Grimm: Lonleyhearts, a Review

At its heart, Grimm remains a show about plastic people and synthetic monsters, a show that promises a creepy, off-beat look into the fairy tale world and instead delivers a vaguely plotted, predictable procedural.

This week's episode, Lonelyhearts, combined "Bluebeard" with the legend of satyrs, in what I admit was a clever touch--one of two bright ideas in the interminable forty-three minutes of show.

The episode opens with a woman running(1) down a lonely road. She swerves into the path of an oncoming car and is (surprise!) hit. A bystander comes out of nowhere, barks at the driver to call 911 because she's still breathing, turns to the woman, and for no particular reason, smothers her, thus giving us our obligatory opening murder. It's never really clear why he does this since subsequent events make it clear he lets women go all the time, once he's through with them, and that she would be quite unable to identify him if he did.

Somewhere in there, a Reaper comes to town to kill Nick. Unfortunately for the Reaper, Captain Renard doesn't want Nick killed, and makes that quite clear, in French, no less, with the additional fillip of cutting off the Reaper's ear, just to help him remember. And here we have the show's second clever touch(2). Renard is shaping up to be an intriguing antagonist, and I find myself curious about who he is and what is he up to. Another Grimm? But the Reaper recognized him as something fearful and not-Grimm. A different creature? What sort? Why does he want Nick "on our side"? Where is he on the sliding scale of evil? When will Nick learn? What will he do?

At which point in my musings, everything crashes into one of the show's biggest problems: Nick has all the personality of a Ken doll. The strongest emotion on screen so far has been mild frustration, which is probably what he'll display whenever Renard reveals his Cunning Plan.

Meanwhile, the Lonelyhearts mystery plays out. Monroe, who is starting to catch Nick's emotional excess, looks mildly annoyed when is called away from his quiet, cultured life to once again serve as Nick's walking encyclopedia and spare sidekick. With his help and Hank's fairly liberal interpretation of "probable cause" to enter someone's house, the three narrow the field of suspects down from one to  one. Yes, their first suspect is also their last, a rapist-abductor who lures women to him with the help of pheromones and then keeps them locked in his basement under the influence of hallucinogenic gasses until they are pregnant, after which he releases them. Oh, and he also eats rare toads to boost his abilities. Quite why this works no one knows or cares. I strongly suspect it has more to do with the viewer's expected response of "Oh, gross! Toads!" than any well-thought-out plot point.

The pacing is pathetically slow. With only one suspect and only three minutes' worth of subplot, no one has anything to do. The villain strolls to a bar. Nick strolls after. Monroe has a beer. Hank climbs through a window. The music and lighting do their valiant best to make all of this exciting, but with nothing much at stake, it doesn't work. Even some character development might have changed things: Does Hank climb through the window because he's  a constant risk-taker and bender-of-rules? Is he breaking his first rule out of concern for the women he believes trapped inside? Is he as bored as I am? With no real facial expression, I can't tell and I'm fast ceasing to care(3).

The show also managed to be offensive. Hank and Nick have just rescued three women who have been held captive in dog kennels and raped. The two seem appropriately horrified, (within the range of their designated emotional spectrum), but then Hank asks how the rapist managed to attract women in the first place, Nick suggests it's the toads, and Hank remarks that he needs to get some. Um--what? I suspect it's supposed to read as "Cops letting off tension after a horrific case" but--it doesn't. It reads as "People making tasteless jokes at exactly the wrong time."

And, yet again, Grimm wastes its fairy tale premise. Sure, the idea of combining Bluebeard and the satyr is moderately clever, but the execution leads to a tawdry, sordid, horrible tale of a man luring women into his house and raping them. That doesn't need special pheromones (unfortunately), and once the villain has them in his house, he no longer uses the pheromones, turning to cages, cellars, and gas (How did he get his house fitted up with those? And does he have permits for keeping an endangered exotic loose on the property? Doesn't that make it hard to change identities when he moves? How many people apply for permission to keep rare toads? And if he hasn't applied, shouldn't one or the other of his visitors fuss?), so why bother with a separate species bursting with super-pheromones in the first place?

The creative team behind Grimm seems to have put lamentably little thought into their fairy tale creatures in general. It's not clear what they are, where they come from, or why they are different from regular human people, or to what extent. It's also not clear that anyone has thought of this. They can breed with humans (as we just rather regrettably saw this episode), so why haven't they bred themselves out? Can they breed with each other? Can they help what they do? If so, how much? Monroe calls himself reformed and plays musical instruments etc, but he also casually tosses off information about other fairy tale beings as though he were discussing the breeding of foxes or toads ("Oh, he's a herder. They're very rare."). The bears beasts had a clear culture and choice, but they also had bear faces--so what's going on? And the show creators really should have thought very, very carefully before they set up a story where a whole race of beings had the nearly irresistible urge to rape people. Or, earlier, an entire race dedicated to kidnapping and killing little girls. Are they saying something about criminality as a whole? Are they thinking at all about text and subtext? Are they thinking?

Less vital to the show's function but still part of the not-thought-out process is the uneven use of technology. The bee-beasts used cell phones. Nick's aunt, on the other hand, keep all of her stuff in a locked trailer? Oh, yes, the book really looks cool, but, come on, she was a librarian, she knows all about scanning books into computers and uploading them onto the internet where she or her nephew could look them up quickly and easily on those phones we keep seeing the camera display ever-so-lovingly.  Sure, those ancient weapons look cool, but a gun seems to work just as well, so why is she keeping them?

One more episode. Just one, and I'm through. Maybe not the next episode, either. Maybe I'll give it a week or three to mature a bit--or wait till after the holidays. Maybe I won't get back to it at all. I'm wildly bored, mildly offended, and thoroughly frustrated by their waste of a good premise.

Edit to add: A friend who hasn't watched the show read the review and asked, "Is it even remotely possible they're trying to bring visibility to violence against women?" Sadly, no. Those weren't women, those were plot tokens. I actually considered writing about the way dehumanizing the women made things even worse--When I said there was nothing at stake, I meant just that: The women were null objects, standing in for the "at stake" element. This adds to the offense value, given how serious rape is(4). Then I decided that, given how lackadaisical the show was in its entirety, and how bland every element was, it wasn't worth spending more time on it. But she asked, so now I am elaborating.
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(1) Jogging, really. Raw panic is not one of those things Grimm excels at portraying. There is creepy music playing, though, and the lighting is doing strange things. Lighting and music are asked to make up for a lot in this show.
(2) No, not having the monsters speak French. That was just so-so. It did give the conspiracy an international flavor, which can be good, but it also added subitles which seemed, frankly, precocious and overly cute.
(3) Between Hank and Sergeant Wu (I looked his name up), Grimm ought to get points for being multicultural, but since the all came out of the same Sears catalog, it hardly seems to matter.
(4) It's not that I like to watch grim and gritty shows about the emotional and psychological impact of rape. I don't. However, if a show does decide to deal with a serial rapist, then they should deal with it, not make it part of some glossed over blandness. There is no good way to tell a "light" tale about rape. Grimm either needs to grim up or lighten up.

Grimm: Beeware, a Review

Ah yes, Beeware, the punnily titled episode in which Nick finally does some detecting, we meet the worlds' worst best communicators, and the tradition of needlessly cryptic warnings is rigorously kept.

I continue to like the idea of Grimm without being attracted to its execution. Nick is still reading as painfully generic, and sadly, so is his partner (Hank?) and the uniformed-guy (Sergeant? Somebody) who provides them with information. So, sadly, is Juliette, though she got one reasonably amusing line--addressed to the wrong person(1).

The bright spot: It is, finally, looking a little bit at the detective side of things: Nick and his partner are investigating two murders by bee-venom carried out during flash mobs.

Of course, the murderer turns out to be a fairy tale creature, and Monroe turns up very briefly to provide some encyclopedic information: The murderer is one of a group of beings called mellifera, whose main ability is to communicate.

Nick figures out that there is a third planned victim, also a fairy tale creature, this time it is Adelind, the same hexenbiest who tried to kill his aunt earlier. He is now responsible for protecting her from her would-be attackers.

And this is where the story starts to implode: No one tells anyone anything, even when it would make sense to do so.

Nick recognizes Adelind, but for no reason at all, does not tell either Renard or his partner. This is the woman who tried to kill his aunt and him. The fact that she is a hexenbiest does not, so far as Nick knows, have to intrude on the police aspect of it. I can't say whether or not this secrecy is in character because I don't know yet that Nick has a character.

Then the mellifer prove to be very poor communicators after all. Nick catches up with the lead (queen?) mellifer while she is trying to kill Adelind. Despite having an entire room full of bees at her command, the mellifer is trying to stab Adelind with a syringe while trying to persuade Nick to let her. As the women fight,  she explains that the hexenbiests she had been persecuting her and her fellows in order to keep them from warning the Grimms, and so Nick should just stand aside (3). After fumbling with his gun for a while and dodging curtains of bees, Nick opts to shoot her rather than let her kill Adelind.

Nowhere during the rather long conversation does she actually give this all-important warning, not until she is dying, at which point she manages several sentences all of which add up to letting Nick know that "He" is coming and Nick should "be prepared." What is wrong with "John Black is coming. He'll be wearing a red jacket, and he'll be trying to steal your soul"? Or some other, similar, clearly-worded message?

Oh, and Nick gets stung at the end. Guess he just made a whole host of new enemies. Oops.

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(1) Really: Wouldn't that scene about bee stings and dogs have worked better with Monroe? Wouldn't it have been more likely with Monroe? I mean, why was Hank going to his partner's fiancee, a vet,  for first aid instead of stopping by a clinic or something? As an aside, I find myself wondering: Why is Monroe helping Nick at all? In the first case, he had some motive: There was a girl whose life was immediately in danger, and he, arguably, had some personal stake in it, since it was his species causing the mischief. What's his motive now? He doesn't particularly like Grimms as a race. Monroe remains a bright spot in the show, but I'd like to know why he's hanging around with the plastic people.

(2) By the next day, so far, but it's anyone's guess whether it will stay that way. Stations have a tendency to make deals with iTunes etc. that push the airtime back later. Whether that will be true of Grimm or not, I don't know.

(3)  Let me repeat: This woman has an entire room full of bees at her command. All she needs to do is have them sting Adelind and then she and Nick can chat cozily. No one would believe him for one minute if he tried to explain that she'd used the bees as a murder weapon.

Grimm, Bears Will Be Bears, a Review

A story blending the police procedural and the fairy tale should not be this bland.

Bears Will Be Bears is a small step up from the pilot episode. The product placement has been toned down considerably to the more usual long, loving shots of gleaming items rather than the extensive name-brand referencing of last week.

Generic Cop, aka Nick, is still pretty much the fresh-faced, standard-issue honest cop. There's little else to say about him. Other characters remain equally bland. Beautiful fiancee has red hair. Dubious but supportive partner/best friend is dubious.

The exceptions to this rule are Monroe, the former Bad Wolf, and Aunt Maria. Bad Wolf is, I admit, a pretty common brand of snarky, but any glimmer of humor is welcome, and it is, at least, a more recent mold. Though--I do predict his "dark past" is going to come back to haunt him and Nick at some point, possibly in an interesting fashion, possibly not (I also suspect some variant of the line "I told you I used to be a murderer, what did you expect?" will come up. I rather hope it doesn't, but it's hard to see the writers resisting).

Aunt Marie had by far the most potential of the bunch. She seemed a person, and a fairly complex one at that, but, as she's dead, we'll never learn more about this librarian/monster-hunter/adoptive mother.

Like the pilot, the plot Bears Will Be Bears has a definite paint-by-numbers feel. The events happen, but there's little real energy behind them. It's a loose take on "Goldilocks," which I think was an unfortunate follow up to the pilot's "Little Red Riding Hood." Last week the show featured snarling wolves who hunt people; this week it featured snarling bears. If this is going to be a monster-of-the-week show, let it at least provide unique monsters!

In their favor, the bears had a better and more understandable motive than the Bad Wolf. He just didn't like red (Or was driven mad by it? Seems the race would have died out by now, if they really, literally could not help themselves around what is a very common color).  The bears actually do have a culture and reason behind their actions, giving them some credibility and some slight indication of personality. The monster pairing, however, remains unfortunate.

So far, the overall bland feel of the show comes largely from the astonishingly poor use the show's creators have made of their source material. They are drawing from three powerful genres and doing little more than skimming off the top of any of them.

I know relatively little about the monster-hunter sub-genre, so I cannot comment too extensively on it. I will say this, though: I know there is a tradition of the monster-hunter being kept in the dark until the last possible moment (usually when he or she is confronting a monster), and Grimm is sticking to this--for no readily apparent reason. It seems this trait runs in the Grimm family. Why, then, are they not raised to it? Told the tales, trained in fighting and weaponry, and prepared for the day when their designated mentor dies? Also, while I'm at it: Archaic weapons are also a tradition, and one Marie apparently kept, also for no apparent reason. Plain lead bullets work just fine.

Police procedurals: I'm more into the detective story side of things, being more an inconsistent viewer of Masterpiece Theater, or at one point Monk than a CSI fan, but I thought they were supposed to feature actual detecting and shows of skill and mystery. Nick has now, twice, stumbled over the perpetrators, and just by coincidence, they've been monsters with fancy German names (Do they have a collective name, these beasts? The "Them" the Grimms hunt?). The intelligence and skill required has been negligible. There's never been any real chance that the perpetrator was an ordinary, evil human, nor has Nick been called on to use much of his training as a policeman. He's a homicide detective. Let's see him detect!

This leads us to fairy tales, which I do know, and which is what drew me to Grimm in the first place. Fairy tales are strange things, full of unexpected twists and a strange logic. Help comes from unexpected places, so does harm. Baba Yaga may show you the way to the next castle--or she might eat you. Or she might come into your house and count the spoons. The simpleton wins. The loudmouth wins. There are rules, but they are hard to keep. There are monsters and evil stepmothers and blessings from beyond the grave. They are horrible and wonderful and mysterious.

And Grimm is using them as a monster-trove.

Fair enough. They can be that, but what a waste.

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For the moment, Bears Will Be Bears is up on Hulu. I'm guessing it'll be there for another month, but they haven't posted the schedule yet.

Grimm: The Pilot, a review

Let's see, what was that about again? Oh, yeah. A girl wearing a pair of pink Nikes and listening to "Sweet Dreams" on her pink iPod goes running in the woods. She is killed by someone wearing Nike boots and her pink iPod, still playing the same song (by Eurythmics, as one cop tells another), is left in-camera. We never see her face until her roommate pulls out an iPhone to show us who she was. The iPhone gets plenty of screen time. So do the Nikes (both pairs), and the song plays again, more than once.

Oh, and, um, yeah, there's something about a fairly generic detective guy who finds out he's a monster hunter, a former murderer who has reformed,a kidnapped girl, and the hunt to find the killer/kidnapper.

The pilot also features generic-policeman's partner, product-placement guy (he gets to name things for us) and a wistful fiancee with long hair.

To be fair, dying mentor-woman (who tells generic-policeman about his heritage as monster-hunter) and reformed bad-wolf-person have some inklings of personality, but not nearly enough to pull this out of the "meh" category.

Yes, the product placement was that bad and the story surrounding the ads was that forgettable.

It wants to be a police procedural with fairy tale elements, which is a kind of cool idea, but when the products (did I mention the Iphone? And the Nikes?) are the most memorable aspects of a show, there are problems.

I'm sort of trying to convince myself to watch the second one, but... eh.