Grimm about the mouth.

Grimm is an atrociously stupid show.

I knew I should have asked for better makeup.

Ignore the mangling of German and Latin, forgive the dunderheaded insistence that nobody sees or knows about these mythical creatures the wesen—even though wesen:human = haystack:needle—you still get brutally assaulted by the stupid. Every single episode is riddled—nay, festooned—with plot machinations that stretch credulity like a Boomer Banks dildo when they're not flat-out contradicting plot points established three minutes ago.

So let's start at the top with a one-question quiz. Answer quick! When you learn that the precious artifact your monster-hunting aunt bequeathed you is keenly sought after by every monster in the world—or at least the college-educated ones—what do you do?  

CORRECT! You head immediately to your Ops-Central trailer that nobody knows about, retrieve your doodad from the super-tricky side-opening desk drawer that nobody could ever find, much less open, take it to work, and put it in your non-locking center desk drawer in the middle of the open police station floor. And you leave.

One perceives at times (note: I'm 40 episodes into the show) that Grimm is aiming for Buffydom, right down to the belated Season 2 addition of the nutshell intro narration over the opening credits—a horrible idea that Buffy toyed with in S2 but discarded before the season was out. Buffy's creators were canny enough to realize the logistical problems with the Sunnydale bizarre-death and monster-spotting rates and to suggest increasingly that the "normals" knew there were demons and vamps wreaking havoc around them; they just didn't want to talk about it. Grimm doesn't know what to do with this, and isn't even smart enough to finesse or avoid the subject: instead, we have entire season-long plot points turning on the singularly daft idea that a character already exposed to many bizarre happenings will somehow be unable to process a few simple facts about the wesen among us.

Meanwhile, in the land of plot consistency...

Ignoring such concerns, we seemed briefly to be getting into a decent long-plot groove, relying less on the silly-animal-head- (or disemboweling-technique-) of-the-week episodes.

I used to have that mask! No, wait, it was Ronald Reagan. No, wait, it WAS this one! No, wait... 

But you know what? Even the long plots take too damn long: one episode, character A makes a transcontinental threat against character B, but emissary C so entrusted doesn't deliver it until the next episode, whereupon character B commends his smirking insouciance back to character A, who receives it from the emissary... who knows? next season, maybe. Apparently, creepy Old World Mafia Postbiester still take boats across the Atlantic (because sunlight? no, wait, that's Buffy again) and then henchhike across North America. Oh, and I could swear we just watched two characters convene a phone call whose sole purpose was to schedule a phone call at which to plan a face-to-face meeting.
 
Grimm tries to be clever but more often than not betrays itself. Why, in a show bustin' out all over with therianthropy, do you name a character "Renard" if he's not part fox? For that matter, what kind of bad sexist joke is it to name the female part-fox character fuchsbau, German for "fox hole"? Why do the Germans have a monopoly on folklore and naming rights to all monster taxa?

The writers assail us with horror tropes and borrowings like buckshot, and we sit on the couch and holler "Bad seed!" and "Pusher!" and "Woman in white!" before the overlay credits are done overlaying. I haven't done an ep-by-ep comparison with Kolckak, the Night Stalker, but I suspect strong correlation.

Foxy the Euro-Cool Captain may be badazz but he got nothing on THIS guy

In the throes of season 2 Juliette comes home and finds a huge gaping pit where her entire house's floor used to be, and an infinitely ascending staircase—right out of Mark Danielewski's The House of Leaves, this is one of the show's more interesting heists, but it's abandoned almost immediately, and suddenly Juliette's haunting-cum-hallucination is all about remembering Nick. The show provides no logic, of course, as to why she's remembering him: the potion she lately drank was for curing a completely separate complaint caused by a different hexenbiest's spell. Oh, and then she remembers too much of Nick, talking too loudly, or in sharply clashing clothes, or some shit. I think I was checking email on my phone by this point, hoping for some strategic disembowelments to happen along.

Sigh. So who's more idiotic, the makers of an idiotic show or the idiot who watches two full seasons of it?

Oh, three more random notes: (1) Nobody apart from the main detectives appears to have any visible means of support. (2) Ain't no possible way Nick and Monroe aren't sucking each other's cocks at least occasionally. There's at least one whole scene where they debate revealing their relationship—in exactly those terms!—to Nick's girlfriend. (3) The Portland law enforcement enclave is one scant, slippery rung up the sophistication ladder from The Lair, where the entire department consisted of Colton Ford, more often than not fighting supernatural crime in his pyjamas.