‘Grimm’ Recap: The Beginning of the End
Warning: This recap of the “Fugitive” episode of Grimm contains spoilers.
Once upon a Friday night, the first of the final 13 chapters of NBC’s fairytale cop drama dropped and per usual things looked, well, grim for Grimm Nick Burkhardt and his motley crew of crime-committing creature fighters because their former captain turned Portland mayor Sean Renard decided to continue down the path of betrayal to big bad despite Black Claw bigwig Bonaparte no longer being an issue.
Hunks of Burning Questions
Our story begins where it left off last season — with Nick and Renard surrounded by slaughtered Black Claw minions and one very skewered Bonaparte. Nick has no idea how the magical probably religious stick healed his gunshot wounds and brought him back from the dead. Renard doesn’t know why he plunged a sword through the bad guy’s chest thus saving Nick from supernatural strangling. His friends are all wondering why they left Nick alone to fight and retreated to the tunnels that they also have no idea how to get out of. Rosalee isn’t sure if they should share their baby news with the rest of the Scooby gang. Trubel doubts that Nick could have survived the ambush and the potential for rebuilding the resistance with Meisner dead and headquarters demolished. And Eve/Juliette, who also had to be healed by the mystical branch, wonders why she can’t call on her Hexenbiest powers without experiencing pain.
Once they are all reunited, there are still more questions. How did Nick survive being shot? Is he a ghost? And, wait back up, did you say Renard killed Bonaparte? Nobody knows how they are going to explain this massacre.
Renard meanwhile returns to his mayoral mansion where Adalind and the kids are locked away and tries to walk Adalind through what happened and how he did not realize what he was doing until the deed was done. Once he rules out Adalind, he deduces that the only other person with that kind of power is his daughter. Adalind advises him to go easy on the discipline. “He would have killed me. Maybe Diana just wanted daddy to be a hero and save mommy. We better be careful what she wishes for.” And in the next breath, he seems to totally not have heard what she said and starts devising his Plan B. He exits the room with an unwise threat against mommy dearest. “You should have never fallen in love with Burkhardt. You’re going to regret it.” I mean, dude, you daughter can kill people with her mind and voodoo dolls from far away. You might not want to underestimate her hearing from the room across the hall.
Cop-on-Cop Action
Renard works quickly to enact his new plan of setting up Nick to take the fall for the bloodshed. First he meets up with a judge, who is also Wesen, to get search warrants. He returns to the precinct to find even more dead bodies and informs the very confused officer that Nick escaped before he got to the other precinct and orders him to put out an APB labeling Nick armed and dangerous. He also says that if he resists arrest, they should shoot to kill. Given that Nick has worked with these guys for years, you’d think they would protest this order a bit more. He does question the captain’s call when Wu and Hank return to the office and slyly suggests, “He should turn himself in or get the hell out of the country because I don’t want anything to do with taking down one of our own.”
Renard gets a mysterious call from some Black Claw member and again he throws Nick under the proverbial bus and adds that “something is protecting him.” The voice charges that it is imperative for him to find out what and take care of it to fix “the major setback in Portland.” As Renard swears he’ll have him within 24 hours, he suddenly notices blood all over his hands but the hallucination is gone as quickly as it came on. Later, when the cop is updating him on the so far unsuccessful manhunt, he has another vision. The officer’s face is bloody and he repeats Meisner’s last words, “You chose the wrong side Sean.”
But that doesn’t slow his bloodlust. In fact, he even tells Wu and Hank that if they get in his way, he’ll come for them next. They catch a call that could be helpful when the body of Renard’s PR gal and lover is found in her bed and CSU turns up Renard’s fingerprints all over her apartment.
All Hands Meeting
As Eve attempts to clean up the dead bodies at the spice shop, one of the dead monsters locks on to her with a death grip and she goes into a trance. He’s being sucked downward in a cloudy limbo and symbols appear all over his face as he tries to drag her with him. Rosalee explains that people believe that you could grab a pure soul with the death grip and trade it to get out of hell before hacking his arm off and pulling Eve back to reality. Trubel speculates that perhaps the stick cleansed Eve’s soul. Clearly, it affected her profoundly as she is starting to have feelings again and while hiding in the tunnels as police searched Nick’s loft above, she could see symbols on the cloth it came wrapped. Trubel can’t see them, but Eve recognizes them from the death-grip goon’s face.
Nick regroups with the gang at Bud’s repair shop. His friends suggest he leave town, but ever the hero he refuses, “If I leave Portland, Renard will control everything.”
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He has less time then he thinks as researching the numbers on Nick’s cell leads the S.W.A.T. team to Bud’s business. They are surrounded before they can create a diversion, Eve is unable to woge, and Renard tells his cop crew to “take them down” before it fades to black. Fans will have to wait for chapter 2 to find out how our hero escapes.
Grimm airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on NBC.
