The Devil's Only Friend Grimm S2E18 Volcanalis

We still want to kiss whoever talked them out of the previouslies, on account of needing the spare seconds to cover the infinite plots! This week we open with Mount Hood and a quote from The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs, which I will readily admit I side-eyed as being similar to a Jack and the Beanstalk quote. At any rate, there's a lot of underworld and help from unexpected sources there. Including the Devil's grandmother. We're not looking at the Gypsy Queen much no really. Anyway, we open with a badass vulcanologist and obfuscating torrents of technobabble. It at least starts out as plausible and comprehensible and then rapidly degrades into shit we'd have to double-check on Wiki, but the point is: fumaroles are openings in the crust, usually found around volcanoes but this one's quite a ways down the mountain from where you'd usually expect them, yes. Cue ominous noises in the underbrush and though she clearly is ready to go and assumes it's an animal, she's equally clearly got plenty of street smarts and instincts. I love you, random vulcanologist. Why are you going to die soon. The guy who comes after her bag full of rocks is totally a Wesen, but he seems awfully unhinged to be a crazed killer - and indeed, he is ONLY going after the rocks. Hmm. Well, there's an easy solution for this, and it's called pepper spray! It's also called calling your boss as you get the fuck out of there and letting him know where you were, where you're headed to, and what happened. It would be really nice if doing everything right translated to getting to survive in this instance, but we know it's not going to because something has to bring the Portland PD in on this case.

Meanwhile, the very strange and one-and-a-half-horned Wesen behind her shouts about showing proper respect and how it's not hers. Uh-HUH. I'm creeped out. Are you creeped out? Because yeah. Ew. And that horn that's been broken off was clearly broken by trauma of some kind, which we'd better find out about in some degree this ep, because we know the CGI department doesn't have budget to waste on this kind of detail otherwise.

I Can See For Miles And Miles (Person of Interest S1E11 Super)

This week on Person of Interest almost the first thing we get are some callbacks to Rear Window, starting with Reese in the window with the camera and the guy down below with the rose garden. So at least that right away gives us some clues as to the plot and what's going on! Of course by the necessity of having at least two if not three points of view (Finch's and the Machine's in additional to Reese's) we can guess the episode will leave the apartment at some point, if only to switch over to the library, but we can still guess the thrust of the thing.

Revenge of Behind the Scenes at Murderboarding

In the wake of one truly terrible and fucked-up week, we bring you clarity and statements of intent! Or, you know, something approximating a schedule. Grimm was preempted from airing on NBC last night, as you all know by now. In the (unlikely) event that it turns up on Hulu or iTunes, we'll have a recaplysis out prior to next weekend; otherwise it will be posted next Saturday after the ep as per usual.

Yes, we're aware of the move to Tuesdays. Here's the thing: we do this for fun, and this particular form of fun takes up an entire weekend day every single time. We sit down first thing every Saturday morning, we take turns that range in length from an hour to two hours of typing time, and we analyze the shit out of the week's episode in between doing the housework we didn't get to all week because we are busy and overcommitted people. Obviously, we can't do that on a weekday. Our goal at this point with the last four eps of this season will be to have it out by Friday; whether that's Friday morning or evening is anybody's guess. Given the lack of notice on renewal, we have no idea what to say about season three of Grimm except that we will be very, very surprised if they don't renew, given its performance relative to all of NBC's other scripted dramas. When we know if this Tuesday move is permanent, or if they're going to move it to some other day of the week yet again, we'll be able to answer what our plans for Grimmblogging next fall are.

As a result of all this schedule fuckery, we're shoving the Haven s1 and 2 episodes off until June; we had initially planned to start them as soon as Grimm finished but we'll need the extra week or ten days of lead time. Especially because there is so damn much packed into the Haven episodes. Person of Interest will continue as normal.

Behind the jump, some more of us saying fuck a lot.

The Sport of the Elected (Person of Interest S1E10 Number Crunch)

And we're back! No Grimm last week means we get a chance to acquire that thing we don't talk about. This week's episode we already know will be abnormal in some way, because hello, why are there two people in the credits? And why does Reese have a sniper rifle again?

Well, we will first be taken by the Machine to a traffic cam over on Roosevelt, with a voiceover phone call about some kid that the two men talking shouldn't have trusted, because he's always been reckless. Speaking of reckless, hey, I bet that's the kid in question having a quite horrible car accident. Since there's nobody and nothing obviously around to cause that accident, we'll bet on drugs or alcohol or both as the cause. The Machine snaps the plate number, we get a moment of fourshadowing (pun intended) the four numbers with four cameras, and before we find out any more of what went on in the past, it's over to the library of infinite knowledge for Reese's morning briefing! Er, snooping. Definitely snooping. Finch is nowhere in sight, which means it's a perfect opportunity for our spyssassin to attempt to learn some more about his employer. Down in the stacks, there's a book lying on top of the shelved books! Gee, what could that... be oh you fuckers. We will now pause while I swear copiously and in all my languages, because that's The Ghost in the Machine, which has only been used INFINITE TIMES in sci-fi and which is... well, you can see if you read the Wiki link, but in essence the purpose of the book is to point out the absurdity of Descartes' mind-body dualism. I have to go over here and bang my head against a wall, because that's an entire SERIES of essays we're not writing about this show. (Yet.) At any rate, a photo falls out, that is a very old picture of Finch and Ingram in their 20s or so with the inscription "in the beginning... N.I." on the back. Aheh. Aheh heh heh. So now we have ghost in the machine, playing god the creator, would you fuckers like to toss me any more fucking symbolism in the first two fucking minutes of show?

Brutally Handsome & Terminally Pretty (Person of Interest S1E09 Get Carter)

A quick word of housekeeping at the start, here. We've just learned today that Grimm this Friday the 12th will not be new as previously expected. It's a rerun, and the next new episode will take place on the 19th. So we'll see you on the 20th with a new recapalypse, new theories on what's going on, and most likely a whole lot of cursing!

Well, we know we're in for a shakeup when the person we see in the number slot of the opening setup is Carter. Will she be the victim? Will she be duped or blackmailed into being the perpetrator? We can't tell from the footage and either would make an interesting story, really. But before we get to that we have to learn a little bit about Carter, and so the machine takes us back to 2004 at what it helpfully labels for us is a forward operating base. And since Fallujah is mentioned shortly thereafter, we can conclude that we're in/referencing Iraq. Hoo boy.

Carter is neither the person under the hood nor the interrogator, the interrogator is an unnamed soldier (at least as far as the dialogue is concerned, the jacket names him as Daniels) and the person under the hood is someone who apparently markets/distributes/smuggles for Al-Qaeda, it's hard to tell at this point what is accurate and what is made up either to railroad someone and make their figures look good or to get him to confess to his real crime. Either is possible, and we're not given enough information to make a determination because Daniels gets about two lines out before he decides the guy is being "stubborn" enough to turn over to his boss. Really? That's all the softening up you're going to do? You're not going to make him say no half a dozen more times or intimidate him to make him think your boss is really nasty or anything? What the hell good are you, then? No, seriously, this guy having two lines worth of interrogation to establish his boss as a fearsome inquisitor and then leaving does absolutely nothing to underscore either the Doylist situation (we already know, if we're genre savvy, that it's Carter) or the Watsonian purpose of the interrogation. Anyway, so, yeah, Carter shows up, as we knew she would, in army fatigues, and addresses the guy by name. Which we will transliterate as Yusuf, because I can and because transliterations are a pain in my butt. Also worthy of note, the Machine is tagging the guy with a red box and redacting his name so we don't get to see how it would transliterate Yusuf. But we do know the machine thinks he's a terrorist, and it's probably right.

Back in the present day we hear Elias's voice over the phone, speaker, computer, something. He's concerned about a woman and that she needs to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Gee. I wonder who he could be talking about.

Twelve Meddling Kids Grimm S2E17 One Angry Fuchsbau

A quick bit of administrivia before we get started: our apologies to the Person of Interest folks for no new post this week; we'll get that up for you next Wednesday as per our usual posting schedule and just end up a week behind. Illness/injury and assorted other problems kept us from doing our usual blogwork and, well, let's just say Kitty has some renewed sympathy for Finch.

Last week on Grimm! Well, if you didn't watch last week you might never know, because they seem to have done away with the previouslies in order to steal a few precious seconds to further either their A, B, or C plots. And this is the consequence of backloading your plots, ladies and gentlemen, if they hadn't spent the first half of the season dragging out the love potion they might have been able to go more slowly with the reveal to Juliette and so on, and therefore have less plot to cram in every episode on the back half of the season. They're actually doing reasonably well with the pacing of the Royal conspiracy arc, I'll give them that (although we missed the canary this week! Hi Chirpy! We love you!) but the pacing of Juliette's arc is awkward, with a lot of things spun out solely for the sake of drama. We're not being given any visible character development on her except "Juliette goes slowly insane" either by love potion or by returning memories, and while it does give her a nice fresh chance to assert herself against all the people who seem to be inclined to lie to her, conceal things, and run roughshod over her, in the balance that's not enough against "woman goes slowly insane."

 
ANYway. I will stop ranting at you now.