Saturday, May 17, 2014

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Grimm S3E22 Blond Ambition

Previously on Grimm: parents drama! Wedding drama! Royals drama in the form of a target-fixated Hundjager! Baby drama mama drama Viktor's face is getting ripped off. Ahem. It's a highlights reel of all the doom, gloom, and poor decisions people have made over the back half or so of this season. Awesome. There's no possible way this can go wrong. Also, let's just stop briefly to note that regardless of Claire Coffee's hilarious Twitter campaign, Adalind doesn't actually know that Nick stole her baby. As far as she knows, the only person she has to blame for this directly is Renard; she can blame Nick and Juliette for not helping her but really, what fucking reason has she ever given them for wanting to? Yeah, not so much.



Saturday, May 10, 2014

Three Grimms! Chug the Bottle! Grimm S3E21 The Inheritance

Previously on... well, actually, there are no previouslies. Just a quote from the "Water of Life" story that has us all pounding our faces into our desks. The sad thing is I'm not even sure what the hell this refers to. There is no King, no throne, no questing anyone. There is no relationship in this episode that fits the sentiment expressed, despite the attempted implication of some feeling between father and son, and although the overall story could apply to what the keys lead to, that shows marginally more forethought and longer thematic application than they've shown in the past. So, um. The hell?




Saturday, May 3, 2014

Social Engineering For Dummies Grimm S3E20 My Fair Wesen

Previously on Grimm! New Girl came to town and turned out to be a Grimm! Albeit a Grimm who had no idea what the fuck a Grimm was. I will say this for the Rubel arc, it's doing a decent job of portraying how traumatizing that must be within the accelerated timeline constraints of television.

I severely question the relevance and efficacy of this week's epigraph, mostly as it relates to the construct of beauty and how people treat women who effect it, but I also think that's putting more thought into the placement and choice than the people who set them up do, so. We pick up where we left off, in Nick and Juliette's house, with Rubel introducing herself as Trouble in the most awkward display of nicknaming I've seen on television since... I don't know when. Let me tell to you a thing, folks, names on television are an auditory media matter. You nickname characters in television, especially when there's a gap of a week realtime between introduction and nickname, (yes, the nickname was introduced at the end of last episode but this is the first episode where it's had consistent use, which is a week gap), based on the sounds of their name. Theresa becomes Terry, a nice gender neutral name, Callista or Colleen becomes Callie, Kathleen becomes Kitty, what have you. You can nickname a character named Theresa Rubel "Trouble" in a book because it's a textual media, and therefore subject to different rules. But when you take a character introduced as either Theresa or Rubel, you do not nickname her Trouble. Just don't. Not unless you base that nickname on circumstance rather than name, which although plausible at the outside for Rubel, has no grounding in line reference or dialogue, as it should. To summarize: nicknames in film and television should be based on a) circumstance or b) the mouth noises of a person's name, and should be clearly drawn from one to the other when you intend to switch primary form of address for the character. None of that is happening for Rubel. It is fucking clumsy, and I know this show is capable of better, so cut it the fuck out.