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the sekunde Coming is at hand.
The sekunde Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare kwa a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its saa come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Reference Rundown
1. Sleeping Beauty is attacked out of revenge. So is Juliette.
2. Sleeping Beauty falls into sleep, because she hurts her finger with a spindle. For Juliette, it’s cat scratches on her hand.
3. Sleeping Beauty sleeps so long, that the world has forgotten her and her kingdom. In this case, it’s Juliette who forgets.
4. In both cases, a kiss kwa a pure person is required to wake the sleeping beauty up.
5. And in both cases, a prince kisses Sleeping Beauty after (symbolically) proving himself worthy
German Gebrabbel
“Schlaftrunk” is basically a sleeping poison. Otherwise, there isn’t much German in those episodes, instead we got a lot of French. I have forgotten most the French I learned, but I’ll try. The name of the cat, “Magique”, simply means “magic” – well, nobody has ever accused lawyers of being creative. “Mauvais Dentes” looks strange to me, I think “mauvaises dents” would be grammatically correct (well, why should German be the only language to suffer?), meaning “bad teeth”, which for me sounds zaidi like someone with caries than with fangs.
The bloody uandishi in the ship, “Ce soir j’ai eté beni pur la présence d’un [?murn?] mais pas pour longtemps”, I sadly really can’t translate, due to the ineligible word. “This evening I was blessed kwa the presence of a ?????, but not for long.”
Highs and Lows
+ The attack on Renard
+Nick trying to explain himself to Juliette, sounding crazier and crazier
+ Rosalee is, as always, fun to watch
+ The interaction between Kelly and Monroe and Rosalee
+ I loved the initial coldness of Nick towards Kelly
+ Catherine is great!
+ The purging process
+ Renard’s brother – perfectly cast, and such a snarky dialogue between those two!
+ Rosalee facing off Catherine
- Don’t drag Juliette all over town, Nick, bring her to Rosalee immediately!
- If it’s a secret organization, how does anyone know about it, never mind that someone is a member? And what’s the point of the Viking symbol in all this?
- Mom? That one was already lame twist the first time a onyesha did it, and it doesn’t get better kwa the hundred repeat.
- Ten siku ago, yesterday, one saa ago, now, - the time stamps on the first scenes are unintentional comical and totally pointless.
- The story of Kelly makes no sense at all. Wouldn’t the Wesen realize they got the wrong person when they cut off the head? Would nobody miss her friend? And how did the coins end up with the jeweler? Am I really supposed to believe that nobody noticed that she was still alive for so long? And that she didn’t catch just one of the people hunting for the coins all this time?
- The CGI-Castle looks distractingly unrealistic, with its mix of different styles
- Why exactly did Monroe and Rosalee wait for Nick instead of administering the poison themselves?
- Why does Nick suddenly decide to swali Catherine again? It’s not like he didn’t know about her knowing about the potion when he went to her the first time?
- Mauvais Dentes = lamest assassin ever. zaidi blood doesn’t necessarily mean zaidi threatening.
The Grimmoire
Let’s sort out what we know so far: Grimms have apparently be around for a long, long time. At one point they decided to work for the royals, which caused (according to Ian) some sort of imbalance in the Wesen World. During the crusades (and some sort of Wesen war), Grimms hide some sort of weapon which would give the royals world power, and Nick owns one of seven keys needed to find this weapon. Meanwhile the royals, whose main power base is in Europe, have been fighting over power, a struggle a lot of Wesen want to end. Because of that there is an organization called the Lauffeuer, which fight for equality in the Wesen world. The complete opposite is the Verrat, a powerful organization in its own right, which is sometimes allied with the royals. The Verrat has a very dim view on Wesen interacting out of their own kind, they are basically a bunch of very dangerous racist, and currently they are helping the royals to suppress the Lauffeuer. Renard, being a bastard and Half-Hexenbiest for sure has a difficult standing with the Verrat and with his own family. He is mainly interested in obtaining the key, at the same time he tries to get Nick to work for him, because a Grimm is seen as something precious kwa the royals (though a Grimm on its own is seen as dangerous). On juu of all this, there is also a not so secret organization called “The Dragon’s Tongue”, but that one seemed (so far) mostly interested in obtaining the coins, not the keys. Either way, they have a powerful reach, too.
Okay, aside from noticing that Wesen politic is very complicated, I guess the big swali is, what kind of weapon was where hidden? Does anyone else wonder if this might be less a super weapon of the middle age and zaidi a super weapon of the middle age, something which wouldn’t be all that powerful kwa today’s standard?
Either way, the poem they started the season with seems to promise that some facades will crumble, soon.
The Final Judgment
This time, there are two maswali to answer:
1. Do those episodes work as a trilogy?
2. Do they work as season finale/premiere?
The answer to the first swali is yes and no. There is a lot of good stuff in this episode, but I don’t think that it’s really enough to warrant a three-parter. The whole interplay with the Mauvais Dentes and the FBI felt like useless padding. Really frustrating padding to be honest, because the FBI taking an interest is enough to fill a whole episode on its own, if not being a whole season arc, as a byplay that scenario is wasted. Never mind that it really looks very callous that Nick keeps working as usual when Juliette is in the hospital. After all, he couldn’t know that he would get a Wesen-related case. Similar confusing is the interaction with Catherine. Is there any reason why Nick doesn’t ask her immediately about the poison? He knows that she ordered something related to it after all. All in all, the episodes were okay, but I expected way zaidi from them than I got. And all in all, the plot was painfully predictable. There was some good stuff in it, like Nick being angry with Kelly and Kelly disapproving of his friendship with a Blutbad and a Fuchsbau, but in both instances, we got a disappointingly fast and easy solution.
The answer to the sekunde swali is definitely no. A season premiere which starts and ends in the middle of a story is neither a good way to draw in zaidi watchers, nor a good pay-off for the people who waited for a resolution of the cliff-hangers for month. Not that the cliff-hangers were particularly exciting. The amnesia plot was something a lot of people called immediately after the season finale and the mom-ending is so overdone, I’m surprised that there are still TV-shows out there which pull this one.
Plus, when I watch a season finale, I expect some sort of solution for the stuff which built up the whole season. In the case of Grimm this meant some majibu about Renard, about the key and, above all, a solution for the swali if Nick should stay with Juliette au not. The finale provided neither of this; instead the onyesha hurriedly introduced some new story-lines shortly before the season finale, with Hanks sudden paranoia, the three coins and Nick’s parents. Even after the three episodes, I didn’t feel like I know that much zaidi than beforehand, despite Kelly sprouting exposition to no end. As I already mentioned, the explanation how she survived makes inayofuata to no sense and it doesn’t really tell us anything new about the coins (aside from there actually being a way to destroy them – good riddance). What the key is for is slightly interesting, and Renard’s half-Hexenbiest status perhaps the best reveal, but Hank is still paranoid, Juliette is still clueless (and I don’t care for her strange amnesia at all), and really, was anyone surprised that the royals want the key?
All in all, those episodes were just okay. I give 7 golden keys out of 10, mostly for the idea with the purging and the fact, that Kelly is at least a halfway interesting (and downright scary) character.
