Grimm Season 6 Episode 8 Review: The Son Also Rises
Kathleen Wiedel
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I confess: I had a really, really hard time deciding what grade to give Grimm Season 6 Episode 8 because I was just too busy laughing my head off.
It was just so difficult to take "The Son Also Rises" with any amount of seriousness, particularly as a person with a degree in English and a modicum of scientific understanding.
In one of the most blatant riffs on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein I have ever seen, Grimm had pretty much everything except for villagers wielding torches and pitchforks!
The whole thing was started by the un-subtley named Victor Shelley got into a car accident with his son, killing (not mostly killing, or nearly killing, but actually killing!) said son.
In a feat of astonishing scientific brilliance (otherwise known as magic), Dr. Shelley and his colleagues actually managed to resurrect the son! They literally brought him back from the dead!
In fact, the only obvious reason anything went wrong at all was because the body parts they stole came from Wesen! The cadre immediately declared they had created a monster and resolved to destroy it!
Now, under these circumstances, is it any wonder that the son then tried to kill them all first?
(Perhaps even more mind-blowing from a certain perspective is the apparently near-total lack of scientific awe and wonder that they succeeded in bringing a person back from the dead! In a garage!)
Beyond that, the story felt rather muddled and incoherent. If any of the four scientists were worried about the ethical implications, why did they do it in the first place, for instance?
The A-story did provide for this highly-entertaining exchange between Wu and Hank regarding post-mortem arrangements:
Hank: The last thing I ever want is to wind up in the ground! I get claustrophobia just thinking about it! Cremate me, spread my ashes over the Willamette River, and let me float free to the edges of wherever.
Wu: You know they have a lot of cows and horses that drink from the river.
Hank: So?
Wu: So what happens if some cow drinks from the Willamette and gets you, too? And craps you out in a field? And then some farmer comes along and tills that field? Next thing you know, you’re buried beneath the cold, dark ground.
Hank: Don’t mess with a man’s afterlife.
When I first learned the title of this episode, I was hoping that it might have something to do with Kelly, Nick's son. Maybe in relation to whatever the mysterious thing going on with his sister and Eve.
The development on that arc has turned a little...weird. Let's let Rosalee sum up some of it:
Are you suggesting Wesen come from other planets?!
Rosalee
Please. For the love of all that is good, no. Just NO. They did that with Immortals in Highlander II: The Quickening. It was a terrible idea then, and it's a terrible idea now.
And then Renard's friend Dasha brought up some mysterious ancient prophesy thing, and I started having flashbacks to the Star Wars prequel movies. Look how beloved those are.
I'm also somewhat conflicted about what happened with Nick and Eve. Or should we say, Nick and Juliette? Because he called her by her former name, something that did not go unnoticed.
I was almost always frustrated by the way Juliette was treated by the writers, and the rather unfortunate implications of Nick engaging in a relationship with Adalind. Now things are just getting confusing.
A part of this comes down to Juliette/Eve's less-than-conventional story arc over the seasons. The rest is courtesy of the rather opaque manner in which this whole death-grip-vision thing has been developed.
The episode ended with Eve declaring that she had a feeling that they didn't have a lot of time before whatever it was happened. You mean...the end of the series?
Sigh.
A few final notes before I turn the discussion over to you:
- A hugely common Hollywood mistake: defibrillators cannot restart a heart with no rhythm (i.e., a flatline, or asystole). Defibrillation can only correct irregular rhythms (ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia).
- I got a kick out of seeing Vik Sahay return to my screen as Sanji Raju; he was previously a series regular on Chuck.
- Props to Silas Weir Mitchell for the expression on Monroe's face after waking up from that dream. Oh, and that dream.
- I really do enjoy listening to Sasha Roiz speak foreign languages. This time, we got Russian!
If you missed anything, be sure to watch Grimm online to catch up!
We've only a few to go before the series finale – Grimm Season 6 Episode 9, "Tree People," is scheduled to air on Friday, March 3, 2017 at 8/7c on NBC.
So, what did you think of "The Son Also Rises"? Was it genuinely horrifying, or unintentionally hilarious? What is this mysterious thing to which Diana is connected?
Let us know in the comments below!
