Grimm season 4 episode 14 review: Bad Luck

This review contains spoilers.

4.14 Bad Luck

Grimm returned from yet another mid-season sabbatical to deal with the fallout of Nick’s discovery that his girlfriend is a right witch.

If you remember, we were left hanging at the end of the last episode, Trial By Fire, when Juliette confessed she was a Hexenbiest to Nick, after wiping the floor – literally – with arch-nemesis Adalind.

Our hero reacts by ticking all the right emotional tick boxes: shock, betrayal, guilt, confusion… Despite reassuring Juliette that he would never hurt her, he takes off, presumably to try to figure out the deeply weird and conflicting relationship that exists between himself, Juliette and Adalind (a relationship that we learn by the end of the episode is about to get a lot more, ahem, fraught.)

As his job is being a hero, Nick thinks he can ‘save’ Juliette. It turns out that’s trickier than he thinks when he encounters Hexen-mentor Henrietta, who pulls a whole seduction routine to demonstrate… well, I don’t really know what that was.

So with no easy way out of the situation, Nick faces a tough choice. Can he learn to accept Juliette in her current form – the way she has accepted his being a Grimm – or will it be too much for him to handle? Will he hang on out of his own sense of guilt at what’s happened?

Nick is the ultimate ‘good guy’ and bland, boring Juliette was once a perfect match for that. He’s clearly struggling to do the right thing, but Juliette 2.0 is about as far away from boring as you can get – particularly as her kill list mounts. Also physically he can’t help but be repulsed by her in her woged form, which again, doesn’t bode well for their future happiness.

But if all that wasn’t enough to deal with, another bombshell was dropped before the end credits – Adalind tricking Nick into sleeping with her has resulted in her falling pregnant with a Grimm’s child! What’s that sound? That would be another nail being banged into the coffin of Nick and Juliette’s relationship.

A theme of the episode was fertility, and boy is Adalind “fecund” (best word of the episode, by the way.) She takes the news as you might imagine, which is to say, badly.

It all adds to the soap opera drama of the show at the moment. Earlier in the episode Adalind was trying to convince Renard that they should once again align themselves in the hunt for baby Diana.

With Nick already pissed off that Juliette confided in Renard about being a Hexenbiest before him, there is going to be one awkward conversation between that love quadrangle when this all comes out.

Elsewhere there was a Leporem Venator (“hare hunter” – as opposed to Heir Hunters) on the loose, a fox-like Wesen that hunts the rabbit-like Willahara for their feet. The foot is used to help infertile couples conceive; the fresher the foot, the more fertile the female, apparently. It is literally seen as a lucky rabbit’s foot – though less so for the Willahara.

Couple of things about this storyline. Firstly, the Leporem Venator, a woodsman type who lives in a cottage in the woods and carries an axe, had the dodgiest accent since Don ‘Barney Rubble’ Cheadle in Ocean’s Eleven. Though by the end of the episode I’d worked out it was probably Welsh, mixed with Victorian London.

Secondly, Wu gets the best lines. Working the case, Wu describes the perp as having “one hell of a foot fetish.”

So what can we expect next for the gang? Well, we can assume that Nick will probably continue to walk around looking bewildered.

But Adalind’s pregnancy throws up all kinds of questions, not least can a Hexenbiest give birth to a child that also has a Grimm’s powers? I guess we’ll find out as the good news is that the show was last month renewed for season five.

To paraphrase Wu, I hope the writers “hop right on it”.

Read Christine’s review of the previous episode, Trial By Fire, here.

Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.