Lord Knows I'm A Voodoo Child Grimm S2E21 The Waking Dead

Previously on Grimm! Families Families Families. Juliette remembers! Adalind Adalind Adalind. A brief summation of all the skeeviness, double-dealing, and backstabbing that's been going on, intercut for the sake of our sanity with the good parts of Juliette slowly being read in on the whole Masquerade. I wonder what this episode will be about.

Today on Grimm... Oh for goodness' sake. Let's have a Papa Ghede (another related figure to, and sometimes overlapping with, Baron Samedi, for those of you not up on your lore of that particular area) rhyme overlaying Eric's model castle. Gee, I wonder who the creepy zombie-controlling Wesen works for. Subtle, you guys. Real subtle. Almost didn't catch that one. We actually have no idea where that rhyme is from or if they made it up for the show, but here's a bit of light reading on Baron Samedi and Ghede/Guédés in general. As a point of interest, his name is pronounced as the French, Sah-meh-dee, or Sahm-dee. Not Sayme-dee as Hank seems to think.

Anyway. Moving on from that and into Eric's model castle, Adalind is back from her shenanigans and Eric is up to his usual shenanigans. Both of them seem to have come recently in from an evening at some upscale event probably involving dinner and almost certainly involving something from the category of concert/opera/theatre, and both of them are in black. Because we didn't already know they were the bad guys. Eric would like to think of himself as bringing the charm but what he actually brings is the smarm, tie all loose around his neck and everything, which he most likely undoes as soon as he's in the car and doesn't have to wear it anymore. Hard to say whether that's simply to give the impression of him as devil-may-care gives-no-fucks or whether that's because he doesn't like things on his neck, reminding him of other things that have been on other necks in his bloodline. Speaking of death, Eric is in a mood tonight, for that other thing that goes well with death. I have no idea why, I doubt even he knows why, but he's definitely in one of those moods and oh god hexenfetish? This is a fetish now? I need a shower. Another one, I just got out of the shower and now I want to go crawl back in and scrub myself off with steel wool, ew, Eric, could you be more slimy. Wait, no, I'm sure you could. Don't show me.

I'll just go distract myself with all the interesting things this scene gives us that are not Eric oozing all over everything. For starters, the fact that he doesn't react to her threat/promise of regaining her powers, indicating that either he's taking her for posturing (dumbass) or he knows it's possible (curious). I wouldn't put that second one past him considering most of the men in his family seem to have a hexenfetish. And then we have a functionary knocking on the door to Eric's clear irritation, okay, I'd be irritated too, but it's apparently a telephone call from the King. Which tells us that there are kings. And Eric's dismissive "which one?" which tells us that there are more than one. And the functionary's answering "your father, sir." Which tells us that whatever's going on with Papa Renard, HRM Sir Not Appearing In This Show (though I would love to see what the casting agency would come up with for the man who sired Sasha Roiz and James Frain) he is at least alive and functional enough to make a telephone call. A coherent telephone call, going by Eric's half of the conversation. We'll let slide the part where everything he says is too quick to let his father actually respond to any of it, on account of that was probably encouraged because of time crunch; they packed a lot into this episode. Apparently something has started that cannot be interfered with, or his father wants him to do some last minute things, or his father's asking what happens if they need to stop it once it's started. Which apparently, not going to happen. This gives us some idea of where the limits of his control over his pet loa/guédé are, at least! Answer: About the same as for his pet Mauvais Dentes. When the time is right, which is probably when the subject is at maximum desperation, Eric will make the proposal himself. Okay, sure. The person being inquired to is a he by his next statement, that doesn't even merit the jar, and we can all guess who is under discussion here. At least Eric's no longer assuming things on his brother's behalf at this point, he seems to have learned his lesson about Sean still being the biddable baby brother of the family. He's just glad the Families have agreed to this, blah blah blah, and then something that most likely should have gotten more of a pause between Frain's last comment and this one, because he seems to have changed topics. Over to Eric's choice of bedpartners! Apparently Eric's father doesn't like Eric sleeping around with sexenbiests. And I slide down the couch at Eric going, essentially, well you did it so why can't I. Like sleeping with a hexenbiest is the royal equivalent of smoking up or something. First of all, Eric, you dumbass, if you really thought sleeping with a hexenbiest is what landed the plural you in any particular trouble, you shouldn't be doing it. And secondly, reminding your father of something you both seem to consider a mistake (though it also sounds as though Eric considers it more a political blunder than I-wish-Sean-had-never-been-born) is not the best way to win his good graces. Dumbass. This also underscores the class prejudices at work here, with Royals on top of hexenbiests pun definitely intended, and more interestingly it puts Eric as, if not under his father's thumb, definitely under his father's putative control enough that if he's planning to overthrow his father as well as the other Families, he'd damn well better be sneaky about it. Adalind is listening at the door, and if Eric isn't expecting that I need words stronger than dumbass. And finally we have the metatextual hilarity here of Eric seriously repeating his father's mistakes even as he seems to be implying, through tone of voice if nothing else, that he won't do that. Okay, now I really do need words stronger than dumbass. Fucking moron?

From there we visit Nick and Juliette, and judging by his appearance and their clothes, this picks up directly after last episode's reunion outside poor Anton's cell. This scene is really, really anvilicious in the parallels they're engaging, from a couple just coming back after a night out (though we only know what that night out consisted of in one case) to the fact that Juliette is still the initiator and chief Discusser Of What's Going On. I would love it if this didn't involve her apologizing at length, though at least it seems pretty clear that she's apologizing for her peace of mind and it's not something Nick wants or needs her to do. As he damn well should be the one apologizing here, I appreciate that. Even if we spent the entire scene muttering and/or yelling about how she has nothing to apologize for. It's also nicely set up to give him a chance down the road to explain what was going on from his perspective, all through the last, what, eighteen months? And without Juliette pushing him right after major trauma from a case into divulging more than he might be comfortable with. Bitsie Tulloch, as usual, brings it this episode, but Giuntoli is still bringing it after last ep. Doing a good job of worried-tired-still a little scared-relieved-hopeful in combination and sequentially, as she keeps talking, and oh both of you. I'm glad they seem to be getting better; if Nick has that stability back he might do better in his professional life. (Speaking of a professional life, is Juliette's job as a vet still a thing? Does she just go to it whenever it's convenient? Has she taken a leave of absence due to personal issues? That last one would make sense, but if so the line reference for it's been cut and it's irritating.) At any rate, kissing ensues, they've shot and acted this a bit like teenagers in the car after their first date. Which in some respects they are! Dinner plans which we know will never go off because this is Grimm and that never happens unless it's a plot point, more kissing, aww, Nick looks all startled and happy. I miss happy!Nick, who is much less of an ass than sad!angry!Nick. And some confusion will be good for him. Yes, you dumbass, other people can handle knowing about Wesen, and they want to help you. I know this is a shock. We know from personal experience on that last bit! But come ON, dude.

Sunrise and set over the city, so a day goes by and that is one hell of a disturbance. Murder? Though we see no obvious wounds on the dead woman, so probably not so much! Those of us who've seen the previews know that at least one of these people is going to be a zombie. Which means the other probably already is! Oh goodie. It also probably means the woman is/was a Wesen, since the one in a rage is in woge. Painful woge, looks like, or painful zombification. Whichever. Maybe both! Wu and Franco to the domestic disturbance call it is! Clearing the front of the house like the good officers they are, and I'm not sure why Wu seems to be taking wrist pulse instead of neck pulse, where it would be stronger if it were faint/thready/any of those Badly Injured indicators. Regardless, he can't find one, so it's off to find the source of that crashing! This is a really well done fight scene: it's brutal, none of the people involved are highly trained in anything other than do the most damage as fast as possible to protect yourself/your partner, and the cops default to guns when in doubt. Plus the zombied!Wesen is acting like a methhead or similar, with high pain tolerance and no apparent ability to be knocked out. A few shallow dutch angles, a lot of shakycam, generally standard camera work for this kind of a scene. And then on into "let's try to brain Wu," which gets the poor zombified bastard four shots, center of mass. Again: well trained cops. This is also somewhat reminiscent of Quill (2x04) where Wu had to shoot the woman who landed on top of him, only in this case he has a partner so he can roll out of the way rather than getting lime green mucus on him. Ew. It looks like someone raided the set of Double Dare or a warehouse of Gak-Splat for this. (And don't you all feel old now, that was the 80s.) Thank you, boys, please go to the police shrink when you get back, you especially, Wu. You look like shit. At least they don't seem to have seen the woge!

Roll credits, and we're back to Vienna! With the other not-a-model castle-cum-hotel. Which means Adalind's retreated to her lair this evening, at least assuming we're in roughly similar timeline to Portland here. (There's no reason why we wouldn't be, but covering bases.) She answers the knock on her door in German, which is a first and indicates that she's either picked up a fair bit of German or has by now defaulted to asking in German in case of the help. (Which may be a bit silly. Lots of Austrians speak English, particularly those in the service/hospitality industries. But whatever.) Wer ist das, who is it, it's Stefania! Yay! No, wait, definitely the other thing. She comes in and makes herself at home, as you would expect out of someone who's a leader of some kind (the jury's still out on royalty as we understand it) and someone who we know is inclined to establish dominance in the most obvious and brutal ways possible. At least, from a human perspective. Still don't know if she's human, either, just that she's probably not a Hexenbiest based on how she talks about them. There's a way for Adalind to regain her powers! No, she's not going to learn what it entails! Just that it'll be difficult and uncomfortable, and at least Adalind's learned this much, learned to say it with a straight face even if she wasn't brought up to handle physical pain (which this will most likely involve), that things worth having are like that. I can't even argue with her, just with her definition of things worth having. Sign this contract! Do this thing! It's nice to see Adalind developing some spine and insisting on trying to lawyer the contract; appropriately enough, we were complaining with a friend on Twitter about how it would be nice if Adalind's badassery as a lawyer could come into play. We didn't mean like this, though! We wanted her to win something via lawyering, instead of getting screwed over in spite of trying to do the sensible thing. There may have been cranky commentary about how she's in a perfect place to play word games most often seen in deals with the Fair Folk and the like, and now they've skipped all that and gone straight for the jugular. Or, you know, the palmprint in blood, as the case may be. I guess the jugular would have soaked the parchment a bit too much and left them without someone to uphold her end of the bargain. Yeah, I don't buy this understand with your gut or heart or whatever it is that's not her head that she's supposed to be understanding this bargain with. Especially since our dear friend Stefania doesn't actually tell Adalind shit about shit as far as the contract she just signed, apart from "you should have no more pain." I assume that's in her hand, not the morning sickness and so on, though it would be nice if that were part of it. Notably, Adalind looks a little less put out by the pain and a lot more put out by the blood magic and the possibility of permanent disfiguration to her hand. Either that's less pain than the last round of shit Stefania pulled on her, or she's getting used to it. Or both. Probably both. I would bet good odds that one of Stefania's chief tactics is the sudden application of pain to bully and/or shape her targets. I would also bet it's going to backfire the next time she tries it. (No points for betting that there will be a next time; now that we've had two there almost has to be a third. Rules say so.) Our queen/speaker of the gypsies leaves, looking entirely too smug, and who is that around the corner? Frau Pech? Say it ain't so. Yeah, that doesn't even merit the jar. She does look somewhere between concerned and resigned, which is interesting. I wonder how many possibilities she had planned for, and how far down the list of preferred choices from her rival/enemy this one falls.

We'll leave that for now and go over to the crime scene, where Nick confirms our initial impression that the woman has no marks on her. Not a one. That's just fucking weird, for a guy who smashed the shit out of all the inanimate objects and then attacked Wu and Franco. I mean, Occam's Razor turns out to be correct: she was put there by someone other than the now-dead guy and was "dead" when he was added to the mix. And for whatever reason she wasn't a target, maybe because dead people are more difficult to move/smash than sweeping things off tables and bashing in picture frames? (More logically, the toxins are keeping him away from doing her damage, because it wants to perpetuate itself. Or at least protect itself.) Into the kitchen they go, to stare down at the guy who, yes, looks like he was stoned out of his gourd and thank you for the lampshade, random CSU guy, you can hang that over the dead guy's face and cover up the green slime. You know what killed him this time. Anyway. Bodies coming out, the detectives have nothing more to do here and need to start tracking down data once they get prints and any other ID through evidence. Back to the car! Where there's a creepy old guy in a top hat leaning on a cane and humming. I suppose that chasing him down in full view of a bunch of rubberneckers is a bad idea, but I wish Nick had taken more immediate note of it/commented on it to Hank in the car. You know, like a good and sensible partner? Admittedly he's taken some hard knocks the past couple days, and he's not close enough to hear the part where Reg E. Cathey is singing in French. Possibly that's actual Creole, I'm not familiar enough with the nuances of it to tell for sure, but definitely French and definitely sort of mumbling. Be creeped out. I know I am.

Back at the precinct we are attempting to deal in facts recorded on computers and not nuance, and these facts say that the woman had a history of prostitution solicitation and drugs. She is a Portlander so she wasn't brought there by Creepy Tophat Guy who, okay, from now on we're just going to give up and call Baron Samedi even though he hasn't been officially named yet. Most of the genre savvy have likely encountered some version of Baron Samedi or Papa Ghede before, yes? Yes. Plus links up above. So, this is a local woman the good Baron dragged into his plots, her last arrest which means the last time anyone verifiably saw her unzombified was seven weeks ago, and she has no connection whatsoever to the house for rent. The guy is much the same except for his last arrest was four years ago so there's no telling when he was last verifiably not a zombie. But he, too, has no connection to the house and/or the woman. It's interesting that both of them were convicted criminals if not convicted of felonies either of them, but without any corresponding anything there's no way to tell what that's indicative or probative of. But wait! What's this? It's a death certificate for the man, Richard Mulpus. Well, that's weird, considering he was very definitely shot earlier that day. It's dated three days ago. Because of course it is, them's the rules. (Drink!) The fingerprints match, and while it's possible it's either a clerical error or fingerprint spoofing (Yes, I'd buy clerical error before fingerprint spoofing because neither Mulpus has indicated they're the kind of criminal who needs to borrow someone else's fingerprints.) it's still worth a checking out. Because what the shit, this is weird even for Wesen.

While they do that we will be over in Vienna listening to Adalind German at the waiters, apparently. Claire tweets that she's been practicing that German since Season One, and we share because we love her. Two pairs of ears and many rewinds later, we have established that yes, Adalind is as near as we can tell saying what the subtitles translate her as saying. Which is unsurprising, considering Claire Coffee's not a native speaker. It wasn't half-bad, given that! It was also very quiet and not very self-assured, which might be a case of actor's worry over getting the language right slopping into the character but we're going to assume it's also that Adalind isn't very fluent in German and is still off-guard and worried about her new, involuntary bargain with Stefania. Somehow I don't think the usual clauses about under duress apply here. I'd be worried too. Whoever Mr. Krieger is (and don't you just love how we keep getting random names and no factions or motives to attach to them? I know we do! lots!), that's not who we're going to see Adalind meet, though she looks like she's in lawyer getup/mode more than femme fatale. Safe to say, then, that she is doing some kind of business while she's in Vienna. Frau Pech is not as good at Batmanning around as some characters I could name, but she does manage to startle Adalind by virtue of not being who she expects at all. Plus, threats. She's doing a not half-bad job of the false maternal concern shtick, but come on, what ELSE are we supposed to take mention of betrayal and worth more dead than alive within three sentences of each other as? That's what I thought. Although I'm not as willing to dismiss her warning about it being more difficult than that to restore a Hexenbiest's powers, nor about the one where she shouldn't trust Stefania. I'm quite certain Adalind doesn't think she can trust anyone in this city. And the bid for hexen solidarity is nice but, honestly, given Frau Pech's somewhat cavalier treatment of Adalind up to this point I doubt Adalind's buying it, especially since Frau Pech still has her powers. And Adalind seems like the type to be a little bitter over that. We will conclude with an incredibly over the top and sloshily pronounced German warning, which translates well enough (as I understand it, although I'd use 'grave' instead of 'tomb' because all I can think of off that fucking set of subtitles is West Side Story, and I'm pretty sure no one in the production staff intended that to come across as a prologue to a snappy dance number) but remains a bit ridiculously dramatic. And to Adalind's credit, she's doing a good job of playing the in-over-her-head ingenue who's wide-eyed and scared of the threats and such that Frau Pech is delivering. Partly because some of that fear is real. Partly because she's gotten used to being underestimated and is using that to her own ends, at this point. The glimpse of exasperated "well fine I will have to manipulate all of you fuckers now" right at the end as she turns back to the table is almost on par with Renard's. Our little Hexenbiest's growing up! At least a little.

On over to the case of the week, and you know, it's not that this isn't an interesting case? It's that everything else in the ep is so much better that we kind of lost track of that when we first watched. At any rate, ME lady (who is still the best) (drink!) tells them that sure, it must be a clerical error, those happen. Easier than believing in zombies, even for them! Especially since Nick got there late and saw no woge at the crime scene. But he's definitely dead now! Acute case of lead poisoning and all. They seem to have a vague intention of going over to the hospital and asking the doc who pronounced the original death if he recognizes their vic/perp, but first, the mucus! Which is not your typical mucus. I do love that we get lines like that in this show. Atypical consistency as well as color, which we could have guessed but the confirmation is nice. No, he was not on any of the usual intoxicants, they're running the in-depth tox reports now, yadda yadda, she'll let them know. Of course. And she thinks they're working on a case of mistaken identity, which would be oh so nice if it were true. The music gives us a bit of a fake-jump-scare with the "maybe he'll get up off the table!" noise, but, no. He's really dead, Jim.

Hey, Monroe! I know you really like clocks and all but Juliette's got something way more interesting for you to handle. He looks a lot more nervous about the favor being asked than he did the last few times, though considering she just visited the trailer and was damn close to getting a woge last time she was in the spice shop, it seems perfectly reasonable. The part where Bud's also there fixing his fridge (or trying to) is probably adding to the nerves. At any rate, she wants to know what Monroe was going to show her the night she went into the coma! Because Juliette is the best, and Monroe needs to sit down. He also might need a drink at this rate. Oh Bud, you are the BEST and so adorable can I scruffle your hair? Please? He would like Juliette to have come for business reasons, which I can totally see, except, no, she's there for a woge. Well, way to tell her the technical term before she ever sees Blutbad or Eisbieber game face! That's actually probably helpful, establishing that there's a set terminology that's shared, so she's not just crazy when it does go off. Particularly because of her scientific mind and tendencies, which may or may not be something Monroe would have noticed. Bud's reactions also just cannot be faked, and he's doing an excellent job of freaking right the fuck out. Oh Bud. Not everyone is as neurotic as you are. We can also see Monroe a) pulling alpha/predator status on him and b) deciding that an Eisbieber is way less scary than a Blutbad. He's right about that! He's also right that they've run out of options and Juliette is asking all the right questions and would like some goddamn answers now. Bud's stammering will be ignored right up until he brings up the excellent point that some humans can't handle the transition from ignorance to knowledge (which we will use as substitutes for the very lengthy German terms) and maybe they should do this in the spice shop? Where, yes, she can get proper treatment for the delirium if necessary. Neither one of us is of a mind to think she'll need it; she's very levelheaded, she's got a lot of background data, and the narrative would at this point fall to pieces if she went batshit over seeing Wesen. This is shot in a very comic style, as you'd expect with Bud playing the straight man. Off to the spice shop we go, on wings of squee and laughter. This is the most unexpectedly wonderful plotline of the second half of the season for us, and though we still want to throw fish at them for the pacing on the front half, this goes a long way to making up for it.

On over to the hospital, where let's check on that supposed dead supposed doppelganger of the guy they've got on the slab in the ME's morgue! Well, Mulpus came in and COD was unknown, big surprise there, and the poor harried ER doc has no idea what he looked like anymore. I can't blame him, unless there was green mucus involved I can't see a reason for any one random white male mid-30s to leave much of an impression. But he should still be in the hospital morgue! Time to go down there. Poor Hank. At least people are more used to getting the hell out of the way of a man on crutches in a hospital. We get a recitation of the facts for people just coming in that ends with the punchline "his evil twin," thank you, Nick. Hi Baron Samedi! Bye Baron Samedi. Are you recruiting again or are you just here to fuck with Nick's head? Not to say that it couldn't be both. It could be both. We would never tell a creepyass loa what to do or why to do it. And NOW Nick will 'fess up to the creepy guy in the top hat taking way too much interest and looking way too smug at the crime scene. Dammit, Nick. Well, the music says This Will Be Important Later, as if we couldn't guess, but for now we'll leave them there and go over to...

… the spice shop! YAY! Rosalee is always happy to see Monroe and Bud. And less happy to see Juliette. Not that we don't think she likes Juliette even if it comes across that way? But thus far Juliette's visits to the spice shop have been best categorized as upsetting to at least someone. If not an outright harbinger of clusterfuckery. So at this point Rosalee's heavy sigh and disappointed/resigned tone is more like the sigh of the Genre Savvy, Juliette's here, something must be going sideways. Rather like "Oh, Nick, you're at the spice shop and the heavy books are out, shit's going down and I don't get my date with Rosalee, right?" Sadly, both of these are true. We get out the summation of the situation for the benefit of Rosalee in quick order, and Bud gets to conclude so he can beg her to talk them out of it. Oh Bud. I'm honestly surprised you haven't fear-woge'd yet out of pure nerves. Monroe opines as it's a little late for that and whereas before it was just lying to her to keep her out of harm's way (which I would argue is still deserving of a punch to the face or at least a thwip to the nose), that ship has well and truly sailed after half a fucking season of being love potioned out of her mind and coma'd by a cat scratch. Not to mention the trip back from all of that. Monroe doesn't want to lie to her about this anymore, Rosalee agrees, and Bud is left out in the shivering nervous cold. Poor Eisbieber. Juliette, however, looks happy and hopeful that everyone is done lying to her. She's very forgiving of all the lying! More so than I would be. Bud hyperventilates some more, but he's out of reasonable suggestions, er, ways to stall, er, suggestions, and so it's on to the woge! We'll start let's not start with Monroe. Rosalee waits until the dramatically appropriate moment and a short crescendo of music to stop him, but stop him she does. Which is a good thing. Because a Blutbad for your first woge is probably only slightly better than a half-Zauber, so let's all thank god for Rosalee's quick thinking and Renard's ability to control himself, yes? Yes. And I say that because I don't think anyone in this room has figured out that if they explain woge to Juliette, she might start asking uncomfortable questions about the Captain and how maybe that wasn't just her hallucinations but was he really a scary half-lich-face-thing? Or at least I would if I were them, knowing that they were love potioned at each other and knowing that he's a half-Zauber and what those love potions were doing to them. He didn't, Renard does have much much better control at that, but it is a damn distinct possibility. But no one brings that up. No, we'll look to the immediate future instead, and some more cuddly looking creatures for her first woge witnessing. Like a Fuchsbau! But not without a little prep, and by prep we mean lots of repetition of the term Fuchsbau and this is really truly Rosalee here, no matter what you may see, it's still Rosalee on the inside. Capice?

Back at the morgue (and while A and I flail endlessly about no go back to the spice shop Rosalee was gonna woge for Juliette!, that's not a pacing complaint that's just a preference thing) Hank and Nick are walking with a morgue tech as he tries to locate the remains of Mr. Mulpus. There are no remains. Or Mr. Mulpus. And the morgue tech says "they don't move" until the paperwork comes through and A and I look at each other and capslock about how they totally move if they're freaking ZOMBIES. Ahem. Nobody in this morgue has read enough specfic to be cracking jokes about corpses getting up and walking out. Well, no, we saw Hank's house, Hank probably has. Hey, speaking of moving corpses, let's go over to autopsy where ME lady of awesome is preparing to autopsy Lilian O'Hara. I do appreciate the little things like the ongoing litany of facts into some sort of digital recorder device. Mostly because I'm a giant nerd. (We will barely deign to acknowledge the terrible terrible reference of case number 221-222. Really, you guys?) I'm sure ME lady of awesome does not appreciate the corpse opening her eyes and sitting up the second she presses the scalpel in to make the first incision! Point of order, though, it is not in fact unheard of for corpses to sit up in their coffins or on their autopsy tables or what have you due to muscle and gas movements during the decomposition process. A similar thing to corpses farting. However, the opening of the eyes is a bit much and worthy of some shrieking and leaping backwards. Poor ME lady. I hope she's not permanently scarred like this, she is, as we've said many times before, the best. (drink!) (and then go watch Serpent and the Rainbow) (sleep tight)

Now we get to go back to the spice shop, although we start with a slow pan up from the side of one of the counters where some plant is doing a marvelous impression of a nervous system with its roots. I'm sure that form of introduction to the scene wasn't on purpose at all, no, really. Rosalee is repeating that it's still her, and they've told her about Wesen and woge (which is nice because it means we don't have to hear it for the umpteenth time) and this was supposed to be Nick's last ditch effort to convince her, etc. Juliette would like them to get on with it. We would like them to get on with it. Every viewer who's been watching for the last half of the season would like them to get on with it. So Rosalee takes a couple of breaths because this is probably going against a whole lot of unconscious social conditioning for her and we get a slightly different delivery on "This is a Fuchsbau" from the commercial. But the woge! We do get a woge. Juliette's eyes pop wide, one eyebrow lifts, I start sliding down my chair in giggles. Bud looks nervous, Juliette "ohmygod"s and hustles her butt out the door, and I'm under the desk laughing. Everyone freaks out. Even the music is freaking out. They get about as far as staring at each other after a few babbled suggestions before she comes back in though. Because Juliette is also the best (drink!) and although this is freaking her out not a little bit, having first knocked down all her conceptions of what is real and what isn't without her consent or any explanation, this is much better. Starting out with first the names and descriptions of the concepts, then the manifestations so that she has something to attach to the words gives her a sense of being able to control her understanding of the weirdness, if not the weirdness itself. It's a common trick even in the real world, naming your fears or doubts, or naming a problem or defining your terms helps to shape and control it within your mind and make it more familiar and more bearable, gives you a better ability to deal with it. As Juliette is having to deal with the world not being as she understood it for 30-something years. But she has terms, names for things, and empirical evidence that this is true, and that helps. Bud would like this to be over now, but Juliette has more questions, starting with does that mean everyone here is a Fuchsbau? Oh honey. Honeys, since we're including the blatantly freaked out Bud here. No, Monroe is a Blutbad, and I really love the dialogue here where Monroe defines a Blutbad as what he is. It isn't scientifically accurate but what Juliette needs right now isn't so much scientific accuracy as grounding in familiarity, and reinforcing the idea that a Blutbad is an aspect of a person familiar to her and trusted by her is a good thing. Plus, it'd be really awkward if he had to explain that it's (bad) German for "bloodbath." Along the lines of things that would be really awkward: Monroe's woge. Especially when they have a nice, cuddly Eisbieber to go next! (Though there's two schools of thought on that: one to save the worst for last and one to save the cuddliest to ease her down from scaryass Blutbad.) Fortunately, predictably, and hilariously the announcement that Bud goes next works him up into such a pile of nervous wreck that he woges without even meaning to. Or noticing, at first. Juliette's jawdrop is the most adorable thing ever. So is Bud's embarrassment. You guys. I want to pet all of you now.

Monroe and Rosalee certainly look like they want to pet Bud, or laugh at him, and I can't really blame them although points to them for not doing more than cracking small smiles. Poor Bud. Also to Bud's credit the first thing he asks when he regains his wits is if Juliette's okay. Not only is she okay, she sounds like she wants to pet him too. Because Bud is, say it with me now! The best. Also the adorablest. So she asks what he is and his brain shorts out completely, leaving it to Rosalee to provide the term Eisbieber. Poor, poor Bud and his brainfreeze. Right, and now Juliette would like to know why they wanted Rosalee and Bud to go first, because she's not dumb, there's something about this they aren't telling her. "Take a little getting used to" is at least a kind way to say it? along with a brief moment of heartwarming for the expression of trust. There's little more preamble here, because both scriptwriters and characters are out of excuses or reasons to delay, and Monroe goes through about the quickest woge he can manage both on a Watsonian and, I suspect, Doylist level. It has to, after all, be slow enough for the audience to register that it happened. Juliette does cringe away and so does Bud, but she does almost immediately after turn back to Monroe, more of a "oh dear god put the bandages back on did I have to see the seeping wound" type cringe. See? Much less bad than everyone feared! Though it's nice to have the writers reinforcing an outside perspective; no matter how cuddly Monroe has become to us over the last couple seasons he is still the big bad wolf. So she recaps what she's learned to make sure she's learned it correctly, and Nick? No, a chorus of denials says he's not Wesen. He's like Juliette. Except for being a Grimm. Yeah, at this point the explanations break down, I think because none of these particular Wesen (which makes me wonder if there are any Wesen who do) know what a Grimm is or how they do what they do. None of the lady bloggers here know, either,  but we have theories. Oh yes, we have many theories. Right now, Juliette is more concerned with who has the stiff drinks. Stiff drinks for everyone! На здоровье.

On over to the Rom camp and have I mentioned how much these stereotypes make us twitch? Yes? Okay, but not this episode, so I'm mentioning again. Wherever the camp is, it's not so far out that there's no cell service, because hello, Stefania, you have a phone call. Adalind is setting the cat among the pigeons, as it were! By coughing up everything that Frau Pech said at that little pre-coffee surprise (pun intended) with a lot of anger and fear. I think most of the anger and some of the fear is real; she knows this is a move with unpredictable results but now that she's been made aware of the extent of the rivalry/enmity between the women she's going to use it. Which is fair. I'd use it, too. Might not be quite this blatant about it, but the sad part is, it's working. The sadder part is, Stefania thinks shoving Hexenbiests' worst traits in Adalind's nose and reminding her what she hasn't got to go along with the behavioral tendencies is going to accomplish a damn thing. Other than pissing Adalind off, but at this point she knows it's supposed to piss her off, so she's using that and, we hope, stomping on/dealing with the anger before making her next move. I mean, really. What kind of dumbass move was THAT. Though sharing the information probably caught Stefania off guard and made her more vicious than was strictly necessary. Adalind hangs up with a look that says she is bloody well not going to sleep well tonight, knowing that she just poked a beehive. Bear's den? Whatever. And Stefania proceeds to throw a shitfit over Frau Pech's meddling, which, honey, you have known her for years. You two keep saying that. I don't know what the fuck either of you expected, but lack of fucking with each others' affairs should not have been on that list.

Meanwhile back at the precinct, Wu updates the boys on the not so dead Lilian O'Hara! To be greeted with a sort of angled camera, I can't tell if the camera itself is tilted or if that's Hank at an angle because of the crutches, but it's noticeable. And off to the hospital they go before Wu can even finish his suggestion! Poor Wu. Lovely delivery on all of that and dear god, Reggie Lee, how so awesome? Speaking of, weren't we supposed to get a first name for him sometime this season? Grump. A and I will facedesk repeatedly over how there is no Masquerade anymore give it up you lot and wonder how many plans Renard has in place to deal with the eventual lifting of the Masq in Portland. Because if I were him I damn well would have contingencies by now.

Anyway, with that out of the way we move on back to Vienna. I love that we can tell this by the dark and the lights of the city at this point, both because of time zones and because Vienna is always dark for dark doings. Ahem. Plus I suspect it's easier to shoot on the stage and have it be believably Vienna at night. Anyway! It's Renard's canary all hunched up on a bench bundled in a coat that looks more Renard-sized than him-sized, and waiting for someone. No bets as to whom. And indeed, Frau Pech enters from the right, crosses his field of view, and plops herself on the bench. Closer than he'd like, by the way he's leaning away from her immediately, and jesus, what the fuck is the history between these two? What the fuck has Frau Pech DONE to all her potential allies in this country? Because it sounds like she's not welcome at court anymore, and she's definitely done something to Chirpy to terrify and piss him off, and in conclusion, the hell. Though that does answer the question of what she's getting out of this, she wants back in the Renard family's good graces. This scene is also staged and shot and acted rather similarly to the scene between Renard and Catherine in Love Sick, where he looked like nothing so much as one of her victims. Here, the canary looks more like a terrified young boy and Frau Pech more like an overbearing creepy mother, but the parallels are very, very close. His body language is closed off, wrists and ankles crossed, shoulders hunched at least as far as I can tell under all that coat. Her body language, by contrast, is open and almost looming at him, especially as she turns and lays her arm on the back of the bench. The maternal look is presumably mostly there because she's too old to be sexually appealing to most people any longer, and it's very Crone-ish. At any rate, she wants an audience with Eric, who she calls Eric, which is an interesting bit of informality. Though I suppose it helps on a Doylist level with clarity, it also indicates that she (or maybe the court/family in general?) doesn't stand on ceremony. She also phrases things to the canary so that it's unclear who's pregnant and by whom, never mind how she knows it. Not that the poor canary expects to get it out of her, but if he doesn't ask he damn sure won't. Seven months! Finally, something we can use for a fucking timeline on this show! Frau Pech, you psychotic twit, nobody believes that you don't want to see the havoc royal blood on the open market would unleash, least of all Chirpy. Nobody. And we get the ew stop touching him moment, similar to the one with Catherine, only the canary doesn't have the presence or power to force her to back off. Poor guy. He really is everyone's buttmonkey, isn't he. But that's the benefit of it, in some ways, is they tell you things they wouldn't tell others because of course you couldn't possibly have the power to do anything with it. Who'd like to place a bet that he became Renard's man simply because Renard was the first one to treat him as an actual human being, instead of an object to be bulled through when they want something from the heir proper? Which latter he certainly seems to be, placing him quite close to Eric in terms of trust (at least, prior to this season) if not in terms of observable power.

We'll leave him on the park bench looking incredibly ill at ease and probably wishing for a stiff drink and go over to the hospital, where the Baron leans over and has some power over his victims, I guess? Since there's a faint spark of recognition as poor Lilian O'Hara looks up at him and we can guess what's coming after the ad break. Why yes! It's an empty hospital bed! And a very confused nurse and less confused but definitely annoyed cops. Nothing there, nothing at all, she wasn't supposed to be moved and there was a 15 minute gap for the Baron to come in and grab her, which is plenty of time and they both know it. It also gives them a time frame to look at the surveillance footage, so it's crutching down endless hospital hallways again. Poor Hank. The short clips on the case of the week, by the way, are not helping our lack of interest in it, even if it seems likely that they're designed that way to cleverly slip something by us. And that right there is why we still do these blow by blow. 

Speaking of by-blows (what), let's visit with the Captain in his office! We start off with a shot from between the blinds so we know there's conspiracy afoot, we've seen this angle and so on before, although not quite so blatantly, lately. This time he doesn't switch to the burner phone for talking to his canary, which is interesting; maybe he's decided that with the bomb there's less point in maintaining rigorous secrecy or maybe whatever uptick in worrisome activity caused the need for the face to face has subsided. French! Excellent. (You can hear that in whichever language you prefer.) The subtitles are again largely accurate, though there are places where I severely question the fact that some of the words sound like loan-words from English. (Un deal? Vraiment?) Which is entirely possible for someone who grew up in a French/English bilingual city (Roiz) and far less likely for someone who probably learned formal court French. At least not English loan-words considering he seems to have grown up initially in either Switzerland or Austria. Still, they probably didn't expect this level of detailed linguistic analysis, so we'll just be over here giggling. Anyway. Notable tics: Renard answers the phone with 'oui', indicating that whatever phone the canary is using it's one that's a recognizable and probably habitual number, telling Renard who it is and where it's from. Yes, the canary says the Family, singular, implying that he's a member of the Renards either by name or by blood or, extremely unlikely due to that ring, by employment. At the most likely distance he's another bastard who's been legitimized in the same way Renard has and is either viewed as less grasping, is not a half-Wesen, or both. Apparemment I would translate as apparently, not supposedly, but it's close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. Confiance a votre source could also be translated as, are you confident in your source, which is a far different thing in their world from trust. Which is a thing that's rarer than babies of Royal blood on the open market. Also, Renard says kidnap the baby, not steal. It's a fine degree of nuance, but it implies greater agency and concern for the child than stealing, which implies an object more than a person. With the linguistic analysis out of the way, let's talk about their attitudes! The canary turns right around from the bench, it's implied, and calls Renard with the news. His body language throughout this and the preceding scene is scared, his face is tense and there is no sign of anything resembling smile lines or relaxation at all. When he's standing for the second conversation his shoulders are hunched and, pretty much, he looks like he's expecting to be beaten? He also sounds a little shaken still, which in combination with however well Renard knows him makes it a safe assumption on our Prince's part that the canary has not, in fact, told anyone else yet. An aside of amusement with regards to costuming: their suits, shirts, and ties are nearly identical apart from Chirpy has a coat on due to being outside at night. I mostly put this down to coincidence, but it amuses me. At any rate, Royal children, it sounds like, are commonly put up for grabs for whoever can pay the most and that lends whole new depths of ouch to at least Renard and probably Chirpy's backstories. Because it means they stood a good chance of being sold to the highest bidder at one point, too. Certainly we can assume Renard was in that position or at least saw half-siblings and cousins in that position at a minimum, with both the blase attitude and the mild concern for the child's well-being he lets through in this phone call. It's possible to probable that's more than mild, but he won't let himself think about it too hard until the child is a reality. And until he knows more about the situation, because there are so many variables here neither he nor his canary can account for as yet. And, of course, there's the facedesk-worthy part to this where for a change we know something Renard doesn't know: the child is his, almost certainly. Still a chance it's Eric's, but a better chance, the way they're running this sub-plot, that it's his from that one night stand with Adalind. But Frau Pech didn't give the canary enough information to make that leap, and we can guess via seeing Eric's dalliances and hearing about his father's mistresses that at least the Renard family dips their wicks into whatever will hold still long enough, so it's not like there aren't probably plenty of options. Assuming Eric hasn't killed off anyone else capable of siring a child who stands to inherit, of course.

With that bombshell out of the way, we go back to hospital security footage, still reeling. Yes, that's both O'Hara and the Baron, and it's useful to know that he's not so careful or so good or both, that he's not kept off the cameras. She's in a wheelchair, too, which says some interesting things about the progression of this whatever it is, but they'll take all the footage. To go, please. Hi Wu! You bring us a tox report on Mulpus! That is like lots of goodies, do go right ahead with that now that Nick has you on speaker. Tetrodotoxins, scopolamine, and datura. They did a good job with the science on this, so let's break it down! Tetrodotoxins are the primary paralytic and also associated both in science and in popular fiction with pufferfish. They function as a sodium blocker, and paralyze all voluntary muscular function as well as acting as a nerve deadener. Scopolamine is most commonly used in fiction these days as a truth serum, but it has a number of other uses, legally as an anti-nausea drug and illegally as a hallucinogen, euphoria-inducer, and in the right quantities and applications it can induce amnesia. It's found in the Datura plants, making this list of toxins a bit questionable though I suppose it's also possible that scopolamine was introduced separate from the plant. Datura itself is also known in several varieties as jimson weed or thorn-apple; more people may recognize its hallucinogenic and delirium-inducing properties under that name, jimson weed. Taken all together, though, this cocktail will fuck you up in the very specific way of leaving you unable to do anything but continue living (and possibly not even that if the tetrodotoxin paralyzes your breathing apparatus and suffocates you) and hallucinate wildly, with effects lingering in unpredictable durations. In short, this is pretty much drug for drug the approximate cocktail used by some Haitian vodoun to poison people and create zombis. Somebody on staff has clearly read Serpent and the Rainbow. (This book is, by the way, very detailed and useful at least as a starting point if you're going to look into such things. For writing your own books, of course.) Wu will leave us with a crack about the woman being kidnapped being too weird even for Portland, thank you, this lampshade factory is in full production I see, and yes, Hank, you need to find the Baron. Stat. He is, of course, off getting more victims! This time with a bog standard roadside assistance trap and some truly, truly fucking awful double entendres. Just in case we didn't know he was a villain. Villains always make fucking awful jokes like that, didn't you know? Get on into the car and be sprayed with creepy green slime! For ease of transportation. Sigh, Baron. Sigh. We get to see him woge this time, and damn but he does look like a pufferfish. Blowfish. Whatever you want to call it, their native habitat in the States is along the Gulf Coast and yeah, okay, if I were a pufferfish Wesen in the deep South I would totally use the Baron Samedi mythos too. Notably, the guy he attacks this time may or may not be Wesen; we don't know because he doesn't woge and there's some reason to believe that the toxins work on Wesen and humans alike. We also assume Reg E. Cathey found the scenery spiced and flavored to his liking!

On over to the trailer, where Nick and Hank seem to have decided that if it's inexplicable, it's either Wesen or can be helpfully explained by the books of infinite knowledge! They're not wrong. One of these days they're going to find something NOT IN THOSE BOOKS, my god. For right now, though, they've pulled up the right journal and are reading from it! Alright, I suppose not many Wesen go around in a top hat all the time. Apparently we're starting with actual Haitian history which resulted in a copious amount of swearing, let me tell you. I may have threatened to take people's books and wikipedia away until I stop saying "fuck" so much. Which could take a while. At any rate, the date on the top of the entry Nick is reading from is 1791, the start of the Haitian revolution, which did start with a Vodou ceremony in which a priestess of Ezili danced and a black pig had its throat slit. For those of you not familiar with Vodou, Ezili is a spirit or goddess associated in popular fiction with lust and fertility. In the case of the actual historical ceremony the iteration of Ezili was more of the fertility and motherhood aspect, but since Grimm isn't digging too hard into specifics and since this is a journal written by a person of questionable reliability and zero familiarity with the religion, sure, why not, alluring dancing woman with knife. You know, of all this first chunk of reading, the part I question most is why the Wesen of a French-colonized country nicknamed a priest in German. I'm just saying. The fuck. Die Buchmann is the only bit of German we get in this entry, presumably because the rest of it is leaning on actual history and Vodou, almost all of which is either Yoruba based or French-based. ANYway. We have a break in the narration to discuss the furnishings of the trailer, for which I want to strangle everyone (despite its adorableness) because it muddies the link between this Buchmann, as the slaves? presumably called him (or maybe that was the Royals?) and the figure called Baron Samedi. I can't quite make out the other names, though the second one is probably "cimetière" which means cemetery, the middle one is probably Le Croix with way too much 'cchhhh', and kriminel (as it's spelled in the book), well, do I have to translate that last one? Hank reads him as described by the Grimm writing the journal as the head of the "goad" family of loa, and I'll stop right there to correct his pronunciation to "gede" or "geh-deh." Because it is. As far as that goes, though, it's not horribly inaccurate? Baron Samedi is the dark counterpart to Papa Ghede, who is a psychopomp, a spirit for the journey between the land of the living and the realm of the dead. And as the name would suggest, Papa Ghede is indeed the head of that family of loa, who are spirit-divinities (not the prime divinity but lesser divinities, in a way?) to whom most acts of Vodou are committed. I could go on and on and on about Papa Ghede, Baron Samedi, and the loa, and aren't you glad this trailer scene is short so I won't. Interestingly, though, the current tophat wearing Blowfish Wesen hasn't yet pulled any sort of Haitian or Louisianan Vodou role around him. This is the only actual mention of Baron Samedi that we get in the episode, the rest is an oblique reference from an actual Prince to what might be an actual Baron and inference based on years of religious research for the real-life practice and horror movies for the depictions. Hank gets to the part about the Wesen being a Cracher-Mortel whose spit induces a death-like trance, etc. The tetrodotoxin I can see, but does he have to eat a lot of jimson weed to get the rest of it? Inquiring minds! Since pufferfish don't actually generate those aspects of the zombi concoction. Anyway. We interrupt this dip into Haitian and Wesen history for a quick summons from Monroe at the spice shop! Notably he doesn't sound agitated and doesn't babble as he is wont to do when upset, so Nick doesn't seem to notice that anything might be wrong. We can see that Monroe's a bit edgy because we can see him on our screen as the scene cuts between the two sides of the conversation, but that's it. Well, and they'll be over to the spice shop as soon as they're done here! Fair enough.

While Nick and Hank finish up at the trailer, the Baron will continue to sing creepily in French (Creole? his voice is too damn deep and he's too quiet to tell for sure) and we get a nice closeup on his skull cane. Never trust someone with a top hat and a skull cane, kids, either he really does have Baron Samedi powers or he thinks it's cool to pretend he does. Either way, nothing good will come of it. (Well, no, the third option is he's dressed for a LARP, but in our case we'd probably know the guy then. Or be able to tell by the dice bag/Crown Royal bag/character sheet/gaming books sticking out of his bag.) This is not a guy dressed for a LARP. This is a guy ready for mayhem, and at this point I have to assume he's going after humans and Wesen without prejudice, because there is no way to pick a bus that's full of nothing but Wesen. Not for sure, not as a newcomer to the city, standard disclaimers apply since we know he's working for the Pustule, but still. Spitting, screaming, now more zombies! Yay!

If we hadn't already suspected the Baron was working for Eric, this cut after the ad break would have convinced us before the last scene. From zombie acquisition to oh hello dear brother so very NOT nice to see you in Portland. He is, of course, not calling and telling Renard until he's on the ground, because why give your little brother a chance to make plans? I feel obligated to note, since we now have two examples of Royals or those connected with Royalty getting out of private planes, that the design on the side of his nonspecifically marked plane is different from the one on the side of Mia's nonspecifically marked plane. I have no idea if this is intended to be significant, I just note it here so that we can have a reference if it is (his is two narrow navy blue lines one arcing over the other, hers is two lines of rich but paler blue and gold intertwining) and so that you can appreciate how utterly obsessed with detail we are. Anyway. Eric! And his hair. Because my god, that fucking hair, Eric do you own a hairbrush? You are a Prince. You can fucking well afford one. Or several. Or a factory of them. Apply one to your hair. In the category of other things I would like to fix about him that don't involve violence to his person, his shirt is unbuttoned far enough that we can clearly see he is not wearing an undershirt, and if my Very Dignified Grandfather taught me anything it's that real gentlemen wear undershirts beneath their dress shirts. Seriously, he was a banker, he was Mary Poppins banker dignified. Eric is not a gentleman. He is not wearing an undershirt. He barely has his blazer buttoned beneath that coat. Also of note, less an Eric note and more of a costuming note, his blazer is so well matched to the color of his shirt that in several shots it looks like he's just hastily thrown on and buttoned a shirt, then threw on his coat over that. The overall effect is to give him an almost Tony Stark-esque look of indolence, without the Stark charm. So. The phone call, greetings, I don't blink nearly as much at Frain's French as I expected to, possibly because there's very little of it. Renard's tone is mild to start with, while Eric's tone is smirking all over the phone. Eric, you're positively dripping smug, it's uncouth and disgusting. As we get a more long shot we see two airport attendants and what looks like one bodyguard doing quite frankly an only competent job of bodyguarding, and barely that. Also a red carpet. He must be a very important person. (He has a model, not a tower, though.) Eric hopes that they can carve out a little family time while he's here. Carve? Carve? Really, Eric? Can I punch you yet? Renard's eyes dart around the room as he gets up on "here?", because suddenly Portland isn't safe anymore. Not even his office is safe, this isn't restlessness that's making him get up, this is fear. Well-controlled in his voice and even in his face, but actual fear and nervousness and he has to look around at his surroundings, make sure he's not being overheard, make sure Eric's flunkies aren't at his door as they speak. Because if Eric would ambush him from the airport, he would ambush him at his place of business. Or home, but either the writers have had enough of that or Renard is now too used to people breaking into his condo to bat an eye at it.

What brings Eric and his hair all this way? Well, his dear brother does, of course. You'll note that when I described Renard's tightly reined in fear above I didn't mention surprise, because he's not. He had to know this was coming, but by the wider eyes and the checking his surroundings he didn't expect it this soon. Still, Eric has some important family business to discuss, and he isn't even pretending to be in Portland stopping through or for any other reason than to fuck with Sean. Apparently it's time to bury old hatchets and look to the future. By the look on Renard's face as he agrees, his idea of burying old hatchets is to bury them in his brother's head. I'll make the popcorn. A few more pleasantries which include Eric leaving his brother to stew over this abrupt turn of events for about 24 hours, because that's exactly what putting off dinner meetings until tomorrow is about, and they conclude with trying to out-toothy each other through the phone. Personally, I think Sean wins that one. Largely by virtue of sheer self-control, of which Eric and his hair have precious little. (Exhibit A: the smug.) But barely do I have time to wonder if Renard's going to throw the phone across the room in a panicked fit of anger than it's ringing again somewhere else! Somewhere where it's either dark or night. No, night, given that the person on the other end is getting out of bed and turning on the light and hi Chirpy! It's Renard's canary. In his pajamas. I can't quite express in English or French how adorable that is. Japanese will have to do, some of you may know the word I'm thinking of, it involves lots of 'eeee' at the end. Squee aside, it's interesting to note that both the canary and Renard sleep in full formal pajamas, where Eric sleeps in sweats just in case there was any doubts as to the fucks he does not give. However, the canary and Eric both sleep with their royal rings on whereas Renard's ring is on his bedside table, possibly in case either of them needs to assert some authority or show proof of their identity for some emergency int the middle of the night that Renard, being in Portland, wouldn't be subject to? Lacking more representative samples of sleeping Royals it's hard to say, but it's an interesting set of observations here. Albeit not one we expected to be able to make.

The canary is assuming something is wrong to be woken up in the middle of the night, and he's remarkably cogent for whatever hour it is there. He's correct about that first part, and probably not used to dealing with Renard in a fit. Yes, this is as close as he gets to a fit, he's incredibly pissed off that he didn't have warning and is initially inclined to blame the one person who could have gotten him that information. And in some ways it probably is Chirpy's fault for having tipped Eric off at some point, which is the most likely reason for him not to have known and to have been apparently misled, along with everyone but the pilot and the muscle Eric and his hair took with him. But Renard also knows that a broken tool is a useless tool, and moreover he seems to have some bond of camaraderie or companionship with his canary; they appear to have similar goals and are definitely in similar situations where they trust each other and nobody else, not to this degree. He further knows that his brother may be out here to fuck with him, but - and the canary confirms this by saying that Eric would never have gone without the family's blessing/permission - there's got to be another reason. Or three. Because his brother is also fundamentally lazy, and will never put forth this much effort in order to accomplish a single task. It's interesting to note that Eric would need the family's blessing to go to Portland; this implies strongly that Renard's deal with the family was a) made with his father and b) did in fact involve a certain amount of "I get Portland and the rest of you fuck the fuck off and leave me alone." Which goes a long way toward explaining why Cousin Menton's bullet to the face last season hasn't had any direct repercussions; they were intruding on his territory and he was within his rights to deliver a message. If that message was engraved on the tip of a 9mm bullet, well, so be it! At any rate, Renard slowly calms down and develops a course of action over the course of the call, which is mostly what we've come to expect from him: gather as much intel as possible, go to the meeting with Eric, wait and see what else turns up that's useful. It's not a great course of action, but it's the safest one available at the moment. We also get confirmation that the canary is supposedly in a place where he should know Eric's movements, though I still question the assertion we've seen somewhere that valet is the appropriate title. It may be! It may not. We don't have enough data to make that call yet. Much to our seething impatience. Speaking of seething, it is an indication that valet isn't the correct term as Renard never drops the 'vous' in his speech even when clearly pissed off. Nor swears, despite what the subtitles will tell you. He's still affording the canary the status of formality, which is also a bit curious given the camaraderie they seem to share? Apparently it's not enough to make them familiars or intimates in pronoun choice. Other than the greater emphasis on the swearing in the subtitles, they seem to be largely accurate. I still wonder which came first, the French dialogue from the fluent speaker and the native speaker, or the subtitles which they then had to translate. A question for the ages. Or the interviewers.

Hey, the Baron has a whole refrigerator unit full o' zombies! THAT'S going to end well! In a very familiar shipping yard and I bet they reused the set from the Mauvais Dentes entirely. And with good reason on all kinds of levels, but SIGH. He does control them, not that we know how, here we're either getting into the magic portion of Wesen powers or seeing the effects of a lot of skilled and manipulative prep-work. The zombies are to rest, because their Mardi Gras is coming; well, that's not ominous at all. He's really bought into the whole loa thing. Honey? You are not a loa. You are a Wesen. (A: I take benzos, which are a palliative for datura. I most certainly can and will punch you in the face, fucking creepy pufferfish Wesen.) Not that he believes it, as he padlocks the storage unit and stalks off whistling and humming. Mutter mutter crank.

On over to Renard's office, where he's finally being read in on the case now that they've confirmed it involves Wesen! Oh my god, I love you guys. I especially love how they've quietly bought into Renard-as-Prince to whom they bring Wesen issues because he was their Captain first. It's a very, very nice bit of manipulation that Renard didn't even have to do anything to earn once he was revealed as the half-Zauber Prince of Portland. Hank, of all people, names the Wesen of the week and explains what the fuck its capabilities are, possibly because he's in the best mental and emotional state overall and especially when it comes to dealing with Renard. Nick still looks a bit like a petulant teenager when he's dealing with his Captain, though to be fair, RENARD. You were in the trailer digging through it, and Nick knows it, and your disingenuous comment about books is gonna get you punched one of these days. He's also taking Hank's measure, probably as he considers whether or not he's going to have a canary by the end of the day tomorrow (noooo don't kill Chirpy you bastards) and tries to assess the strength of his support at home. More blatantly than usual, and Hank tries to deflect it, but for all that he's not entirely okay with it he is getting good at handling the weird Wesen shit. The rest of the scene is mostly Renard hammering on the "hey dumbass this is obvious" type questions, and yes, Nick, there's something you're not seeing. Renard probably should be telling them both about Eric right this second, but I can understand the desire to acquire more data first if not wholly condone it, as tight a timeline as they're working on. The thing Nick isn't seeing, of course, is that this is all being set up as a trap for his benefit (though the first incident may have been an experiment for proof-of-concept), and why on earth he doesn't just examine the facts to see if that's a supportable conclusion, as many times as he's dealt with assassins since his Grimmwakening, I do not know. Nick, grow more of a brain, please. Or listen to your Grimmstincts properly. Or something. Renard will also lampshade for us the question of, will Lilian O'Tara or whatever's left of her also become violent and psychotic? Well, yes, probably. There's a moment of shared cop annoyance where nobody likes that she's going to have to do that before they can find her again, it's not quite on par with the misery of "the serial killer will have to kill again before we can catch him," but it's a similar tone. They'll keep Renard updated provided events don't run away from them, which I am not placing any bets either which way on, and back over to the model castle we go!

In this case it's not Eric we're looking at but our dear canary! Well, Renard's canary, and our dear little friend or something. Yes, we've grown rather fond of the poor guy fluttering around in the very hazardous darkness. He's breaking into Eric's desk! WITHOUT GLOVES ON. CHIRPY. GET YOU SOME GLOVES. Even if fingerprinting a broken-into desk isn't the first thing likely to occur to Eric, it might at some point down the line, so get you a pair of freaking gloves already. Sigh. Spycraft is definitely not his forte, and it's a good thing he's cute. This does not, by the way, look like the same office in which we saw him doing business with Adalind in so many senses of the word. For one thing that desk is different, there's a wooden file organizer on it that wasn't on the other desk, and what little we can see of the surroundings indicates different paintings on the wall and different bookends on the desk, as well as a vase that doesn't appear to be there in the other study. It looks more like a desk that sees use and less like a desk to show off Eric's power, at any rate. The canary rummages through the desk and comes up with three folders. We also don't get a good enough glimpse into the desk to understand why he pulls these as being relevant but not anything else in there, though possibly he's familiar enough with the contents of Eric's desk to know what the daily, more public or at least less incriminating things are and what he might want to look into. The three folders have names on them! Conrad Henlein, which is moderately German although if it were full German that would probably be Konrad. Vojtech Tuka, which has got to be a romanization of some language I don't know off the top of my head, and Thomas Schirach. I've got nothing except that it sounds like a very bizarre spelling of Chirac. None of these, by the way, match up with any of the names on the list on that flash drive currently in Renard's possession. We checked. This is why you love us. He starts with the first one, hey, that's a German passport! Sans photo, as he says, without photos, indicating future use as an alias for a person yet to be determined. The interesting part here is less that it's there and more what it's paired with, which we see from both the glimpse of the document as he puts the German passport down and what he says as he picks the Czech Republic (hah! language I don't know!) one up, is a death certificate. (Certificats de décès.) At least I assume that says death certificate at the top, I don't read Czech. Which is interesting because it might imply that Chirpy does. Possibly more likely that he reads German, though, the document under the passport for Conrad Henlein said Sterbeurkunde, death certificate. Point of interest, a quick google images search indicates that's a way more formal looking death certificate than most hospitals would give out. But that's also a quick google images search, so take that for what it's worth. That's the first two folders, the third, for Thomas Schirach, is empty. Which is the least helpful since that name could match half a dozen different countries at least. Like a good canary, though, he will now take photos of the documents before putting them back hopefully in the order and positioning that he found them in, though I don't trust his limited spycraft that far. I am pretty sure, though, that a Cold War era spy or before would have killed for the facility of a modern day smartphone; this is the sort of scene that would have had one of those tiny sideways cameras with real film that could be destroyed, back in the day. Here it's as simple as taking the picture and emailing it to Renard or to a drop box of his own choosing.

Meanwhile back in Portland, we go over to the spice shop! Where Nick is nervous and defensive and maybe a little guilty looking (GOOD. FEEL ALL THE GUILT, NICK, YOU COULD HAVE DONE THIS AGES AGO) and Rosalee, Monroe, and Bud are explaining what happened with Juliette. All in their respective idiosyncratic ways, of which Bud's is still the least helpful but most adorable. Oh Bud. His leading with Juliette walking out is idiotic, but it paves the way for the others to explain that she came back, not because she was in severe distress but because she wanted to know ALL THE THINGS. Like a good scientist. I love that Hank admits so readily to not having taken it well any of the times Monroe woged for him, like you don't when your first impression of the Blutbad is being knocked over by him in the woods in the middle of a manhunt. And then we get a brief glimpse into Wesen life that indicates maybe they aren't born knowing what woge looks like, even if they're born in woge, and thus have to learn from their parents. Bud's, in this case, being an accidental one. Aww. He also brought the lampshades about people's inability to pronounce the German, thank you, yes, those are mouthfuls even for us. Rosalee has a cluebat and is not afraid to beat Nick with it, Bud has another lampshade about the impossibility of Nick being a Wesen (really? our TOES), and look, yes, you can tell her all of the truth now, Nick. That's a good thing, and you should have DONE IT YOURSELF. The closest we'll get to that kind of smacking him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper that we so badly want to do ourselves is Monroe's "we all have," and, alright then! That's that, and we'll move back to Vienna again for a fan service shot of Adalind examining herself in the mirror. No, at two months in Hollywood pregnancy she wouldn't be starting to show, not really.

Something more pleasant than a baby whose chief anticipation at the moment is as a commodity. Juliette is setting a very romantic table for her and Nick's long-awaited and much interrupted dinner, and trying to reassure herself as she does. Again with the rich colors, though this time a neutral (for the symbology in this show, that is) indigo blue rather than her usual red or green. But it does look good on her! And she's all made up and nervous and Nick's at the door, and he's nervous, and he got her flowers. And this kind of open admission of feelings with no hesitation or ego is exactly the kind of boyfriend we came to see in Nick last season, so it's good to see him returning as they begin their relationship anew! Hey, speaking of honesty without hesitation, Nick will now tell her that Monroe and the others told him what happened at the spice shop! And she fumbles around for an adjective that describes the experience without being too negative because she doesn't want to scare him off, and they're communicating again. You guys I have waited so long for this moment and it is beautiful. Even with her cringey misuse of the term woge. No, Nick, you're not the only puzzled one here. Go make up with your girlfriend. Make out. Something.

We'll leave them to that, sadly, and go over to Eric and his hair. Which he seems to have tamed, and my sanity thanks him for that. He is not in the DeLuxe, or if he is the hotel hasn't been named as it has in past episodes and the window is not something I recognize. That's fairly distinctive architecture there on the outside of the building. He's also, predictably, in the penthouse. The walls are bright crimson, I have no idea what is with this show and bright colors for walls that aren't normally found on TV show walls, but do I really need to explain what all that red in his surroundings means? No? Good. And unlike his brother, this penthouse apartment or hotel suite or what have you is full of stuff that shrieks I Am A Rich Dude. From what looks like a mix of countries and eras. Thanks for that, Eric. Oh, but just in case we didn't know he was rich and influential and powerful and old-blooded and so on he will now ramble on at all the culture and history Vienna has, mostly by listing composers, as opposed to Portland, which has... Nike. Does anyone remember that Nike was a symbol for victory? Now you know. And we are all about as interested as Eric's bodyguards. I wonder how often they have to listen to him ramble like this. Because I would quickly guard his body from the vantage point of enjoying his couch while he rambles from a cramped, dark closet. Fortunately he has a visitor to interrupt him before he finds something else to annoy me about, oh LOOK. It's the Baron. Would anyone else like the jar with the surprised face, because I'm too lazy to go dig it out. Eric does look a bit wary at the knock on the door, at least until it opens; we might know that's too dramatic and deliberate a knock for it to be Renard, pissed off at his brother invading his territory, but Eric doesn't seem to realize that. But no, it's the Baron. Still can't be bothered for the surprise face. They both know each other and are pleased to see each other, Eric's getting glee and smarm all over the nice hardwood floors. Interesting to note that he calls him Baron, which again, coming from a Prince? Is that a title or a reference to the mythology? Also interesting to note the contrast between this and the account of the Cracher-Mortel in the book from Nick's trailer; where in that account at the Haitian Revolution the Royals employed the Grimm to stop the Cracher-Mortel calling himself Baron Samedi (among other things), here we have Royals employing a Cracher-Mortel to stop a Grimm and his Prince's revolution. It's a good, subtle mirror from past to present, I can only assume they did it on purpose. We shall find out to what effect they use this current Cracher-Mortel... next week. Because we close on those dreaded words, to be continued. I dread those words a lot more than I dread your creepy cackling, you fuckers. Just so you know.