'Grimm' Recap: 'Mommy Dearest'

Courtesy NBC
Wu Meets a Monster...


Opening Quote: “I am going off to a house and entering it like a snake...I will devour their babes and make their hearts ache.”

Meisner and Adalind are still cozily ensconced in their little cabin in the Swiss Alps. It would be terribly romantic if only Adalind wasn’t in the middle of birthing a demon child. Meisner performs this task admirably well. He’s a catch ladies; not only is he hot but he can deliver babies too. As soon as the bundle of horror is done throwing books around the room and is delivered into this unsuspecting world, Adalind goes full on Hexenbiest before collapsing in relief.

Speaking of pregnant gals, back in Portland, a young couple eagerly awaiting their first child is finishing dinner. Sam leaves to pick up his adorable wife’s prenatal vitamins while Dana gets ready for bed. As soon as Sam is gone a skinny grey monster climbs the tree outside Dana’s bedroom. It’s snake-like tongue slithers through the window and under the covers. Dana awakens to it attached to her navel. Obviously, she screams and struggles, dislodging the nasty thing. As she groggily stumbles around the room she falls. The monster itself then slips into the room and once again attaches to her navel as it makes an odd ticking noise. Dana’s screams finally alert a neighbor who comes over to help. Before the neighbor gets there though, Dana manages to slice the tongue with a broken pottery shard and the Wesen scurries into hiding. When Sgt. Wu inevitably arrives, we learn that he knows the couple. Dana is a good friend of his that he grew up with in the Philippines. As he tries to reassure her, she whispers the word “Aswang” and passes out.

When Nick and Hank show up at the hospital, poor Wu fills them in on the details. He feels terribly guilt ridden because he’s the one that told them to move to Portland, because it’s safe. Excuse me while I laugh. According to the doctors, Dana lost a lot of amniotic fluid but the baby is fine. So an Aswang is a Wesen that sucks amniotic fluid. Say it with me now, "Ewww!" 

After everyone leaves the hospital room, Sam calls his brother in the Philippines. He enlists his help in finding a mysterious “she” that is in town and is presumably responsible for this attack. He then turns into a grey-skinned toothy monster just like the one that attacked his wife. That night Wu has a disturbing dream of his grandmother telling him the legend of the horrible Aswang. The real story here is that every culture loves to scare its children with horrific monster stories. Legend has it that the Aswang drugs the mother and then eats the fetus. Guess what? Dana was drugged up with valerian root. Wu almost tells the Grimm about his Aswang worries, but laughs it off in the end. He wouldn’t want anyone to think he believed in monsters now would he?

Sam finally gets a call from his brother with a motel name. Guess who’s in the motel? It’s his mother. It turns out that she will die within a month unless he sacrifices his firstborn. As the eldest child, it’s his duty. I think this is a family tradition best left in the far distant past. He adamantly tells her to go back to Manila and even gives her a plane ticket. She angrily rips it up, so I guess she’s determined to get another taste of that yummy amniotic fluid. Meanwhile, Wu has become suspicious of his odd behavior and is beginning to think he had something to do with the attack on Dana. Basically, Sam tells him to shove off. That’s going to work, I’m sure.

The Grimm gang has meanwhile collected Monrosalee and headed to Aunt Marie’s trailer. While I love Monroe, I dislike this useless sidekick business. Anyway, they learn that the fetus the Aswang (aka Tik-Tik) eats has to be a blood relative. So this points them at Sam’s family, especially when they learn that his mother is in town. They argue about telling Sgt. Wu the truth about Wesen, but Monroe and Nick are set against it, much to Hank’s disgruntlement.

Wu finally works up the courage to tell them about the Aswang myth. Nick awkwardly blows it off, but Nick runs after him. He tries to tell Wu that he doesn’t think it’s a crazy theory and he should give his instincts more credit. Increasingly suspicious of Sam, Wu decides to stake out the house. As he is sitting in his car outside, he sees a taxi drive up and dispense Lani, Sam’s mother, at the curb. He watches as she walks behind a tree and then a shadow scurries up the trunk to the second floor. She makes some noise entering the house and Sam wakes up. When he enters the hall, Lani attacks him and pushes him down the stairs. There is an awful lot of bad parenting in this show. Anyway, he ends up crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, which is where Wu finds him when he barges into the house. 

Lani has meanwhile gone upstairs and hummed Dana back to sleep and started feasting on her baby’s precious amniotic fluid. Wu’s worst nightmares come true when he walks into this scene. The snake-tongued creature jumps on him and slashes his face. She’s pretty spry for an old lady. Only she’s not spry enough to avoid the bullet Nick puts into the back of her head. Dana and the baby are saved, but Wu thinks he’s lost his mind when the corpse turns back into Sam’s mother. The poor man checks himself into the mental ward. Hasn’t Wu suffered enough? First he eats the drugged up brownies Adalind made and ended up eating his couch, and now he sees a real live Wesen and his friends don’t tell him the truth.

Meisner checks in with Capt. Renard to let him know about the sweet little devil baby. When he tells the good Captain that the baby is a girl, Renard seems a touch moved. I think he almost smiled. He orders Meisner to keep them safe and get them out of there as soon as possible. Since they have to wait for the woman who just pushed out a person to recover enough to hike through the forest, this will take a few days. When he goes back inside to check on Adalind, she and the baby are sleeping peacefully. As he reaches over to pull the covers up higher around her, Adalind’s hair suddenly wraps around his arm. The creepy baby is creepily staring at him with glowing red eyes. I guess the evil princess decided he was okay, because she lets him go and goes back to sleep. Adalind’s going to have a hard time getting a date if that baby is going to threaten everyone that gets close to her. Maybe she’ll like her daddy. We can only wait and hope.

So what have we learned this week? First, creepy babies are creepy. Second, mother-in-laws are bad news. Third, Nick is a crappy friend. And the most important thing we learned in this episode of Grimm, is that Sgt. Wu’s first name is Drew. So hello, Drew Wu, I hope you get out of the psychiatric institution soon.

The next episode of "Grimm" ‘Once We Were Gods’ airs Friday, March 14 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.