Nine years ago I was struck inconsolable by the brutal end of a romance. Following a tumultuous seven-year affair I had hoped we’d be together for the foreseeable (she had lobbed herself off a tower on one occasion and we’d managed to ride even that out), but fate had ordained differently. I went through a stint of resenting vague reminders of what she had meant to me, of snarling at second-rate imitations who tried to steal her crown. I’m talking here about the end of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (what else?) and the chasm the series’ end left in the genre of fantasy drama. But time heals all. I’ve been hearing a whole host of promising things about the new detective-cum-fantasy show “Grimm” which premiered in the States late last year, and this week I resolved to smash down my lingering slayer-issues and take the plunge.
The show’s premise is
ingenious; it’s based on the fairytales compiled by the German folklore-whizzes
the Brothers Grimm in the 19th Century- our most abundant source of
children’s tales. The series follows the detective and newly discovered “Grimm”
(someone with an ability to see “Wessen” or other-worldly creatures for what
they really are) Nick Burkhardt navigate his way through murder cases using his
mythological endowments and broadly lead a double life as Grimm and
average-Joe. He’s joined in life one by his dead aunt’s scrapbooks and a
reformed Wessen; in the other by an oblivious fiancé and a swaggering friend
slash partner detective. The parallels with my beloved stake-bearing, vamp-boinking
Buff-stuff are palpable, which is no doubt down to co-creator David Greenwalt
who featured on Buffy’s and spin-off Angel’s credits episode upon episode.
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| Bad impression: Monroe's transformations leave him in Nick's firing line |
I decided to adhere to
the three-date rule when downloading and bought the first trio of episodes (potential
iTunes marketing ploy?), but after just the pilot I was gushing about the
show’s virtues like some love-struck teenager. Things got going with the grisly
murder of a red-hoody clad college student jogging in the woods and the
disappearance of a similarly dressed schoolgirl. The hunt for the killer would
have made a stellar episode in its own right, with Nick mistakenly tackling and
accusing a shifty looking guy who lived close to the scene of the crime whilst
the real culprit kept his latest pray locked in the basement of his wood cabin.
Alongside all this routine killing, kidnapping and macabre postman stuff,
however, the show saw Nick being visited by his terminally ill Aunt Marie. She
brought with her both an axe-yielding demon that made a claim on her life (to
be gunned down by Nick) and the revelation that her nephew is destined to fight
forces of darkness. She mysteriously revealed that Nick comes from a line of
Grimms, who have the ability to detect Wessen presence and must stifle their attempts
to wreak havoc on mankind. As it turns out, the hallucinations Nick had been
having about people in the street disfiguring have some weight to them, and he
must act upon rather than suppress them. Cleverly, the aforementioned innocent
guy (Monroe) Nick the detective took out is a reformed wolfish Wessen himself,
and became an asset to Nick as he hunted down the real Big Bad Wolf and rescued
the snatched Red Riding Hood. Greenwalt’s ability to cram all this into an
hour’s slot is testament to the genius he showed with Buffy. Without being
bogged down in explanations the episode offered up a fast-paced and
double-stranded first helping.
Episode two, “Bears
Will Be Bears”, was a second story of two halves. Aunt Marie continued to be
hospitalised and yet more attempts were made to bump her off before she wound
up dying in Nick’s arms (tough week for her, as they go). One of her attempted
murderers was a bitingly attractive “Hexenbiest" creature Nick encountered
in the pilot, and she goes on (from what I have gathered) to become critical. In
a twist, it was revealed that she had some tie to Nick’s boss who knew all
about the double life of his employee. That half was done masterfully; the
lines between good cop and bad cop became blurred (something that even “Buffy”
avoided during Season One), Nick was left out on his own as a Grimm and the
efforts of Monroe to go against the Wessen-grain and protect a Grimm was a
toss-up between comic and heart-wrenching. The remaining 50% of the episode,
consisting of the case Nick became embroiled in as a detective, was just so-so.
Based loosely on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it focused on a boorish family
arranging a hunting rite of passage for their teenage son with a human couple
as game. The use of the Grimm elements came across as fresh, still, though it
all became pitifully overshadowed with what was going on with Aunt Marie and
Nick’s calling. To have held its own as an equally arresting thread of the
show, the story needed to be a smidge more multifaceted. In the Red Riding Hood
pilot there were false trails and red herrings: both noticeably absent here.
Plus it was taxing to care too much about what happened to the human pray; the
episode opened with them breaking into a house and being a little too irritating
to scoop themselves much more than indifferent audiences. In all, a bittersweet
second date watching.
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| Love-hate relationship: Adalind and Nick are thrown together |
Third time lucky, as
they say. Episode number three, “Beeware”, saw the series reach dizzying new
heights (this is especially of note because Greenwalt is absent from the
writing credits- a reassurance that he isn’t carrying the whole caboodle). When
a flash mob was organised via Twitter and a young lawyer came a cropper in its
midst, Nick rapidly discovered that one or two in the mob around her were
bee-like beasts, called Mellifers, who are used in the world of Grimm creatures
to send messages. I won’t give you a blow-by-blow (partly because I’d be here
for hours) but the show culminated in a battle that was ostensibly between
three attorneys who shut down a factory and its miffed owner, but was ultimately
a face-off between Hexenbiest and the Queen Bee of Mellifers. Nick wasn't only
tasked with concealing the true nature of the dispute from his co-workers; his
job as a detective called him to defend the very Hexenbiest who had tried to do
in Aunt Marie a few weeks before. Naturally, Nick’s being pulled in two
directions by each of his respective paths gave the episode pace and suspense
(“If something happens to me it won’t just be a Grimm killing a Hexenbiest.
It’ll be a cop letting an innocent woman die.”), and his spontaneous decision
to gun down Queen Bee bucked all my expectations. Equally arresting was the
dynamic he shared with Hexenbiest Adalind; there was resentment, vengeance and
outright threats being hurled about, but also an unmistakeable attraction
between the pair that provided a darker, less clear-cut close. What episode
three excelled at was to provide a plot that was entangled intimately with
Nick’s infantine Grimm role so that the two egged one another on, rather than
to offer an imaginative but too much disjointed concept a la “Bears Will Be
Bears”. After Beeware? I was buzzing (sorry).
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| The day job: Nick and Hank investigate |
"Grimm" holds promise,
for me, because of its sharpness and symbolism. In episode three the ironic use
of social networks by beastly creatures that creepily set murder plans in
motion enabled viewers, if they so wished, to look a little deeper than the
words on the script. Even in the less heralded “Bears Will Be Bears” the use of
a barbaric hunting game as a coming of age celebration tactfully poked at Western
society’s dressing up of its activities under the guise of refinement and
taste. Nick’s continued use of Aunt Marie’s trailer following her death,
meanwhile, and its dual role as a research base and arsenal, emblematizes what
we less obviously take from parental figures as we gain adult independence. And
if astute and witty metaphors don’t whet your appetite? Grimm has a tip-top
cast, right down to the junior policeman Wu; when asked if he can fiddle with
CCTV recordings in the hunt for a murder culprit, he responds with droll, “Of
course I can. I’m Asian.”
Early days it may be,
but I’m the commitment type. What’s stopping me giving myself wholeheartedly up
to "Grimm" just yet is its lack of a whopping, top-dog villain. The few
adversaries Nick has bagged himself, thus far, he’s pretty much taken out, and
the absence of a mammoth big bad has hindered things just a smidge. Of course,
this area looks set to be rectified post-haste; Nick was warned in episode
three, “Beware. It’s close.” Ominous. There’s also his sinister-looking, bent
boss, who could nimbly spring to the calling of nemesis. Unlike episode one, I
feel the second and third handicapped themselves by having Nick’s visions serve,
on a silver platter, gargantuan indications of who would turn out to be
assailants. It struck, as Nick interviewed a witness in “Beeware” and he
happened to morph into a demon on the spot, a little too easy.
In all, the show looks
set to be ace. It’s satisfyingly different to its fantasy-drama predecessors
and (much as it has been inevitable for me) deserves to be judged on its own
glaring merits. There are well-crafted, age-old stories, conflicted characters
and stunning one-liners. If I have to move on from “Buffy”, at least I’ve
waited for a corker.
One Line Wonder
Hank (Nick’s cop buddy, after Nick sees Adalind transfigure into a grotesque
Hexenbiest): Why can't you look at her ass like the rest of us?
The Fortune Telly-er
I see Nick’s fiancé Juliet
becoming a bigger presence as the series progresses; her being put in jeopardy or
even being bumped off would give Nick the drive to fully commit to his new life
as Grimm.
There’s got to be some more explanation about the deaths of Nick’s parents on the way. His Aunt Marie merely said that they had been killed- by whom? Will their killer become Nick’s much-needed adversary?
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