Grimm Episode 2 Review and Plot Hole Discussion

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

We have already reviewed the pilot for NBC’s Grimm, with a section in that post explaining some of the context of the show and why we are talking about it. I would advise you to read that before proceeding here, and you can follow this link: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2025/01/nbcs-grimm-reviewing-pilot.html

 

Bears Will Be Bears Review

 

As the opening quote, “She looked in the window and then peeped through the keyhole; seeing nobody in the house, she lifted the latch,” relays, this is the Goldilocks story, but specifically the original 1837 Robert Southey version “The Story of the Three Bears.” In this original version, the bears are three bachelors (which maps onto this episode’s title being “Bears Will Be Bears” after the “boys will be boys” masculinity motif that the episode will have some commentary on), and Goldilocks is not named Goldilocks and is in fact not a child but an old woman. That said, this is still inextricable from the context of the later Goldilocks alterations because the woman here is named Gilda (gilded = coated in gold). Why Gilda is aged up (though not fully to old woman status) seems to be either to be more accurate to the original or simply because there was already a young girl in danger last episode, so it would seem repetitive.

 

Gilda and her paramour Rocky (I guess naming the character Locke would have been too on the nose) immediately break and enter into a nice house littered with bear iconography and symbolism. They sample the clothes, food and wine before trying out multiple beds in a PG13 (or rather TV14) fashion. This kind of lower class decadent cosplay of the rich is a valid modernization of the original old woman’s actions as well as on the class commentary some Grimm stories include (video on The Hare and The Hedgehog coming soon to our YouTube channel Plan9Crunch, link here: https://www.youtube.com/@Plan9Crunch).

 

In any case, the family has arrived home. Just as the old woman of old, Gilda leaps out of the window, but some roaring thing gets its hands on Rocky before another one chases Gilda to her truck, and she drives off.

 

In the hospital, a doctor examines Nick after he took the syringe meant for Aunt Marie last episode. It is a little unclear whether Nick survived the neurotoxin in the syringe because he is a Grimm or because Adalind and Renard prepared just enough to kill an old woman in a coma with it (Renard, given his backstory as well as current job of Police Captain, should know to stay under the radar with his moves, and, thus, I find it likely it was the bare minimum required to kill an old lady so that it would not arouse much suspicion. If the feeble woman covered in scars happens to have slight amounts of a neurotoxin in her system it adds to the mystery, but, if she was obviously poisoned, that would supersede her feeble status and mysterious past to drive an investigation somewhere rather than nowhere).

 

After some banter with Hank, Nick sees Aunt Marie being moved into surgery, and Renard swoops in to “secure” the scene. The three go off to look at the security tapes to look for Adalind, and Renard asks Nick specifics about his relationship with Marie before subtly undermining their efforts on the Adalind case by stating that it will be difficult to get an ID from the back (he must have ensured that she would only be visible on the cameras from certain unhelpful angles before letting her go in there).

 

Hank has Nick do the same “analysis from afar” trick he used on Adalind last episode on Gilda. Many commentators on this series have stated this “Sherlock Scan” to be a dropped character trait and an example of “Early Installment Weirdness,” but I do not buy that because, going forward, it will be a consistent trait of Nick’s role as a Grimm that he has to make judgements off of quick moments relying on what he can read of a person from the split seconds of seeing their mannerisms or later on their Woge (which is what it is called when their Wesen form reveals itself). Including these scenes now reinforces how he will be able to use his present skills as a Grimm later on; including more of these scenes later would be redundant alongside the episodic Woge scenes. (There is also more to be said about how the backstory implications Nick highlights in Gilda and Adalind might mirror the lived experience and often rough home life of a Wesen and how his profiling might not be merely the same mechanism but just the same action; however that is season 5 territory more so than season 1.)

 

Gilda leads Nick and Hank back to the house, where their coworker Drew Wu is already there on account of the family, the Rabes, reporting breaking and entering upon arriving home from Seattle. (The timing of their arrival is coincidental but does not qualify as any plot issue because it is literally the inciting incident of this story; if they had not arrived back precisely when they did, the entire story would not have happened, not just some parts of it. I will elaborate on what plot points I do take issue with in the “plot holes in Grimm” section of this review.) Rabe is, of course, an anagram for Bear, and Hank identifies their aboriginal art collection while Nick grows more and more suspicious based on claw marks by the window. Mother Rabe brings up respecting their ancestors, while Father Rabe tries to shut her down. This will play into some of the larger themes: the name is Rabe, not bear, an anagram of bear nonetheless, but the patriarch whose name the rest bare is the least interested in being a bear, and so he is Rabe. The son is named Barry (a homophone of bear) so guess where he stands on the issue (I am not arguing that the characters are aware of the philosophical coding in their names; it is the storytelling priming us for their later roles).

 

Cut to Rocky in a den being menaced by a bear, likely this missing Barry, and, now is a particularly late title card (10 minutes in) just simply showing the word Grimm and a brief flash of Adalind’s Hexenbiest face (in this episodic procedural, Nick and Adalind are the main players in every title card. That will be important). At the station, Nick and Hank finally get Gilda’s statement, and it seems a little weird they are only doing this now, but the brief excursion to the Rabe house did reveal her guilt, so this could be them finally booking her. Nick is more sympathetic than Hank and asks, once Hank leaves the room, if she can identify what chased her. Wu reveals Rocky is definitively poor, lacking a phone, which will make it even harder to find him in the Rabe den, but Nick is determined to go back there until Marie calls him.

 

Marie tries to console Nick, calling him to hunt down the bad Wesen. (She indicates that there is a reason he is a cop, and this could be about his sense of justice or my idea that he is already using the playbook of a Grimm, or perhaps both.) She is paranoid about the Reapers and exposits briefly on that organization as well as the importance of keeping the trailer secret.

 

Nick and Hank, returning to the Rabe residence, stumble upon three bikers each wearing a primary color. These are Barry and his friends, and while Hank interrogates the Rabes, Father Frank Rabe watches Nick watching Barry woge. Frank immediately becomes hostile to Nick, who reflects on the bear symbology on the premises (specifically a totem pole he researches on his home computer with Juliette a couple scenes later).

 

Renard meets with Adalind under a bridge, and their dialogue explains part of their aims. Renard cannot allow Marie to tell Nick anything more, because Renard wants Nick on his side in regards to some unspecified conflict. Renard wants Adalind to outsource this hit to humans, specifically so that they do not get excited and woge. Now what Renard is in this world is a mystery for a little while, but this shows him to be knowledgeable about the woge, meaning that if anybody could stifle their woge long term, it would be calculating Renard. Someone threatens Adalind under this bridge, and Renard rolls his window up as she kills or at least probably maims the man.

 

After a scene reminding us of Nick and Juliette’s relationship, Barry and his friends prepare a sacrifice pit (remember the bears will be bears title; it’ll be important to these characters), and Nick dreams of Aunt Marie advising him in the trailer and stabbing his hand with a knife. Juliette tries to support and comfort Nick, and this might be the first confirmation of her job as a veterinarian, which will have plot relevance toward the end of the season. In the trailer, Nick finds a bear hand item just like one the Rabes had, and he visits Monroe mid-workout.

 

As I mentioned last time, much of the structure of season one is devoted to deepening the friendship and partnership of Nick and Monroe, so this mostly comedic scene of Nick asking for Monroe’s help has some tension but also displays the characters’ chemistry. Monroe sighs when he opens the door to see Nick, but he also sighed when he paused his pilates to get the door, which makes sense insofar as the last episode indicated Blutbaden have a very heightened sense of smell, so he probably knew Nick was there before opening the door. Monroe identifies the Jagerbars by the item Nick has as being important to the Jagerbar coming of age ceremony the Roh-Hatz, and Monroe voices fear about the proposition of Aunt Marie being in town and hunting him (after Renard pulls the guards, Nick will task Monroe with protecting Marie in the hospital as the comedic subplot for this episode).

 

The Roh-Hatz is explicitly masculine and about connecting with the inner beast by chasing victims. Aunt Marie fills Nick in on the rest of the procedure, such as that it happens at sunset. When Gilda returns to the Rabe’s with a gun to get some answers about Rocky, Barry woges and restrains her, prompting the reveal that his traditional mother is in fact the one organizing the Roh-Hatz for them. The presence of a trio of Jagerbar bachelors in Barry and his friends should have clarified to anyone familiar with the original tale that the family of Rabes would not be the trio of bears, but the earlier disagreement between Father and Mother Rabe indicates that only the Father is truly innocent of this. Now, the title, once again is Bears Will Be Bears, and Barry’s mother is taking this attitude toward Jagerbars, not only insofar as bears will be bears but bears must be bears for their society and family unit to work. Barry’s father contrasts this style of masculinity by neglecting that side of themselves and what they can do/have done historically. Instead, the Rabes are quite wealthy collectors of Jagerbar artifacts, and this would be because Father Rabe is not concerning himself with rituals to justify killing people, instead being a lawyer.

 

Nick and Hank arrive back at the Rabes trying to intercept Gilda, and, once Hank leaves, Nick and Frank talk about what they are and who that means they are to each other. Mother Rabe refuses to yield to her husband when he asks her to tell Nick where the boys are keeping Rocky (clarifying the type of masculinity she responds to), and Frank Rabe takes Nick with him in his 4-wheeler to find Gilda and Rocky. Meanwhile, Hank finds Gilda’s truck. Frank makes Nick promise not to hurt the boys if he does not need to. Cutting to the bear boys, part of their ritual is cutting themselves to put their blood on the victims.

 

Monroe confronts a sleeping Marie, who awakes and threatens him, but in doing so, he foils an attempt on her life, so he goes off to follow the would-be assassin. The assassins beat up Monroe until he woges, rips off one of their arms, and says things went too far. Monroe, in wanting to avoid violence but still being aware of his cultural heritage (briefly wanting to kill Marie because a Grimm killed one of his relatives), represents the same kind of masculinity as Frank.

 

Frank and Nick find the den, but the hunt has started. Frank woges, prompting Nick to pull his gun on him, and Frank runs off to try to intercept the boys. Nick finds Gilda and Rocky, kicking the boys down and firing his gun in the sky to try to get them to stand down. Frank comes between Nick and Barry, who stands down, but Mother Diane Rabe barrels out of the forest as an actual bear (I’ll get to that), and accidentally impales herself in the sacrifice pit trying to kill Nick. As the boys, Gilda and Rocky are arrested, and Diane is taken away in an ambulance, Rocky is aware he has done something wrong, Diane insists that they have to respect their ancestors, and Frank responds, “Not like this.”

 

At the hospital, someone dressed as a reverend attacks Marie, and she dies killing him. Juliette watches on as Nick moves the trailer and visits her grave in a time lapse. Some Wesen watches Nick at the grave from within the bushes, and, if I had to guess, it seems like it would be Steinadler (bird Wesen) Farley Kolt, played by Titus Welliver, who has a role within the overarching plotline of the season and a past with Aunt Marie.

 

Episode two is more ambitious than the first in terms of thematic content and juggling the amount of characters and the moralities of all involved. However, my predisposition to it is a little negative compared to the first episode because of the moment where Diane Rabe turns into a full bear and not just full Jagerbar, so the back half of this post will be about the plot holes in Grimm and why, while frustrating, they do not ruin the show.

 

Plot Holes In Grimm

 

I will have to spoil certain things in talking about some of the plot holes of this show, so, unless you want spoilers pertaining to mostly random oddities and contrivances scattered throughout the show, you can stop reading here.

 

As I was flipping through a collection of The Brothers Grimm stories, I noticed one called Mother Hulda, which was interesting because Marie's attacker in the pilot was named Hulda, but, as far as I could ascertain, Hulda would be closer to a witch (or prophetess via Biblical allusion) than a male assassin. It does make me wonder why the showrunners didn't use that name for a Hexenbiest, especially for Henrietta whose name already started with H, but it does not appear that the name meant anything after all. (This is not a plot hole by any means, just a curiosity and additional paragraph to give you a chance to leave if you do not want spoilers for the show.)

 

According to a tie-in book called The Icy Touch, the Brothers Grimm do exist but are not actually Grimms. The novel, from Titan Books, allegedly has many explicit continuity issues (mistaking Hasslichen for Reapers and conflating Siegbarstes and Hasslichen) including worsening a would-be plot hole in the main show by referring to Sean Renard as part Hexenbiest. (He is not, in fact, a Hexenbiest, but half its male counterpart Zauberbiest and half Royal.) 

 

The possible plot hole comes in season 2, where, after it is made explicit that ingesting a Grimm’s blood negates a Hexenbiest's powers long term, Renard ends up ingesting Nick’s blood with no power loss. (I am more than fine to give the show benefit of the doubt on Hexenbiests and Zauberbiests having separate material properties because there is a name distinction between them, but writer John Shirley evidently thinks that Renard is a Hexenbiest and thus, retroactively applying cause and effect, should have lost his powers in season two.)

 

When I think of a plot hole or contrivance, there are obviously different levels to it, but I generally think of something that is impossible or highly improbable based on the established rules. There is some leeway if an event is circumstantial enough to be just a coincidence and not a contrivance, but even coincidences can stack into an overall contrivance. In this episode, Wesen are capable of fully becoming the animal they embody as we see with Mother Rabe. Now, technically speaking, when viewed in the context of the rest of the show, this seems like a trait of merely the Jagerbars. I recall seeing a claim that some early season one interview implied Monroe was also capable of this “if he got angry enough,” but I could not find any citation (in this episode though Monroe is stifling his true power, so there is nothing in the episode to say that a fully centered and bloodthirsty Monroe would not be able to turn into a full wolf). Throughout the show, there are moments that would drastically change if just any Wesen were able to do this, but, as the viewer, we can construct a minimally invasive headcanon to create greater organic unity.

 

In the first episode for later payoffs in catching the Postman to work, Oster’s ipod must keep playing Sweet Dreams continually from the moment she dies to the moment Nick and Hank find her body and ipod or have cycled through an entire playlist back to that song precisely when they show up. As audiovisual storytelling and shorthand, it is a good writing decision to keep that song playing as a motif through the episode, but placing plot importance on it risks damaging the overall cohesion.

 

The Reapers altogether disappear from the show after season one, and, while Nick puts up a credible defense against them, even landing a major victory, it does not make sense that a successful and storied organization would cease just on the account of one man they failed only a few times against. The later Royal family arc shows the international political scale of such factions, and the Hadrian’s Wall and Black Claw war of season 5 shows an efficient way to marry large international organization status with the personal stories of a few key players (that, if destroyed, mean the functional destruction of their causes), but none of the thought that went into these plotlines can retroactively work to explain the Reapers, and so I must conclude it a poor mark on the overall show.

 

In season two, supernatural shenanigans place a major strain on Nick and Juliette’s relationship to where they do not sleep in the same bed anymore. Consequently, Nick is forced to sleep on the couch or at Monroe’s house, but season three reveals they had a spare bedroom the entire time. The best defense I have heard for why Nick does not sleep in the guest bedroom is that it is their routine to sleep on the couch during disagreements, but that does not hold water, because the reason for this spat is that Juliette has literally forgotten everything about Nick and their cohabitation (it makes more sense in context). Clearly, the guest bedroom did not exist yet and would have changed season two if it did.

 

I notice fewer issues with the show in its later seasons, but even these earlier examples are contextual and only an issue based on specifics. I do not like plot holes and like even less playing defense for plot points I can’t even argue are mere coincidences, but it is also about a story’s overall cohesion. The contrivance that allowed for a payoff is not the only notable feature of the plot; we must also evaluate the strength of that payoff, since it was evidently so important to get to that point that logic was allowed to falter. Most stories do not manage to have great payoffs built on the shaky sand foundation, and that is why plot holes are as big a deal as they are, but this show is very good at using all of its pieces to tell a cathartic and fresh story, so it is not the biggest deal. The presence of plot holes and, at that, ones that affect the entirety of seasons means to me that I cannot give the show a 10 out of 10, because a perfect version of this show would inevitably be different, but the execution of ideas good and bad in this show are so strong that I could give it up to a 9 out of 10...pending another rewatch of course. We likely will not cover any more episodes with in depth reviews on this blog, so I invite you to watch this show for yourself on Amazon Prime Video.