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.
