This review contains spoilers.
2.4 Quill
Hank: Am I gonna be seeing them all the time now too?
Nick: I don’t think so. But you never know…
Except, you definitely do know, because this is Grimm, a world where Wesen conveniently commit every crime in the city of Portland and implausibly disrupt romantic B-plot picnics, the furry fiends.
No sooner had Nick and the newly in-the-know Hank had their little coffee shop tête à tête, than a Wesen strayed into their jurisdiction. And not just any Wesen, but a plague-ridden one, thus kick-starting the events of a pretty decent episode of investigation and plot escalation.
The yellow plague (something to do with pigs apparently) was an unfortunate illness that manifested first as horniness, then as wanton destructiveness, then as really bad skin - essentially a Jägerbomb in virus form then.
Anyone else think that the idea of a disease that wipes out Wesen could have had more legs than just the one episode? Having the whole thing done and dusted with relative ease felt something of a rush, though an entertaining one while it lasted.
Suffering from picnicus interruptus were Monroe and Rosalee, who made the leap from gooey-eyed pals to lovebirds during the episode. Judging from the costume department’s deployment of the famous ‘unflattering jumper’ disguise to conceal actress Bree Turner’s baby bump though, the path of Wesen love is not going to run smoothly for the pair.
Speaking of smoothness, Quill saw Juliette and her untroubled forehead having shaken off the worst of the amnesia, only to come down with a bad case of exposition mouth. After a spell of sniffing Nick’s jumpers and asking herself “Why can’t I remember you?”, she was prompted to do some investigating of her own, leading to the triumphant return of… the fridge repair beaver!
If you’ve only joined Grimm this season, then allow me to introduce you to the fridge repair beaver. He’s a stout fellow, nervous, talkative, good with a tool-box, and prone to showering people with flurries of artisan home-made gifts. We like the fridge repair beaver.
Importantly, he divulged a crucial bit of info to Juliette this week, by revealing that Nick’s a Grimm. “What’s a Grimm?” she asked, to which the fridge repair beaver replied with a lie so unconvincing anyone with a working sense of dubiousness would have had it out of him there and then. Luckily for this slowly ratcheting storyline, Juliette’s ability to smell a rat seems to have been removed as a child, so she put a pin in it to deal with later.
In other news, the Captain formerly known as Prince was back to his clandestine cross-continental phone calls (let’s hope he’s on a low-cost tariff), and received a tip-off about another European reaper sent after our Nick. The Italian assassin didn’t present an immediate problem to Det. Burkhardt, choosing instead to engage in a good amount of watching, waiting, and CGI-morphing into… a sort of panther was it?
Hopefully, this particular Grimm hunter will prove more of a challenge than the last few, all of whom have been dispatched with some efficiency by Nick, a man with a sporadic talent for fighting that waxes and wanes depending on the requirements of that week’s plot. Judging by the moves he put on plague-y Rosalee, we do now know that Nick has a Vulcan death grip in his arsenal, which should prove handy when his Italian visitor decides to do more than just grimace through a skylight.
It all knitted together rather nicely this week. The Seven Royal Families plot, Monroe and Rosalee’s new relationship, Sgt. Wu’s traumatic plague-victim encounter, Juliette’s growing unease around Nick, and Hank’s initiation into the Scooby gang were all interwoven with a decent sense of forward momentum.
No, there wasn’t a huge amount of peril to the virus plot, and yes, it was awfully bad luck for Monroe and Rosalee to pick the only romantic picnic site in Portland at which they were guaranteed to run into Nick and Hank’s suspect, but on the whole, Quill had much to recommend it. Roll on next week.
Read Frances’ review of last week’s episode, Bad Moon Rising, here.
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