Women of Grimm

You've seen us do profiles of characters for our other show at the moment, and you might have read some of them, or our celebration of the women of Haven. We'd like to turn our attention now to celebrating the women of Grimm, and their influence on the events within the show. While the protagonist of Grimm is Nick and, arguably, Renard as the deuteragonist, more and more, the driving forces behind an equal if not majority share of the plot these days are the women.

As we stated earlier, Juliette's first introduction in the show is in the context of Nick's girlfriend. Because the first episode is so focused on Nick's discoveries and Nick's life we get only bits and pieces throughout, but what we do get is enough to know that she's been with Nick for several years, long enough to build up familiarity with his background and his family as well as be comfortable with them dropping in unannounced (or, presumably, comfortable enough to tell him off if she was uncomfortable with same). We can deduce from the way she behaves around him that she is aware of his habits and his reactions to anticipate them, after the quick exchange when Aunt Marie is attacked and as well when Nick wakes up with the nightmare. She functions for the first several episodes as Nick's support structure, without either giving much of a clue as to aspects of her life outside of Nick and yet without sacrificing her own independence as a character; she acts more as a sounding board or an alternate point of view than a yes-person. Over the course of the first season we learn that she's a vet, that she's not only well-educated but also quick thinking and with sound reasoning skills. We learn that she favors the scientific over the instinctive, not blatantly, but demonstrated by the fact that she clearly feels something is wrong at several points in the first season and decides not to act on those instincts for whatever reason. However, when she is confronted with a physical conundrum (the unknown species of creature that attacked the horse in Big Feet) she does pursue that even though it takes her to a place she doesn't yet have the terminology to describe.

Blood Is Compulsory

One of the major themes we haven't touched on yet in an essay, or even to speak of in any detailed manner in the ep analyses, is blood. I mean, aside from the part where Grimm's sometimes a gory show and we grumble at length about having to translate things written in blood in French and could his handwriting please suck less? (No, we don't squick easily.) Specifically blood magic, both the more obvious kind and the kind related to bloodlines.

You'd think we would have, but we've been waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for a resolution to the Juliette-and-Renard potion subplot. Making puppy eyes at the writers to come explicate the way both those potions worked, too, because there's so much tasty analysis we could do with it! Unfortunately for us, they're going to leave us on tenterhooks for the holiday hiatus. Fortunately for you, that means we're going to leap ahead and do the damn thing anyway, including some discussion of blood magic as used in Western mythology/legend as well as some speculation about where they might be headed in Grimm.

When You're At Home: Catherine Schade

All right then! Last week we covered Adalind's house; this week we'll do her mother's. Not because I expect Catherine Schade to come back from the dead anytime soon, but her influence was obviously formative to Adalind and almost certainly to Renard as well. So we'll go over this in some detail, in the interests of teasing out what this tells us about the woman who made Adalind who she is today. Spoiler alert: nothing nice.

Because I'm lazy at heart, and because Kitty's already gone through the opening scenes of Love Sick for house profiling, I'm just going to start by copying these paragraphs in. Then we'll do some extra detail work, and then we'll start hammering on the s2 eps.

K: Renard's battlewagon pulls up to a Victorian? style townhouse, three stories and likely a basement behind the shrubbery. Two of the stories are lit with the curtains drawn, so someone's home but not inclined to visitors, so either he's expected or he's gate-crashing. Now, later in the beginning of season two we learn she paid cash for this place, so she, too, has some wealth available to her; I'd put this townhouse at up nearing half a mil easy. Two moss-covered trees frame the front of the house in this shot, giving it an in-the-woods appearance. Like the witches in the old stories. And like the witches in the old stories, we cut to an interior shot where a woman whose name we don't yet know is grinding some dried herbs and other things into a mortar, with a kettle on one side and a small cauldron on the other. She has a couple of spices and an herb jar in front of her, but given what we saw earlier in organ grinder I'm hesitant to say that's cumin and parsley or anything of the sort. She looks up and smiles at something we don't hear (A: probably the car door closing), either because of the background music or because her senses are greater than normal.