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| Courtesy NBC |
Opening Quote: "I thought of making myself a beautiful wooden marionette. It must be wonderful, one that can dance, fence, and turn somersaults."
With a Pinocchio reference like that, it's no surprise that we open with some high school kids practicing for an Academic Decathlon. A kid named Pierce is doing pretty good, while his overly competitive mother watches. The kids go out for greasy fast food after practice. Here we learn that Pierce's mom is a freaky smart geneticist. This doesn't bode well. The kids split up and head home. It's like they've never seen a horror movie before. Never split up! Anyway, Brandon gets attacked by our Monster of the Week, which appears to be a Lowen, a lion-like Wesen. This tragedy interrupts Nick and crew, who are attending an awards ceremony for Capt. Renard. Nick has managed to convince Juliette to come with him. She very nonchalantly can't keep from drooling over the good Captain, who also keeps looking her way.
Since Nick and Hank have to go investigate the dead kid, Renard offers to take Juliette home. Oh, yeah.
Renard does manage to get Juliette home safely, and she awkwardly escapes to the house - where she immediately goes upstairs to take a cold shower. However, the old black magic on Renard gets the better of him, and he slips inside the house and follows her upstairs. Just when we think he's going to hop in that shower after her, he catches sight of a picture on the dresser of Nick and Juliette in happier times. He promptly breaks the glass and flees the house, leaving Juliette none the wiser. Poor Renard. He is so overwrought with himself, he almost runs over a pedestrian, and we catch another glimpse of his Wesen self, which looks quite ugly, and not very Prince Charming like at all.
The next morning, Nick and Hank are interviewing the rest of the Decathlon kids about Brandon. They don't find much to go one, except that the coach of the team is a Lowen. Who are of course known to be aggressive, competitive, and prone to violence.... Could this be our culprit? I doubt it.
Now let us take a little sojourn to Vienna, Austria. Oh, lookie! It's Adalind! She's is laying in wait for Renard's brother at an expensive looking restaurant. She chats him up, baiting him with information on Renard and the Grimm and they get cosy in the dining room. Well, Adalind gets all the juicy gossip about our Capt. Sean Renard. Turns out his mother, a Hexenbiest, was the King's mistress. Apparently, the Queen wasn't too happy with a half-breed in the family, so Renard's mother fled with him to America. The Hexenbiest part of his heritage would explain the extremely bad looks of Renard's inner Wesen. Ick.
Back in Portland, Renard, trying to look ordinary, enters the Spice Shop. Monroe who is still minding the shop while Rosalee is away, doesn't recognize him. Renard explains that he needs something to stop obsessive behavior. Monroe really gets enthusiastic about trying to help. You can tell he's been studying up on his potions. The Captain declines to give him any details other than it's a potion-induced obsession. This is bad. Monroe's going to have to do some research.
Meanwhile, Jenny, one of the Decathlon kids, is having a hard time dealing with Brandon's murder and asks Pierce to meet her at school. Well, the next thing you know, Jenny is being attacked under the bleachers. Nick and Hank arrive on the scene, and find that the dead girl is clutching Pierce's watch in her hand. This of course, necessitates a trip back to Pierce's house, where he is playing basketball in the driveway. They get pretty aggressive with the kid and his mom comes out of the house yelling at them for upsetting her son. At this point both Pierce and his mother reveal themselves to be Genio Innocuo, cute little turtle Wesen! This means a trip to Aunt Marie's Trailer to research turtles. As luck would have it, there was a Grimm on board the H.M.S. Beagle with Darwin during his trip to the Galapagos islands. The Genio Innocuo were native to the islands. This Ancestor Grimm found them to be peaceful, intelligent, and non-violent, which of course, made them easy to dispatch. Nick's ancestor's were jerks. All of this means that Pierce doesn't have the claws or teeth necessary to have performed the murders, so the team goes looking for the coach.
While Hank and Nick are looking up turtles, Pierce is becoming a little suspicious of his own mother. He finds some bloody clothes in the washing machine. They are interrupted by a call from the coach, who has pulled the team out of the Decathlon competition despite Pierce's and his mother's objections. Pierce runs off in a huff. Of course, when the Grimm Team gets to the coach's house, they find him dead, just like Brandon and Jenny.
Pierce angrily confronts his mother, accusing her of having killed his friends. He pulls the bloody clothes out of the washer, only to find that they are his. His mother begins to cry, telling him that she was only trying to help him. That she was trying to give him traits she never had. So, mom is a geneticist... you do the math. Obviously she was messing with this kid's DNA and somehow he is both a Genio Innocuo and a Lowen. Well, the Lowen part gets a little angry and attacks her. Conveniently, Nick and Hank show up and intervene. The mother admits that she altered Pierce's DNA, but that he doesn't know what he's doing. He has no knowledge or memory of what the Lowen part of him does. So once again, we learn that puberty sucks.
You know what else sucks? Renard returns to the Spice Shop for his dose of bad news. Well, the good news is that Monroe can mix him up a potion that will help with the physical symptoms, but that's it. There's no stopping the emotional obsession without treating both victims. Monroe, proceeds to explain that he will just be a ticking time bomb, and a danger to anyone between him and the object of his obsession. Yeah, I think Nick's going to have some trouble with that.
Nick pursues Pierce, who is about to jump off a building and end his miserable split personality existence. Nick handcuffs himself to the kid as he jumps and therefore prevents his suicide. Sadly, this means that the kid gets to spend an undisclosed amount of time in prison honing his Lowen killing skills. I call this a bad move, Nick. I'm looking forward to the episode where all the “bad guys” Nick has saved from death, only to put in prison, come back to thank him.
Next week we get a look at some ghosts, just in time for Halloween! The next episode of Grimm, "La Llorna," airs on NBC Oct. 26, 9 p.m. ET.