Spoiler Alert. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know, don’t read this.
So, last night I watched it. Oh, Good Lord. The only theory that could deflect shame from everyone involved in this fiasco is if the writers had all been fired and instead the Producer’s teenage daughter wrote it, while attending a school dance, while texting her best friends, while breaking up with her boyfriend, during a hurricane. Even as an ironic joke or as part of a drinking game (let’s say a tequila shot after each important character is brutally slaughtered) it’s unwatchable. Rather than belabor the point with countless examples of awful television viewing let me cut to the chase. At the climax of the show the hero is about to betray the world to the devil by surrendering to him this ultimate weapon when he is stopped by a young woman snatching it away. He then chases her down, beats her into submission and is heading back to surrender it again when his dead mother and dead aunt calling to him from heaven shame him into a debate about fighting back. But he’s so broken from the beating he’s been given by the devil that the only way he agrees to fight is if his mother and his aunt will fight for and with him. Think about this for a moment. A grown man has to be helped in a fight by his mother! And in fact, most of the damage in the battle is done by his dead female relatives. This truly represents the low ebb of masculinity on broadcast TV. After the victory, there’s a sort of alternate reality scene change where all the main characters are alive again and don’t remember any of the climax as if it didn’t actually happen. Nick starts hugging them all and seems pretty close to blubbering and it’s reminiscent of Dorothy awaking in her bed in Kansas. “You were there and you were there, and there’s no place like home.” Good Lord. Then the very final scene is twenty years in the future and his son and his baby mamma’s daughter (by his mortal enemy and police chief boss) are now Grimms getting ready to head off with Mom and Dad for some good old American Wessen slaughtering. Good clean fun. Good Lord.
I confess I liked this show when it first came out. My only defense is that it was in the early Obama years and I needed something absurd to allow me to think that maybe none of what was going on in the world was real. After all, if a whole American city could be composed of monsters without any humans suspecting then maybe somehow the world would manage to escape the Obama presidency without mortal damage being done. Silly me. Luckily, now we’re in the age of Trump and I don’t need fantasies to distract me. The reality is bizarre (and entertaining) enough. So, farewell to Nick and Juliette. Farewell to Monroe and Rosalee. Long may you inhabit Wessen-infested make-believe Portland Oregon which is a distinct improvement over the actual horror of SJW infested Portland.