Original Air Date: 13 January 2012
Eddie: Hank? Why?
Nick: He put him in prison.
Eddie: Oh, yeah, that'll do it. These guys carry grudges to the grave. And usually it's your grave.
The Story: Jack and the BeanstalkIntro: "Fe fi fo fum... I smell the blood of an Englishman..."Review: I'm not sure how this week's episode is related to the popular English story "Jack and the Beanstalk", but I found is extremely entertaining and involving characters that, up to this point, were somewhat left aside. Both Juliette and Renard were more or less involved in the action, as opposed to their sort of boring characters in the first episodes of this season - especially when talking about Nick's useless girlfriend.
I will get to them in a minute, but before than I'd just like to comment a little but on the main villain of the week. Oleg Stark was supposed to be a contract killer, one so intelligent that he was not only capable of covering his tracks by using a dead man's fingerprints to throw the police off his trail, but also leaving little clues for Hank to find. Honestly, I found all that a little over the top for a Siegbarste - "your basic ogre". Of course, I buy the violent streak, the congenital analgesia and the abnormally dense bone structure, but I don't buy the intelligence one needs to be a contract killer.
Other than what I see is a fault in the construction of the villain, this episode showed real progress in storytelling and building the action. Having Nick and Eddie work together has always been one of my favorite things about this show and this week this was taken to a whole new level by Eddie's more than important involvement in the case. With Nick being attacked by Stark in his home (leading to a great response from Juliette, who wasn't as useless as she'd been before), Monroe had to take point in helping Hank deal with the Siegbarste and he did that like a real Grimm assistant.
While the best scene must be the one where Monroe shot Stark dead, I had a lot of fun watching him rummage through aunt Marie's trailer - virtually an armory of all things helpful to kill creatures like himself - in search of a poison and a riffle capable of shattering the Siegbarste from the inside. His "Dad... I swear to God, I'm doing the right thing" is the synthesis of all things that make the war between the Grimms and the creatures like him. This hasn't really been explored in depth, though we had a glimpse of that in "The Three Bad Wolves", and I'd really like this theme to be developed further and see a possible conflict between Nick and Monroe due to this history.
Some other interesting things: It was revealed that Nick was not working with Hank five years ago, when Hank arrested Stark for murder, so their relationship is a recent one; that's interesting because, in their partnership, it always looks like Nick has the more prominent position, though he's newer at the job. For once, Nick asked Monroe's help with his actual occupation, that of watchmaker. That led to a series of funny moments while Nick and Monroe were trying to hide their special connection from Hank. As of Hank, he showed he can be a complex character when he confessed to his partner to misplacing evidence in order to make sure Stark got convicted five years ago. Talk about police cleanliness, right? Aunt's Marie's trailer was not only used to find information about a certain creature, but her weapons were finally out to good use. That's what I want from every episode, guys!Grimm 1x07: Let Down Your Hair Back to Season 1
