#adorable silly campy twisted fairytales

[benevolenterrancy]

@doctorbluesmanreturns so true, so true!

The Big Bad Wolf and his commitment to self-improvement!

book titles all courtesy of @meso-mijali who is funnier than me:

Mirror Mirror: 10 Steps to the Fairest You 7 Dwarves' 7 Steps to Romance, by Doc Red Riding Hood and You: Finding Your Inner Child and Learning to Trust Again Into the Woods: CPTSD and the Self Gnolls, Trolls & Wolves: It's what's inside that matters

(+ "Meyers Briggs: we aren't astrology for STEM, honest!" which didn't quite make it in, but assume it's one of the untitled books u.u)

[grimmmviewing]

S1E20: “Happily Ever Aftermath”—A/B+ (Watched 7/10/24)

This is a very solid episode of Grimm, in terms of meeting my admittedly subjective wants for the show: It’s dark, but not excessively so; it makes good use of the adaptational premise to twist a recognizable fairytale story in a solid-enough way that balances genuine creativity with a bit of goofiness or campiness or cringe; while it doesn’t outright avoid the serialized narrative (focusing on the thread of Nick’s parents’ deaths again), it feels like those elements exist more in the background/vaguely “in between” the other stuff, making the priority the Cinderella adaptation. Assuming true “monster of the week” episodes are not an option, this might be the best alternative. The ongoing story advances marginally, taking up comparatively little of the runtime.

Speaking very (very) generally, the initial premise of this adaptation isn’t exactly novel—We’re seeing what comes after the “happily ever after,” which is probably the most obvious starting point for a subversive take on one of these stories. The particulars are a bit more interesting, though, like how we open with a “Bernard Aidikoff” being outed as a Bernie Madoff-style crook. I had a note questioning if this depiction was in bad taste given the recency (at the time of airing) of the real-world scandal, but it’s not a thread I’m too interested in since this is just Grimm doing what comic books and other series like Law and Order have done plenty of times before: giving a real person a close-enough fake name in a way that’s kind of cute, as they try to “rip” material from “the headlines.”

The Aidikoff/Madoff thing more or less sets the tone for the handling of the Cinderella material as well—Arthur (our prince character, who lost a disastrous amount of money through Aidikoff) says at one point, “I can’t go to [my wife’s] stepmother.” It’s such a perfect line and reading of that line, because of the obviousness. It’s very awkward, but so is the way that his wife is named Lu-cinda or how she has a god-father. Seeing the pieces fall into place this way is a lot of fun. Later in the episode, when Arthur, Lucinda, and the godfather, Spencer, are being interrogated by Nick and Hank about their possible involvement in the stepmother’s murder, Arthur also delivers a succinct summary of the adapted version of the Cinderella ball and choosing her (equivalent) over the stepsisters. It’s very cute, and while Hank asking Arthur if he had any kind of sexual relationship with the stepsisters dirties it up, that’s just another kind of adorable. It’s Grimm doing its Thing. It walks a thin line between being unwatchably silly and just clever enough, and that’s probably a harder tone to write for than it might seem.

How the show’s Wesen focus fits into the original fairytale is both a strength and a notable weakness: Spencer, Lucinda, and (presumably) Lucinda’s late father and mother are all Wesen; however, the stepmother and sisters are not. This particular Wesen is another of the evil-coded ones as well, and it turns out that Lucinda is actually a proper spoiled monster with “no conscience,” to quote Spencer, while he’s always watched over her to keep her from acting on her worst impulses. We find out relatively early that Spencer is a Wesen, but the show waits to reveal Lucinda is one as well, building tension and uncertainty about exactly how the story is going to go. Even then, it’s still uncertain for a time precisely how the blame falls—which one murdered the stepmother and how in cahoots they might or might not be.

(Side note: I usually find Grimm’s horror elements pretty fleeting and weak, but the scene in the stepmother’s bedroom where she hears something and then looks under the bed and gets jump-scared by a bat creature did startle me. Something about the lighting actually felt a bit oppressive this time. Similarly, much later, the reveal of Lucinda already inside her remaining stepsister’s house similarly Got me. This might just be luck, in part, but my sense of the first of these two instances was still that it felt a bit more deliberately scary in a way that the show usually isn’t.)

In terms of the twist’s weakness, I think part of that feeling comes from the fact that “just” flipping the script (to say that, “Actually, Cinderella was the mean one”) doesn’t feel wildly original—more like the obvious route for subversion. I thought the idea of Spencer alone being a Wesen and choosing to attach himself to a human girl as a magical protector, while closer to just the “original” story, could have been an interesting angle for Grimm specifically to explore in its world. His friendship with Lucinda’s father is the reason given in the episode, though the fact that they were both Wesen makes it less interesting and less “unnatural.” Similarly, I think the idea of a mixed Wesen-human household is also very intriguing and might have been explored more. We get some vague allusions to how Lucinda tormented her stepsisters, but the concept is one that could have been further plumbed. Like, what was it like for the sisters to grow up in the same house with an evil Wesen? We can fill in the gaps, but it feels like there’s pathos being left on the table.

With Spencer and Lucinda, the show is once again poking at the question of what is and isn’t immutable about Wesen breeding, even if it isn’t acknowledged like it was in “Leave it to Beavers.” Lucinda seems to be more or less exactly what you’d expect from a Murciélago, while Spencer clearly isn’t. Him dying along with Lucinda is very convenient since it means that the show doesn’t have to reckon with how he revealed his true nature, verbally, to Hank and then used his supernatural screeching to shatter the window of his interrogation room and escape the station to go after Lucinda. I did absolutely love how his confession to the murder of the stepmother and one stepsister just casually reveals to Hank things that Nick has been keeping from him all season. This ends up being a ploy to get Hank out of the room, but when Spencer launched into it, to Nick’s obvious discomfort, I had to smile.

I found a similar joy in the Grimm tool Nick uses in this episode—a goofy little crank-powered sound gun with a stand. It’s nice to have a more obviously fantastical prop like this, and it ends up being very useful for maintaining secrecy in the end as well since Nick gives it up to the cops as (supposedly) the weapon used to achieve the otherwise unexplainable murders. Yes, the story technically, truly ends with the new dangling thread of another man involved in the killing of the elder Burkhardts, but there’s still a pleasant overall sense of tidiness.