Grimm 2.07 “The Bottle Imp” Recap

In the world of Grimm, you never know what people are capable of. The show has continually hit on the idea that what we present to the public are merely facades, what we want them to see rather than who we actually are. From the local mailman to prominent political figures, from police officers that have been sworn to protect the public to your child’s high school teacher, we’re all hiding something that we’d rather not share with anyone that we know, let alone the strangers that we encounter on a daily basis. Unfortunately for some, they have to hide an entire identity for fear of the reaction that other people would have to who they truly are.

Green with Envy
The case of the night delved into that very idea, as it began with a 9-year-old little girl (and her pink giraffe being picked up by her father. While it initially looks like your typical “weekend with dad” situation, there’s something not quite right here. For one, all the father (William Granger) had several maxed out credit cards that he tried to use to pay at the gas station, resulting in the attendant being called (off screen) and him seeking a vehicle with his daughter (April) in order to continue evading police. The man that they hitched a ride with only let them after seeing April’s innocent face, though things turned south quickly once they got on the road; the Amber Alert for April came across the radio and William slammed the man’s face into the steering wheel, running them off the road in the process. William drags him out of the truck and into the woods, presumably killing him before tearing off with April.

William, a man recently fired from his job, had a wife that is found beaten and bloody in the bathroom, asking for her daughter. While he left her at home, he took the guns, tape, nails, and camouflage gear that he had been buying the past few days into the container that he had buried deep in the woods. The container, which contained multiple pipes/air ducts, including one leading to the forest floor, was to be the home of William and April as they got away from society and the possibility of him going to jail for abducting her and killing the attendant and driver. However, he didn’t kill the driver – the driver is alive, his hands duct taped and his mouth gagged with a bandana, crawling on the forest floor to safety. He made it out while William was trying to go to town for supplies, including cereal for April, something that allowed the young girl to be open to intruders. At that time, the police had keyed in on a 2 square mile area that the two could be in, eventually finding the container and taking April to the station where she was released to a social worker.

And William? He immediately B-lined to the hospital, where they thought he was going to try to finish the wife off. However, once Nick and Hank made it there, they found out the family’s dirty little secret.

It turns out that it wasn’t William that did the killing or that hurt his wife; it was April, who had begun “growing into” her powers much earlier than her parents had anticipated. They had no way to control her until William decided to take her to the container, likely until she learned how to control herself around other people. However, that knowledge didn’t help the foster family that April was sent to; for a few days, she was to stay with Patty and Dave, parents to at least two other children. Though they seemed nice at first, Johnny, one of their children, immediately began picking on April, jerking her out of the swing and pinching her in the process. Once he began swinging, she pushed him out, which brought the parents out to reprimand both for misbehaving, Dave giving a lecture on what not to do at their house.

April initially seemed to have calmed down, but she waited until Dave turned to walk away before lunging at him, eyes an unusual shade of green, and latching ahold of his arm, drawing a considerable amount of blood in the process. Nick and Hank got to the scene and April reverted back to the little girl that she is, thanks to Nick having been nice to her in the container. Her smile to him, her teeth covered in blood, faded by the time she headed to some type of juvenile facility, where she’ll be remaining until the age of 18. While she busied herself coloring in the “interrogation room”, Nick spoke to one of the guards about the situation, who turned out to be a Wesen herself and one that promised to be able to handle April’s ability. Nick kept looking in at April, almost like he was perplexed by her/waiting for her to do something, but once he got the assurance that she’d be alright, he left her in the hands of the state.

Wanna See My Ax?
Nick and Hank head to the trailer to go through Aunt Marie’s books to find out what type of Wesen William is and how best to deal with him. It’s the first time that Hank had been to the trailer, which causes him to be a little awe-struck the entire time. From the drawings, descriptions, and death depicted in Marie’s book to the cabinet full of weaponry, Hank’s trying to take it all in, asking questions to Nick the entire way. The two find out that they’ve got a Drang-Zorn on their hands, a nasty, ill-tempered Wesen prone to seeking shelter underground and able to be taken out with a crossbow. Granted, Marie used the bow to subdue them long enough to tie them to a stake and burn them to death, but a gun could work just as well and not be as torturous. Nick and Hank may want to catch William; they’re not willing to go that medieval and that violent quite yet.

However, they’re more than willing to admire weapons, which Hank gets to do upon seeing the cabinet in the trailer. The thing that catches his eye, though, is the elephant gun and the .600 caliber Nitro Express bullet found with it, the same shell found in Stark, the Siegbarste that attacked him last season, who Monroe killed with that very gun. Hank immediately mentions that he owes Monroe his life and Nick counters that Monroe has saved his life several times already.

Eye of Newt
While all this was going on, Monroe was running the spice shop on his own, as Rosalee was out-of-town to take care of her sick aunt. The shop is expecting a customer named Leroy, a man with an inner ear problem that will be needing a potion specifically mixed by Monroe in front of him and an assourdissant, a contraption that looked like a cross between head-gear and something from a Saw movie. The ingredients for the potion, as expected, contained a plethora of complicated German-y words that Grimm loves to throw out, which Monroe got confused by. Rather than giving Leroy 2 teaspoons of viscum coloratum (a type of mistletoe), he doled out 2 teaspoons of nepet agrestis (a type of catnip), something that would obviously not be the best thing for the mauzhertz to be ingesting.

When Monroe tracks him down to give him the proper dose of what he needed, Leroy was cackling maniacally, having torn his apartment apart, slapped a fair amount of paint on the walls, and used a chainsaw to destroy a grandfather clock. Leroy makes a go at Monroe, but the blutbad slams the door on him and knocks him out cold, allowing him to pour the liquid in the container attached to the top of the assourdissant, which he was wearing at the time.

Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
“The Bottle Imp” kicked off with Nick and Juliette in the kitchen, fireworks going off in the background (literally) and a story about Juliette going to the dairy farm with her birdcall-loving father being traded between the two. Only this time, it wasn’t Nick telling her about something that she told him and Juliette desperately trying to place when that event happened; Juliette lets him know that she remembers telling him that while they were making dinner, embracing her love with their nightmare over. After apologizing for putting him through everything, Juliette goes even beyond that and tells Nick that the last thing that she remembers was him telling her about his ancestors and that she didn’t believe him then but does now.

And then Nick woke up from his dream.

The two didn’t meet up until near the end of the episode, when Juliette made dinner and the two danced like they used to before the coma. It seemed like they had finally made inroads toward being the “old” Nick and Juliette, until they shared a pretty passionate kiss…and Juliette pulled away to see Captain Renard’s face rather than her boyfriend’s.

The Witch is Back
The episode saw the brief return of Adalind, as the former witch called Renard demanding to know who killed her mother. We hadn’t seen (or heard) anything from her since her feline nicked Juliette and sent her (and Nick) down the rabbit hole that was her coma, though we didn’t learn anything about what she had been up to in that time. Her clothing and the location that she called from were both quite nice and extravagant, so whatever identity that she chose to hide out under had to be a major upgrade. For his part, Renard tried to get her to come back to town, something that she didn’t agree to, likely since she found out that Juliette is out of her coma. Now that Adalind knows that Renard is the one that roused her from her slumber, could she use this to her advantage and let Nick know about it? She obviously wants to ruin him in some form of fashion; why not finish the job from another angle?

Additional thoughts and observations:
-Once he hung up with Adalind, Renard looked at the computer screen that had Juliette’s name typed for an entire page. Could it be real and Renard’s obsession with the redhead is taking over his mind? Or did he imagine the name was there because of said obsession?
-The “Rosalee goes to take care of a sick relative she’s never mentioned” is a little Three’s Company, right?
-I found it a little odd that a 9-year-old freely quoted Thomas Paine and that they never explained why she was into centuries old political science.
-Next week on Grimm: Nick and Hank look into the death of a high school decathlete, while Adalind is spending time with Renard’s family and Monroe gets an unexpected visitor at the spice shop.