It only took about 17 episodes, but last night's Grimm finally delivered on the squirming underbelly of fairy tale crime this series has been promising forever. For the first time, ever, I actually cared about Hank and Sgt. Wu. And I didn't need a CG Anteater creature to carry the disposable storyline.
This week Grimm wrapped up the ongoing Adalind Hexenbeast story, and damn if it wasn't pretty good. Sure there were a bunch of plot holes about the strange lengths they went to get this very important key that we're really only finding out about now (so that's what the Captain is after). And I'm not really sure what specific purpose Jessica Tuck (Nanners from True Blood) was serving as Adalind's Mama, but you know what? It was highly entertaining. The more Nanners the better. Right? Of course right. Plus Tuck did open up the villain world of Grimm a bit. The leech scene was pretty potent. The audience actually got to spend a lot of time with the Big Bads this week, watching the Captain talk about various political fairy families, seduce both mother and daughter Hexenbeast, and cover his tracks. While I'm still not sure what's going on with this fella, he's still very commanding and scary. Let's hope we find out what this scary key is all about.
We also spent a bit of time with Sgt. Wu, who was busy gobbling up all sorts of odd items. Which meant the more batteries he swallowed, the less time would he spent delivering his terrible jokes (something I've grown to love about this fella). For once it truly felt like Pilates Wolf wasn't carrying this show kicking and screaming by its ears.
But most surprisingly, the best part of this episode was watching Nick deal with Hank. From the surprise double date where Nick threatens Adalind in the basement, to Hank's evolution into a kind of terrifying, obsessed stalker, we had a lot of fun watching Nick handle the situation. We wish Nick would have been a bit more bummed about his sweetie rejecting his marriage proposal from last week, but you can't have it all we guess. And to actually make me emote for Hank, well that's a job well done.
Bravo for playing with the side characters and thank you for not involving a monster of the week to try and force an emotional response from the audience. The groundwork has been set, and we're all ever so glad that the show has started to play with the goods they've been developing. I can only hope that we'll be getting more Nanners and more Captain very, very soon. Fingers crossed the second season a lot like the good we're getting right here, right now.