GRIMM Weaves an Evil Web

Season 1, episode 11: “Tarantella”

This episode opened with a sort of prologue reviewing information from two past episodes. This episode is all about, or mostly about, spiders.

This episode did well on the creepy factor. I am not sure if I miss the opening misdirection shots of previous episodes. While I found them a bit annoying it did make this show different than others. I don’t expect that style to come back. It feels like the series has settled into its own.

“Tarantella” opens with an attractive young man, Ryan, at an art gallery. Despite closing a conversation on his cell phone to his girlfriend with “I love you.”  It’s obvious that he is there to check out ladies, not the art work. In a flash he shows us that he is Fuchsbau, a fox creature. Apparently Fuchsbau sort of hunt women. Which begs the question: why does the girlfriend on the phone hang around with a serial womanizer? But enough about him; he’s only a small part of this story.

Ryan strikes up a flirty conversation with a beautiful brunette. She leaves the gallery and he follows. She keeps trying to put him off and he will not let her alone. In his apartment he tries to take advantage of her but she turns the tables and attacks him.

He manages to bite off her finger but that is his last fight. It looks like she pukes some sort of milky stuff into his throat. Next shot she is leaving, her hair is messy, her lipstick is smeared. She’s crying and while she’s rubbing her face with one hand the other is hanging at her side one finger missing and it’s dripping blood. I wondered why the police can’t follow the trail of blood to crack the case.

At home with Juliette, Nick is trying to connect their television, when suddenly their window is egged. Nick overreacts and heads outside with gun drawn to find a couple of beaver creature kids lurking behind a wall. The two kids run off scared.

Nick again avoids the impending necessity to either cut Juliette lose or bring her into his world. A point that Monroe teases Nick about – Grimms not being so very brave after all. As with most every conversation Monroe and Nick have it’s interrupted by a phone call.

When Ryan’s body is found the next morning it’s totally desiccated. Which is why they are all surprised to find out he was alive the night before. Nick finds a finger under the dead Ryan’s neck area. Nick is creeped out when the finger wiggles in his grasp. He drops it and Hank first teases him then takes care of bagging the evidence.

Last week the running thing was Hank repeating that the town is getting weirder. This week it’s tease Nick week.

Hank and Nick follow up the scene of the crime with a trip to the art gallery from the night before. There they watch surveillance cameras and see Ryan and the attractive brunette, Lena. (They don’t know her name yet. That’s just to make it easier for me.) They watch video of the two of them leaving the art gallery. They hypothesize who was seducing whom when another phone call interrupts.

Next they are with the coroner, Harper. She comments that these two detectives seem to get all the interesting cases. Harper however, likes the challenge that these cases present. She explains that the victim was forced to ingest a highly corrosive acid. It liquified his internal organs and they seemed to have been then removed through the hole in his abdomen. The hole appears to be a bite wound. Nice way to go, huh?

Nick and Hank explain what they know so far to Captain Renard. They learn that there is a match with the finger print on the finger found at the scene to a murder scene five years before in Pheonix, Arizona. That murder looks almost identical to this one. The toxicology report points to an amino acid found in spider venom.

Next scene finds Nick doing research in Aunt Marie’s trailer. There he finds the origins for this tale is a Japanese spider goblin and a name for what he is chasing. Lena is a Spinnertod one of the worst of the spider creature people.

Back to Lena as she prepares to go out again. This time she wears a light blonde wig. Her finger is bandaged. This is my least favorite part of the episode. I think it’s poorly done. Either there is a real problem with continuity here or something else happened and they tried to cover it with a sloppy edit. So bear with me here.

Lena arrives at a jazz restaurant and an attractive man notices her. Then we jump to his face burning from the acid in a hotel room. Lena attacks him and kills him in a slightly different way than the first attack we witnessed. But here is the confusing part; when we last saw Lena she was in the blonde wig. When she put on the wig her own hair was in a tidy ponytail. Now as she attacks her victim, her own hair is down but styled, held back away from her face, probably with barrettes. I can buy that the wig might have come off in the attack. But I don’t see how or why she would take time to then style her hair as she is savagely attacking this guy.

Back to Nick’s story; he visits a house with two beaver creature people and sort of threatens them. He makes it clear that he does not want any of them coming to his house. Does anyone else wonder what the creature people see when they recognize him as a Grimm? I am guessing it is very scary. It might be interesting to see an episode from a creature’s perspective.

The hotel maid discovers the latest victim on the floor near the bed. Two things are odd about this. First, the light switch does not work. Second, the body was on the bed and now it’s on the floor. Not so surprising that Lena is able to slip out past the maid.

Police do their work on the crime scene. They find a scrap of fabric in the dead body’s hand.  Watch our Lena in her blonde wig leaving the hotel room on the video from the hotel. Back at the police station Captain Renard shares information on past murders – three from five years ago and three from five years previous to that. They surmise that since only two have taken place this time there is another victim yet to come.

This was an interesting part of the episode. Instead of placing misdirecting shots in the front of the episode they went here. With voice over from Captain Renard talking about how the murderer might be selecting her victims, we watch Lena watching men at a park. She seems to be scoping them out. She gets out of a minivan, and an attractive man comes over and offers to help her. It appears that he may be the next target.  They have a coy exchange and a young middle school age girl runs up. It’s then that we learn this is her husband and daughter.

Nick pays a visit to Monroe for more information on spider creature people. Monroe is sort of the creature version of Martha Stewart. He is in the middle of making vegetarian sausage. While Monroe himself does not know a lot about spinnetod, he remembers someone who might be able to help, Charlotte.

Next we join the spinnetod family at supper. Lena gives her husband the watch she took from Ryan. They all admire the watch and when Mom and Dad kiss it’s the daughter’s cue to leave the room.

Monroe and Nick arrive at the cloister house for creature types to question Charlotte. She is some sort of spider creature. She looks 70 but claims to be 26. She gives Nick a lot of information. She says she has turned her back on the urges of her kind. But towards the end of their visit she takes a shine to both Nick and Monroe. They quickly leave before she is unable to resist her urges.

The watch from Ryan shows up at a local middle school. The principal called the police. All this leads them to Lena’s daughter. Apparently part of the story was cut from the aired episode. On the official show website it says something about the daughter, Sally, taking the watch from her father’s night stand.

It’s not much to go on but the police arrest Sally’s father for the stolen watch. It’s at the house that Hank notices the wife’s finger is bandaged. But Nick sees that she is a spider creature. When Nick asks to see the injured finger she reluctantly  removes the bandage to reveal a complete and perfect finger.

At the police station Nick and Hank question the husband about the watch. He holds on to a lie about buying it at a swap meet.

Lena drops off her daughter at a friend’s house. She is headed off to find a victim for her last feed for five years.

Back to the police station. Nick reveals himself as a Grimm to the husband who is also a spinnetod. Nick asks why Lena has let him live. He goes on to tell Nick a tale of attraction and love.

I don’t get this next bit. Lena gets out of the shower and finds that her face is not right. She starts peeling off her skin. Now that is a really intense exfoliator she is using.

The finger print from the severed finger matches a print taken at Lena’s home. I guess that is enough to give them probable cause to enter Lena’s home. They don’t find Lena but Nick finds the discarded skin.

Lena’s car is found at the marina and the police are off to that location. Hank grabs the young man Lena is seducing and takes him out of harm’s way. Lena attacks Nick. Nick gets a shot off. That alone in many other T.V. shows would have killed someone. Nick manages to knock Lena into a net. Yes, it’s an ironic twist that the spider is caught in a web.

Hank and Nick pick up Sally from the friend’s house to take her to her grandmother’s. She is asking many questions about her parents. In the back seat we and Nick she her morph in to a spinnetod as well.

The last scene for this episode is Lena sadly examining her quickly aging hands and face from inside a jail cell.

[Official Show Site at NBC]     [Previous recap: “Organ Grinder”]