#dude there is a friggin BREITBART article of all things about this episode

[grimmmviewing]

S1E10: “Organ Grinder”—B, I think… (Watched 3/9/24)

“You know, I’ve been at this job a while, but it seems like this town is just getting weirder.” – Hank (brushing up against the revelation that he’s a character in a weekly fantasy procedural series)

First, the Hansel and Gretel connection: After the opening quote, I actually forgot until a scene later in the episode where Nick and Juliette approach a homeless brother and sister and I made the connection between this “Gracie” and “Hanson” and the fairy tale. That was a fun little jolt. I did wonder how well this story about a newly-introduced kind of Wesen harvesting human organs was going to dovetail in any sort of way with the source material aside from just the concept of children being some type of cannibalized, but then Hanson ends up using bits of the puka shell necklaces that had been present throughout the episode to leave a trail for the cops to find when the brother and sister are themselves abducted at the climax. I groaned when I realized what was happening. Like, it… works, but it still has that little bit of cringe in its modernization that really makes it (and Grimm as a series doing this adaptational thing episode after episode) sing.

One thing that both has to be addressed about this episode but that also feels kind of awkward to bring up in a casual, little write-up like this, though, is the depiction of the “Geiers” (henceforth, “Gs,” just to be safe)—a species of hook-nosed monsters that abduct human children to harvest their blood and organs for Wesen medicinal use. I thought I might be misremembering the exact particulars of the antisemitic concept of blood libel, but after a post-viewing Google and Wikipedia… I have mixed feelings about rating this one too highly.

I’m obviously not going to claim that Grimm is intentionally deploying that conspiracy to some sinister end, just that there’s an incredibly unfortunate combination of imagery and plot in this episode. There are some early mentions of vampires, for example, and my one thought was that the Gs might have been meant to resemble Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (the vampire itself potentially being an antisemitic design), and the exaggerated nose was added as some sort of “original character, do not steal”-style measure that just made things even worse. Or maybe it’s a visual synthesis of Orlok and the hooked beak of a vulture given the apparent association between “G” and that animal, though the relationship between the concept of a vulture and the word/name and Jewish stereotypes stills seems fraught. However the combination of the elements, visual and narrative, in Grimm was achieved, the end-result does not look good. I was tempted to say “This episode hasn’t aged well,” but it really seems to have just been born old, in this regard.

On a lighter note, here’s an exchange between Captain Renard and Sergeant “Comrade”(?) Wu that I enjoyed a lot, after they find a bunch of human organs drying for processing (a pretty strikingly grotesque image): “Well, whichever way you look at it, it’s still cannibalism.” / “Uh, I think it’s pronounced ‘capitalism.’” 

The fact that it’s the clinic—part of the American healthcare system, a notoriously blood-thirsty branch of capitalist living—that’s ultimately revealed to be keeping the vulnerable kids healthy just to cut them up for parts to be sold in a sort of apothecary with a certain upper-class vibe (to a secret race of non-humans, but I’m not dipping back into that again) feels like it could be taken for something meaningful: Raise up and support the youth just enough to cannibalize/capitalize on them, literally consuming their lives.

If I wanted, there’s plenty of fun stuff here to recount, like the premise of flipping the exotic animal parts as… “enhancement” to be animal-like beings using human parts for that purpose. That Monroe tells Nick this and also throws in a quick mention that, actually, there’s no truth to the exotic animals thing is fun for me since it feels like the writers/people behind the show coming through in the writing a bit. Almost like they felt a moral responsibility to throw in a quick mention, like activism in miniature. It’s cute.

This bit from Monroe during the aforementioned conversation is also very cute: “You probably didn’t know that your testicles— I mean, not your testicles specifically. . . .” This is over a little dinner with some wine, too!

There’s some great Juliette stuff in the mix. The episode focuses pretty hard early on about whether Nick should tell her the truth since her not knowing is becoming dangerous. Then, we get this sequence where Nick and Juliette take Gracie and Hanson out to dinner, and Nick more or less ends up interrogating them, cop-style, but we can see that Juliette is picking up on something he isn’t, and she figures out Gracie liked one of the other boys who disappeared and is then able to get more information by empathizing than Nick was with his more forceful approach. When he compliments her afterward, we can read between the lines to connect back to the conversation with Monroe—Nick’s clearly wondering if Juliette can handle This, and in the strained silence they enter into just before he gets an interrupting phone call, you can feel him trying to decide whether to tell her or not.

When I saw the intense shaky camera in the woods during the opening scene of kids on the run from their captors, I thought the show might be losing its touch, but despite some further goofiness with the visuals (like the use of slow motion when the head G is about to fall into her own bonfire while fighting Nick), it still has this deft hand with weaving together visuals and plot elements or themes that make me want to just recite my full list of Fun Bits I couldn’t help but write down as they happened.

#nbc grimm #dude there is a friggin BREITBART article of all things about this episode #chekhovs puka shell necklace apparently #tv series #review #rewatch