You might say that Nick gets tangled up in his latest case on ‘Grimm’. It’s a real hair-raising adventure.
Sorry about that. But it’s not like the show’s writers are above straining a bad pun. This past Friday’s episode is called ‘Let Your Hair Down’, and it’s about the story of Rapunzel. Well, vaguely so.
A couple of hikers stumble upon a secret pot field in the woods and get kidnapped by the grower. As he’s about to execute them, the rancher is himself attacked and killed by… something. They don’t get a good look at it, but it’s fast. The hikers manage to get away and run to the police. When the grower’s body is found, it looks like his neck was strangled and snapped, apparently by a thick braid of hair. Nick matches the DNA to a very young girl who’d gone missing in those same woods seven years earlier. His partner Hank had originally worked the case.
The girl, named Holly Clark, is a blutbad. Her birth parents died, and her adoptive parents were not creature folk. She grew up with no one to explain to her what she was. Now she’s spent the last seven years living as a feral child in seclusion. Obviously, she hasn’t exactly gotten a hair cut in that time. She’s braided her hair into a long ponytail that she whips around as a weapon. (This seems pretty far-fetched, even by this show’s standards.)
While Hank tracks down old leads in the case, Nick convinces Eddie to help him sniff out the girl in the woods. They locate her in an abandoned tree house that was built as a hunter’s blind. When attacking the pot grower, she took some buckshot to the stomach and is in bad shape, bleeding and feverish. She’s also not exactly communicative, and doesn’t trust Nick. But she recognizes that Eddie is the same kind of thing she is, and lets him take care of her while Nick goes for help.
Meanwhile, the pot rancher’s redneck brothers want revenge. They re-kidnap one of the hikers from the beginning, and torture him to reveal… well, nothing. He doesn’t know anything, so they leave him tied up in their basement as they head off to the woods. It isn’t addressed again whether the poor guy ever gets out.
The rednecks come across Eddie and threaten him. Nick returns in time to shoot one of them, and Holly strangles the other. Nick then drives Holly back to civilization for a reunion with her adoptive mother. Apparently, this half-dead feral animal of a girl with a gut full of buckshot no longer needs a hospital. Or, you know, a psychologist, or a social worker or something, despite having killed at least two men that we know of. She’s fine now.
As for Hank’s side of the investigation, he tracks down an old neighbor of the family. The man had an alibi at the time of the girl’s disappearance, because he was in a hospital being treated for a dog bite. It’s pretty obvious to us that Holly must have wolfed out and bit him, but Hank doesn’t yet know about the creature world. In a final scene, Holly IDs the neighbor in a line-up. I suppose this means that he tried to kidnap her to molest her or something. But this isn’t well-explained, because earlier we were told that the girl went missing while her family was on a camping trip in the woods. It was implied that she ran off because her non-creature parents didn’t understand what she was going through. So how does the neighbor come into this? Did he follow the family on the camping trip, kidnap the girl, and then let her loose to run off on her own when she bit him? I wish this were clearer.
‘Let Your Hair Down’ isn’t a bad episode, per se, but it’s certainly one of the weakest of the season so far. The writing is pretty dodgy, and the monster effects are especially cheesy in this outing. The CG morphing looks crappy, and the monster faces are so obviously rubber masks. That’s kind of embarrassing.
On the plus side, Nick discovers that Eddie is absolutely obsessed with Christmas. His whole house is decked out with lights and trains and miniature villages and so forth. He goes gonzo for the holiday, and even tells Nick that not only is Santa real, but he’s a creature too. How else could he survive those temperatures at the North Pole?
