Grimm – Season 2 Episode 6 – Over My Dead Body – Recap and Review

Grimm finally delivers an edge of your seat adventure in this week’s episode, as it manages to stray from the typical linearity of its previous episodes and tie all the major characters into one thread.

Check out the recap and review:

Angelina Returns

Angelina (Jamie Newman) Monroe’s (Silas Weir) ex girlfriend who was last seen in the episode, The Big Bad Three Wolves, is at a local country bar, and she stumbles onto a Jersey-Shore-esque man, Jacobs, who brutes his way into trying to have sex with her. Angelina shows no interest and decides to leave, but he later catches up to her to persuade her that she’s making a mistake. Angelina smooth talks her way into persuading him that he’s the one making the mistake, and I guess they both have to transform into their respective monsters in order to really settle it out. His muscular frame proves no match for Angelina as she wipes him out in an instant. Angelina steals his money and throws his wallet away, but her feelings of vanquish are shattered as a man holding her at gunpoint abducts her. He introduces her to his boss, who is a konigschlange, a cobra beast, who tells her that she’s killed the man that was meant to do a job for him. Providing her with three choices, two of which that resulted in confinement or death; Angelina takes the last offer, which not only spares her life but also rewards her with 25,000 dollars. She is told to carry out the job that her victim was meant to commit – the job to kill Monroe and bring his body within 24 hours.

Revelations Over The Dinner Table

 

Grimm alternates between the storylines of Renard (Sasha Roiz) and his mysterious ‘clan’, Nick (David Giuntoli) and his relationship with Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) and Monroe and his growing fancy for Rosalee (Bree Esrig), who all engage in conversations that reveal more of their pasts across the set of a dinner table. Renard reunites with her ex-girlfriend, Mia, who is a member of the Dragon’s Tongue. She tells him that he's visiting Portland to see him. Juliette decides to be more proactive about the development of her relationship with Nick (About time! She’s waiting for all the answers to just come to her?) and finds out Nick’s favorite meal so that she can cook it for him. Juliette tries to ask Nick whether or not he knew the reason behind Juliette’s proposal denial, and Nick hesitantly tells her that she thought he was hiding things from her. Rosalee and Monroe adorably love it up over glasses of wine, and Bree reveals a great knowledge in music history, much to Monroe’s excitement.  The date is rudely interrupted as Angelina storms in the door. She cuts to the chase by telling Monroe that she has been ordered to kill him.

Monroe – The Glue Of The Show?

Monroe, with his usual awkwardness, tries to make sense of this sudden news. (I feel him. I mean, who in their right minds would ever want to kill him?! After all, he is the only source of refreshing comic relief in this show.) Angelina is unable to give him any answers, prompting Monroe to call Nick for help. Surely enough, this was the exact time that Juliette asks Nick “So are you hiding anything from me?”, offering yet again another convenient excuse to chicken out of telling the truth. When Nick arrives at Monroe’s house, he discovers that Angelina is the one being ordered to kill Monroe and fights his urges to arrest her for her outstanding murders. Monroe tries to mediate the conflicting interests by asking both to temporarily agree on a truce. Nick concurs as he realizes Angelina is the only source that can solve the case.  Angelina regurgitates all that she knows to Nick, and Nick decides that the priority is to first find Monroe a safe place to stay. Monroe is placed at Hank’s (Russell Hornsby) house in the meantime whilst Nick and Angelina head to the bar again to sniff out more clues.

When Will Nick Get It?

Once there, another investigator is already on the case, and Angelina pretends to be Nick’s partner and offers a very detailed hypothesis of what happened in the crime (all of which were actually true) in order to deflect the investigator’s attention and sidetrack him to finding less relevant evidence. Meanwhile, Angelina finds the cell phone that Jacobs had used to receive his boss’ orders that night, and Nick is able to trace the call to a hardware store. Angelina identifies that same man who held her at gunpoint there, and pulls another acting stint (with a small cameo from her Blutbad self) as she tries to provoke him to tell her more information concerning the reasons behind targeting Monroe. Lo and behold, he’s being targeted because he’s working with Nick, the Grimm, and Nick actually looks shocked as he finds out. As if Nick couldn’t have seen this coming? (Mind you, Monroe’s already been attacked once for his ‘betrayal’ to collaborate with a Grimm.)

Dead Faint

At this time, Hank seems to fancy his Monroe’s company as he treats him like some kind of Pokémon, asking him to demonstrate his transformation several times. Nick returns to check on Monroe, and updates Hank with the new information, including the fact that he is working with Angelina. Hank agrees to go “off the records” with Nick and collaborate with Angelina, and they all try to devise a plan to deliver Monroe dead. Monroe suggests the potion of Dead Faint, which paralyzes someone to look as if they were dead temporarily. Now where I have seen this before? (Fringe?) Monroe consults Rosalee about the functionality of Dead Faint, and Rosalee warns that the spell comes with great risks, as Monroe could either wake up too early or not at all. Before drinking the potion, Rosalee stress that if Monroe turns white, then he must be resuscitated immediately. Angelina’s lingering feelings for Monroe resurface, as she begins to lose her tough façade and show empathy for Monroe’s bravery and plight.

Angelina hauls Monroe who is now under the elixir, to a forest after receiving orders about the location of delivery from the konigschlange. She meets the boss who inspects Monroe’s body and acknowledges that he is not alive. However, he tells Angelina that he is not really the one who wants Monroe, and that he is additionally working for someone else. Another car drives in, and it is Mia who steps out, revealing her real purpose in Portland. Angelina is starting to get nervous as she notices some faint fist flexes from Monroe. Mia is surprised that Angelina carried out the job, and before they can all leave and pay her, Angelina’s fear of Monroe’s death gets the better of her as she decides to resurrect him in case it’s too late. Monroe wakes up, and chaos ensues as Angelina leaps to defend Monroe from being harmed. Nick and Hank notice the commotion and step in to kill the konigschlange, but Angelina is wounded amidst the battle. Monroe asks Nick not to turn her into the police and executes a personal burial in honorary Blutbad tradition. I had high hopes that Monroe wasn’t going to turn into his wolf-self and howl in pain, but surely enough, Grimm’s predictability and cliché overload does it again as that is exactly how it ends.

This is certainly a step up from previous episodes, as I found myself actually on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens. It was an exciting episode…I will give them that, but as I write this review, I feel that I’m constantly talking about the same things. I feel that we are slowly getting sneak peeks of what’s to come, but it is coming at such a snail’s pace that I don’t feel that the show has progressed all that much. When are we getting any substantial insight into what in the world Renard’s managing on the side, and what his true identity is? At this rate, it’ll probably be Season 4? We are constantly being introduced to his ‘people’ episode after episode, and all of them just end up getting killed and contributing little to the greater story. Is Mia finally the one who will be the withstanding character that will enlighten us about what we've been dying to know?

When is Nick ever going to be comfortable about his identity with Juliette? Before Juliette lost her memory, he had already come clean, but now he’s bottling his past up again, and their relationship’s narrative feels like a deja vu. Even the prospect of Juliette being able to remember him, as teased by the trailer, does not excite me all that much. Also, Nick has long known that he's being targeted by the Wesen and the Royals. Is he going to just keep waiting for everyone to be sent to him, or is he going to do something about finding the source of the problem, and pull a Liam Neeson and actually use his arsenal of weaponry to better use. What do you all think? Is Grimm dragging out all the potentially exciting elements far too wide that it undermines the build up they’ve been promoting for all these weeks?