Grimm "Iron Hans" Review

Iron Hans’ Youth Camp for Wesen helped young boys prepare for their Wesen futures. What does it mean to be a wesen? Beyond that, what does it mean to have power? What does it mean to feel the pull of evil and the pull of good simultaneously? “Iron Hans” could’ve been an adolescent coming-of-age story, but Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt didn’t seem interested in telling that story. The girls don’t have guidance. Maggie told her father at episode’s end that he never saw her as she was. Juliette, like Maggie, is an outsider, in a boys club. Ideally, she’d destroy Kenneth. Kenneth’s like the others. The boys run the wesen world. Some of the girls get lost in the cracks.

The Maggie reveal comes out of nowhere. The story sets up the young buck son as the killer. He disliked Monroe’s friendship with Nick. There’s a shot of him during Monroe’s story about tasting blood that implicates him. Suddenly, though, Maggie comes out of the woods, tackles Monroe, and asks him to join her for the hunt. The last time Monroe went on a hunt was with his ex-girlfriend in season one, if my untrustworthy memory culled a trustworthy memory from the murky depths of my mind, and that ended in sadness for Monroe. It was his last time as a ‘wild’ wesen. She pulled him back. A season later he met Rosalee. Maggie’s characterization was bare. The boys left her out of the tame rabbit hunt, the camps, and the everything. She barely formed a connection before attaching herself to Monroe in the last act. Her dying scene is borderline gibberish. A lot of emotion coming through that didn’t exist before the hiker put a knife into the side of her abdomen.

Was there a parallel between Maggie and Juliette? Perhaps. One may argue that Dostoevsky’s Demons is a prophetic vision of McDonalds if one has the textual evidence to prove it in the body of the essay. If a parallel exists, it was bare. Juliette continues to increase her antagonistic behavior to everyone she holds dear because she blames them for her transformation. A helpful amount of convenient soapy writing aids her ‘me vs. the world’ mentality. Kenneth planned to turn Juliette fully by telling her about Adalind’s pregnancy and the identity of the baby’s father. Kenneth refers to the baby as the baby Juliette should’ve had with Nick. Pissed off and wanting to kill Adalind, Juliette visits the police station-well, running into her might’ve been a cruel twist of McFate-and learns that Nick will also protect Adalind from her. Juliette hates that, but by protecting Adalind he’s protecting Juliette’s precious humanity. After the writers have fun writing bad Juliette, Juliette will return to her do-good attitude, and she can’t return to goodness with a body trail.

The rest of “Iron Hans” involves Kenneth taking orders from the King to kill Renard, Renard continues to investigate the person he assaulted, and Rosalee begins to work on a way to help Juliette return to normalcy. Renard’s the least essential character in Grimm. Adalind explained what needed to happen to help Juliette in exchange for Nick protecting her from Juliette. Nick and Adalind had a moment in which he felt his baby kick. Adalind then leaves. Nick, freaked out, stands still, and Renard says, and I’m paraphrasing, “This is highly complicated.” Earlier in “Iron Hans” he stood in the pouring rain like an early 2000s emo kid in an imagined Taking Back Sunday video for “Great Romances of the 20^th Century.” Also, he wastes department resources on a case he created by assaulting a man. I hope that he still investigates the case in season 7, having, of course, made no progress.

Other Thoughts:

-Enjoyable episode, overall, I’d say to an inquiring mind over bottled water. Jeff Fahey is great. I’d like Iron Hans to return. It’s a cool part of the wesen world.

-It’d be amazing to camp in Oregon, eh? The woods at night there look magical.

-Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt wrote the episode. Sebastian Silva directed it.