‘Grimm’ Recap: To Sleep, Perchance to Scream
Warning: This recap of the “Breakfast in Bed” episode of Grimm contains spoilers.
Hank and Nick get an assist from Monroe on a case where a creature steals sleep, while Rosalee and Eve believe they’ve made a breakthrough on deciphering the cloth’s symbols and Renard turns a haunted corner.
Waking Nightmare
Another week, another cool new Wesen. (Starting to get a little misty knowing that there aren’t that many episodes left to add to the show’s menagerie.)
Dan, a tenant of a fleabag motel, returns home to an earful of complaints from the manager and his floor-mates. It seems he has been keeping late nights and making a ton of noise, and no one is happy about it. But it is immediately clear that he is not just partying hard, but is actually terrified. He keeps checking under the bed and in the closet, and nails and chains up the windows. He also puts a chair under the doorknob and sleeps with a hammer.
But to no avail, it turns out, as a dark shadow floats past and the next thing you know, he’s inhaling green smoke and a big glowing monster with rows and rows of quasi teeth is coming in hot. When the paralyzing effects of what turns out to be bad breath wear off, he goes wandering down the street in his boxers, mumbling to himself, which draws the attention of a guy who works at a homeless shelter who assumes he’s hungry, tired, and mad. Dan thinks he might be the evil entity and winds up beating him to death. No good deed goes unpunished is the moral of that story.
Hank is happy for a case to distract him and his partner from thinking about the magic stick. “I’ll take a cold-blooded murder over an unsolvable ancient riddle about the universe any day. Only Big Bang Theory I want to deal with is the one from a gun,” he quips.
They track Dan back to the hotel, and he refuses to open the door to his room. “I don’t know how it gets in, but it does. It will kill me,” he worries. So they have to force their way in, and as they are leaving to take him down to the station, Nick notices an old man with an oxygen tank looking shady. According to the manager, he’s been there longer than anyone can remember and no one has heard him say a word.
When they can’t determine a motive and realize Dan has never been violent before, nor does he have a history of mental health issues, they realize that lots of people have breakdowns when they first encounter Wesen. His interview gives them enough details about the monster to go on, and this one is easy to identify because a similar creature made Monroe’s favorite aunt loony tunes. An Alpe goes insane if it doesn’t feed nightly on proteins the brain creates during REM sleep. On the flip, if they use a person as a breathing buffet for too long, the victims go crazy instead. Heavy sleepers with high doses of melatonin are their favorite meal. They suspect the manager, the old guy, or the maintenance guy at the hotel has a history of strange deaths.
With Dan gone, the Alpe returns to feed on his lady neighbor. She tries to get out of the room and winds up tripping on the stairs and falling to her death. Nick proposes a plan to catch the Alpe in the act: Because he and Hank are known faces, he asks Monroe to spend the night with a camera in the room and a wire. He says yes as “payback for Aunt Ida.”
The bait works, and soon he is lying paralyzed in the bed with the monster straddling him. It is spooked when Nick shoots out the front door to get in, but Nick and Hank give chase down a secret passage concealed by the dresser. They eventually find the hotel owner, who they thought they had interviewed from her house in L.A. Turns out she has been living in Portland and feeding on her tenants. Nick gives her an ultimatum: sell the hotel, give the proceeds to local homeless shelters, and leave Portland for good — or die by the Grimm’s hand. She agrees but makes a last lunge at Nick after woging. But you gotta be faster than that to get the Grimm. He jumps out of the way, and she hits her head on the corner of a table and dies.
Aha Moment
The Scooby gang sure could use Dr. Robert Langdon right about now.
Nick sneaks past a (not) sleeping Eve and down to the tunnels to photograph her handiwork. She eventually joins him and still cannot remember why or how she scribbled all over the bricks. She just felt she needed to sketch the gobbledygook graffiti.
“Do you think the seven Grimm crusaders knew what they had?” she wonders aloud.
“Probably why they buried it,” Nick deadpans.
While having a deciphering party, Monroe finally sees a symbol that he might recognize. He hypothesizes that one of the pictographs represents Pleiades, the constellation of seven stars associated with times of mourning. “It held significance for just about every ancient civilization you can think of,” he recalls before adding that festivals of the dead always get celebrated in the fall because that is when the seven stars rise as the sun sets. There also happened to be seven crusaders and seven keys. Coincidence? Probably not.
Rosalee suggests it might be a map of the universe. Monroe takes the theory further: “Makes sense. Ancient civilizations charted the stars for all kinds of reasons — religion, cartography, timing the harvest.” And his comment makes Eve think it might actually be an ancient calendar, but they can’t figure out how there would be symbols related to vastly different cultures and time frames like Mayans and Sumerians on one piece of fabric. She seems almost hopeful when she mentions, “What if this is some event from a very long time ago that might tell us where the stick came from?”
While the guys are off fighting crime, the women continue to follow the signs.
A little too conveniently, Rosalee has an app that tracks the movement and alignment of the planets. They try to line up the cloth’s pictures with the position of the planets, but nothing works no matter how far back in the past she goes. But when she accidentally goes in the other direction, all signs point to March 24, which just happens to be the date of the series’ penultimate episode.
Meisner the Friendly Ghost?
While in his office, Renard, still on edge and hearing things, gets an unscheduled in-the-flesh visit from the mystery voice who has been trying to piece Black Claw’s efforts back together since Bonaparte’s death. He believes it is important that the two talk “now that Bonaparte is dead and you’ve killed your political career.”
He is not having any of Renard’s excuses about the Grimm being responsible for those two mishaps. The Captain reminds him that the Grimm seems to be under the protection of something really powerful. He also informs Renard that the goals have not changed. “You need to pick up where we left off,” he insists.
But Renard has grown weary, too, and before kicking the guy out of his office, he declares, “I’m done taking orders. I’m done with Black Claw, and I’m done with you.”
As he is headed home later that day, Meisner rematerializes to warn him that two men are waiting by his car, and that can mean only one thing — they are there to assassinate him. With his tormentor’s help, he flips the sneak attack around in his favor but can’t figure out why the guy he betrayed just saved his life. Meisner replies matter-of-factly: “This time you chose the right side, Sean.”
Grimm airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on NBC.
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