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| Courtesy NBC |
Opening Quote: “More and more she grew to love human beings and wished that she could leave the sea and live among them.”
The setup: Young frat guys are lured to the water's edge by some hot girls. Drunken, very off-key singing ensues. I'm not saying the singing was so bad it was deserving of death, but it was pretty bad. Some water-dwellers apparently didn't like it very much either. After the girls entice the men into the water by removing their bikini tops, the poor boys are dragged under the water.
On shore, another girl steals one of the boy's phones to gaze longingly at his selfies. Once the siren girls leave, the phone stealing girl drags the object of her affection from the water and after a little CPR, he coughs up some water. She flashes glowy eyes and webbed hands before disappearing. Mermaid anyone?
Jake, our lucky survivor, files a missing persons report on his friend Dan, who turns up dead of course. As Jake leads Nick and Hank to the scene of the crime, Nick's new super hearing detects an eavesdropper. It's our fishy savior. He chases after her, but she escapes into the river and demonstrates some impressive swimming speed before she surfaces with her glowy eyes staring back at him. After hearing Nick's description of the girl, Capt. Renard suggests they round up the “unusual suspects”. He then goes to his office to make a phone call to his compatriot in Austria who has sent him a picture of Adalind. Apparently, it's just now occurring to the good Captain that Adalind is the one with a royal baby on the way. Oops.
When all else fails, Nick runs off to Monroe, who now comes with a free consult with Rosalee. They are currently occupied with unpacking all of her stuff into Monroe's carefully decorated house. She suggests it might be a naiad. She then sends all the boys off to the trailer to look up naiad lore. I think she really just wanted to get them out of the house, don't you? They discover that the naiads can't get very far from the water. One of Nick's ancestor's caught one, who died by morning when kept from the sea. Nick's ancestors were not the nicest people in the world.
Wu works another one of his technological miracles and tracks Jake's phone to a houseboat at the marina. It's inside one owned by a nice older man named Able, who happens to have 3 daughters, Sara, Anna, and Ellie. Guess who the pretty girls from the river were? You got it. Sara and Anna were the two young sirens from the river. Ellie, Jake's deaf savior, watches from the safety of the water.
Some young angry fisherman try to intervene when Wu and crew take the girls away for questioning, but they back off when arrests are broadly threatened. I imagine all that time away from the water might not be very good for the complexion. Once the cops are safely away, the young ruffians attack Able, claiming that Ellie needs to be “cut”. Apparently this is what happens when you don't raise your women right. I don't like these guys. I just thought you should know. Anyway, Able shows up to save his daughters and claims he killed Dan. Nick and Hank can tell he's been in a scuffle and don't believe him. The new plan is to use his confession to get Sara and Anna to tell them what really happened.
While her family is off getting ready to die like fish out of water, Ellie just can't leave a good thing alone. She shows up at Jake's house and reveals herself. Unfortunately, while she is showing off in the pool, the fundamentalist fishermen club Jake over the head. They then haul her out of the pool and away to be punished for her modern ways.
Dominic and Jesse are fish men from Alaska and they're sterile. This apparently makes them mad. Let me explain. Sara decides to tell Nick the truth to save her father. Dominic and Jesse have come to Portland from Alaska as part of an arranged marriage between their families. One small problem is that naiad men are sterile. The womenfolk have to get pregnant by human men to keep the species going. This makes big fishermen like Dominic and Jesse angry, so they kill the possible fathers of their potential children. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Nick and Hank head off to the marina to save Ellie from the angry sterile men. Fortunately Dominic and Jesse have been unsuccessful in keeping Ellie transformed long enough to cut her webbing. So they are angry, brutal, and ineffective in so many ways. As Nick and Hank show up, they tie Ellie to an anchor and throw her in the water. Normally this wouldn't be a problem for her, but she happens to be unconscious.
Nick dives into the murky water to save her and spends a very long time underwater, much to Hank's alarm. When he emerges with Ellie, he has that gray zombie skin tone again, but soon pinks up nicely. He deems that Dominic and Jesse need to go to jail for their crimes, even though he knows they will shortly die from dehydration any way. Once again this compassionate decision makes one wonder why he had such a hard time with the guy that died in the bar fight. The happy naiad family is soon reunited at the dock. Let's just hope they don't get any new boyfriends from Alaska.
Since we have once again been reminded of Nick's new weirdness, Juliette is at home checking the report Nick's doctor sent to his email. While she's doing that with his permission, I don't think he was planning on getting any missives from his mother while she was looking around in there. Given the cryptic nature of the message, Juliette is suspicious of this “M” character. I hope Mama Burkhardt shows up again, that woman could really whip this crew into shape.
The next episode of "Grimm," “El Cucuy” airs Friday, November 29 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.