'To Protect and Serve Man' -- Grimm 2x11

Warning: Spoiler Alert

This episode was brought to you by "The Twilight Zone" IT'S A COOKBOOK!! "The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood.

Ok, two things struck me early on with this episode ... the first was the title. I will completely admit that as soon as I saw the title, my first thought was of that "Twilight Zone" episode ("To Serve Man"), and I was glad to find out that I wasn't imagining things (what with the eating of people and all). And the other was that this might be the first time that there was a cross-over between "Grimm" and SPN. Sure, it's not a cross-over with characters or actors, but the fact that it is the first time (to my recollection) that they have both dealt with the same monster kind of made me get a little bit giddy. I totally started having flashbacks to back when SPN was actually pretty good, and I didn't want to keep yelling at the showrunners for the choices that they've made. Then, I started to have a few flashbacks to Ravenous, what with the eating of people and all, but that's probably to be a bit expected, no?

Monroe walking in on Juliette snogging Renard ... yikes. If she really does tell Nick at least the outlining details about Renard next week, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that she only did it cuz she was afraid that Monroe was going to tell Nick, and she wouldn't be able to tell him the way that she wanted to ... and he might tell Nick with a little more detail about the snog than she might want him to know. I'm sure she thought that she would probably be safe to have one more snog with Renard before trying to do whatever it was that he thought would help them, but why would you do that in public, when there was a chance that it could get back to the one person in the world that you didn't want it to get back to? It seems like it would make sense to keep that whole thing under wraps as much as you possibly could, no matter how safe you thought that you were, if only to be extra special super safe about the whole thing. Ok, it's true that she would have pretty much been boned as soon as Monroe walked out of the back room and saw that it was Juliette that Renard was obsessed with, but snogging him in the shop isn't going to go very far in the "nothing has happened, and he's only on my mind cuz I can't help it" department. And I'm getting the feeling all over again that the writers may be trying to write her off of the show, which doesn't make me at all happy on the inside.

I can't be the only one who is glad that Hank is the type of guy who would take the information that he's now discovered about Wesen and Grimms and the lot, and would realize that someone that he had testified against might have been telling the truth about the fact that he was being attacked. And on top of that, that Hank is the type of guy who would not only realize that, but would do his very best to make sure that with this new information, he would try to do whatever he could to make sure that the guy wasn't executed. I don't think that I could like him anymore if he saw the article about dude getting executed in a couple of days, and he didn't do anything about it after having some doubts about what really happened. And I'm really happy that the boys were able to find proof that dude was attacked before he was executed. Knowing that there are Wesen out there that want to hurt people, and not being able to prove that someone was only trying to protect himself from a couple of them would have really sucked (especially given the circumstances).

'Southern Comfort' -- SPN 8x06

Warning: Spoiler Alert

I'll admit that Garth has started to grow on me over the time that he has been on the show, but ... him being the "new Bobby" ... bollocks. There is no "new Bobby" ... there never will be a "new Bobby". Only Bobby is Bobby. ::in a huff::

Ok, now that I've kind of gotten that out of my system ...

It does kind of make sense to have someone fill the need that is presented by the loss of such an important person within the hunter's world. They're going to need someone who is familiar with all kinds of lore, and who will be able to get them the information that they need in a hurry. And while Garth is kind of a goofball, he seems like he might be more suited toward finding out information than going out on hunts (since he seems much more likely to get himself hurt when it comes to dealing with real "monsters" and weapons). Also, it is pleasantly surprising that he has moments of insight that are truly helpful to other hunters and their problems; his goofballness seems to be a bit of a hindrance at times when it comes to picking up on cues ... but then, he has proven that he's rather in touch with being able to pick up on the underlying problems between the boys, so maybe it's that he's good at picking up on the things that are actually important, no? Also, while I can understand that Bobby was important to more people than to just the boys, the boys were family (to him and to them), and it seems weird for other people to try to copy the things that he did or said. Maybe it made Garth feel a little bit closer to his memories of Bobby, or maybe it helped him deal with Bobby's death, but I was totally with Dean for yelling at him for trying to become Bobby ... in a way, it kind of felt like he wasn't taking the death of someone who was so important in the lives of the boys as seriously as he should. I totally get trying to pay homage to the man ... I just didn't dig it all that much.

By Odin's ravens, I am getting so very, very tired of the boys getting pissy with each other. They seem to (on some level) want to cling to each other, but they seem so completely desperate to make each other miserable once they are together. It's like they are in this constant state of trying to figure out if they love each other, or they want to beat the holy living hell out of each other. At this point, I would love to see Sam go off and find someone that he can settle down with (since he's been trying to run away from his family ever since he was ... what? ... 13?), and for Dean to find someone who would actually have his back. Yeah, this has never been the life that Sam wanted, and he's felt like he's been forced into it, but I'm going to have to go with Dean on this; Sam's left how many times, and he keeps coming back, and he keeps making Dean feel like shit (like he doesn't want to be there, like he would abandon Dean at the first chance he got, like family will never be as important to Sam as it is to Dean ...). The longer that Sam stays, the more miserable he is making both of them.

I'm also taking Dean's side in the whole "Benny thing". How is Benny any different than Ruby? Besides the fact that Benny has actually been helping Dean, instead of trying to get him to break a seal? And there's only so much that can be said about the fact taht we didn't know that she was in on the whole thing with YED and Lilith, since she was sneaky from the very beginning, and never stopped being sneaky (or giving me any reason to believe that she wasn't up to something horrible that was meant to hurt the boys). Yeah, I didn't trust her from the beginning, and it didn't matter what she did to "help" them, I never trusted her. Unlike Benny, who (even though he's a vampire) seems to actually be someone that they can trust. Why is it that the more time that goes on, the more I'm trusting Dean on the big things about who/what they can trust, and trusting Sam less and less? Probably cuz Sam makes such bad decisions. Stupid Sam.

'The Final Frontier' -- Castle 5x06

Warning: Spoiler Alert

Is it just me, or is the fact that the episode is called "The Final Frontier," when it was directed by Jonathan Frakes (and had a very special guest appearance by Quark Armin Shimerman) give cause for a multitude of geek-gasims? I totally thought that it would. I thought that the "Star Trek" references in this episode were fantastic ... even though the "Nebula" experience reminded me more of "Andromeda" than of "The Star Trek Experience." Yes, the whole "experiencing the show" would probably be something akin to the ST thing in Vegas, but the concept behind the pretend show that they were supposed to be recreating the experience of seemed to have more of the feel of "Andromeda" to me ... at least from the seasons that I have seen (which were more of the early seasons, rather than the later) ... even though I kept thinking of Reavers when they referenced the baddies from the imaginary show ... but then again, they could have been Magog (especially if you consider how they reportedly looked).

Also with the love? Castle slipping in a reference to "that Joss Whedon show" (which was obviously "Firefly" ... I do love it anytime that they reference the 'Verse in "Castle"), and the fact that Ryan is a LotR fan ... even if I wouldn't classify LotR as Sword and Sorcery ("Highlander" is Sword and Sorcery, and LotR is High Fantasy as far as I see it). The more that we learn about Ryan, the more I want to squish him to my bosom until he stops trying to escape, and that is a fact.

But I did have kind of a "derp" around the fact that Beckett was a closet scifi dork. Her having a motorcycle, fine. Her being a baseball fan, seems in step with her. But the idea of her being a closet scifi dork, when she is constantly making fun of Castle for the dorky things that he enjoys ... I'm having a hard time making sense of that. It seems a little bit too out of character for her to be into anything that is that far into the realm of speculative fiction, and even more so that she would cosplay at cons as a character from an obscure scifi show ... especially when she was talking crap about the steampunk fans who were dressing up in steampunk clothes to go to a steampunk bar. Yes, she is/was a fan of "Batman," but that does seem to be in character (if we're not counting the pre-Bale movies), since they are more like detective stories (and perhaps (in a weird way) getting revenge on the people that murdered a parent), and they don't deal in superpowers that come from the sun or a magic ring or something; I also wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that she was a fan of the Holmes canon ... cuz of the detective aspect. It just doesn't make sense to me that she's going to keep making fun of Castle for his excitement over nerdy things, or her lack of understanding of why steampunky people would not only be fascinated by the concept but that they would also cosplay ... if we are going to find out that she also did some cosplay of her own ... and enough that the people from that area of her life were still friendly with her years later. It just seems to me to be a bit hypocritical of her to talk trash about people who are doing the same things that she has done in her own life ... but then, this isn't the only thing about this character that bugs the hell out of me (see my irritation at the way she treats Castle). Sometimes I get the feeling that the writers of shows don't really pay attention to the details of the things that they are writing about a character, and that kind of makes me irritated.

'The Hour of Death' -- Grimm 2x10

Warning: Spoiler Alert

This episode was brought to you by ... the show's own mythos apparently (which I find completely amusing).

I love the fact that there ware Wesen Grimm's fairy tales within the mythos of the show. In a way, it would make sense that they would have their very own form of fairy tales that were meant to teach their young the things that the older generations thought that they needed to know (since that was pretty much what fairy tales were for). And to find out that "normal" Grimms were not the thing that the Wesen feared the most ... it was really the super crazy Grimms who would go after every Wesen that they could find (regardless if the Wesens in question had actually harmed anyone, or had any intention of harming anyone). But the fact that Monroe mentions the fact that these super crazy Grimms where like the ones you might normally see gives me a bit a hope that Nick and Aunt Marie aren't so very singular as what we may have been led to believe before now. Sure, we don't have all that many Grimms to really have gotten a base reading of how they are as a whole (only ever having encountered Nick (who doesn't know really anything of his heritage), Aunt Marie, and Nick's mom), but the way that most Wesen behave once they realize that Nick is a Grimm would lead the average viewer to believe that a good many of them have been jerk-faces, and have given the Wesen community as a whole a reason to fear them. But perhaps things may have started changing for the better in the more recent past (not only that Monroe states that these super crazy form of Grimm are from the way-back times, but also that there are Wesen who trust Nick even after finding out that he is a Grimm (and I have a feeling that the Eisbiber wouldn't be friends with someone that they know is a Grimm, unless things had started to change a bit).

So, our intern turned out to be a Wesen that wanted to kill other Wesen ... cuz he was doing some serious hero worship of Nick ... or at least, that seemed to be the excuse (or the trigger) for him killing other Wesen. Seems to me that there was a great deal of instability in his life, and he turned it into some self-loathing ... self-loathing that he could only deal with by worshiping Nick as some kind of saint/hero, and trying to kill as many Wesen as he could get his hands on ... and by extension, perhaps kill the part of himself that he didn't want. Perhaps he blamed his mother for the way that they lived and thought that if he could be a Grimm, he could have something better than what he had. Or maybe by killing Wesen (regardless of what kind they were), he was really trying to kill his mother in effigy for letting him down. It's a possibility, right?

We also seem to be getting some forward motion with Renard and Juliette ... even though this forward motion will devastate Nick if he finds out what has happened. It may have been only that one kiss between them (I'm not counting the one that got her out of her coma, since she was unconscious at the time), but the fact that he will see it as her being disloyal to him (even though she doesn't remember anything about him, or their relationship together) will crush him. He may have been rather clumsy when it comes to showing her how much he cared when they could both remember how they felt about each other, but that doesn't mean that he didn't love her ... or that he still doesn't. I have the feeling that things are going to get much worse before they get better between the two of them ... provided that what I have feared since this season started doesn't happen (in that the writers are using this as a reason to write her off of the show).

'Blood Brothers' -- SPN 8x05

Warning: Spoiler alert

I'm really hoping that after this episode, what we see is a real change in the way that the "monsters" of the show are portrayed. Benny was treated much more like he just might have just been one of the gang ... one of the gang with a slight blood problem ... and I really dug that. Well, he was at least treated that way by Dean, and that seems to be the really big issue here, since in previous seasons, it's Sam that has seemed to be willing to treat the "monsters" like they may not necessarily have needed to get dead by some random hunter, and that there might be some of them that could be taken at their word that they had no desire or intention of hurting humans. And with the added bit of "humans kill more humans than any 'monster'" thing in the mix, it almost seems like what we will be getting is a slight shift in how they are going to be treated ... or at least it seems a little bit hopeful, and that makes me happy on the inside, since I've never dug the whole "everything that isn't human is a monster and MUST BE KILT DED RIGHT NOW!!!1!!ELEVENTY" thing that the show has always done.

And to have this "there are some good 'monsters'" thing come from Dean, I think that it not only shows a bit of growth in his character, but it also makes me happy that he is willing to look at things that way. I can only hope that what we saw from Sammy can be handwaved into him being pissed at Dean for not telling him what was going on, instead of him taking the reversal and becoming someone who is unwilling to see that not everything that isn't human is some kind of monster and that it needed to be killed. The fact that he was the one that used to be much more willing to hope and trust in that regard makes me a lot not happy when it comes to the change in him right now. But then again, it's not as though Sam has never done anything that has made me want to shake the hell out of him (maybe kind of literally).

I'm hoping that we can trust Benny, and that there isn't going to be a giant turn around with him so that we find out that he's only been using Dean to get out of Purgatory, and then, using him again to help him not be dead ... and maybe tricking him into maybe helping him destroy his old next (especially since I don't think that he would have been able to kill Andrea himself ... and I'm really not sure right now whether what he said about the last thing he saw was "father" killing her ... I almost wonder if he knew that she had been turned, and knew that he wouldn't be able to harm her, so he brought along someone he knew would be able to do the job. I hope that's not what it is, since I really want him to be awesome).

I'm also wondering if Benny really killed "father". We didn't see it happen, so by all of the laws and rules of fiction, it didn't happen, but that doesn't mean that I don't really want it to be true. I really want the boys to be able to trust him, and to be able to have a brand new ally, what with the fact that they are now the only ones that they have anymore (it would be nice to have someone else in their corner).

'Probable Cause' -- Castle 5x05

Warning: Spoiler Warning

I'm so very, very glad that what we had here wasn't what the preview seemed to be showing us for this episode. From the preview, what it looked like what we were going to have was Castle being believed to be the killer ... yet again ... and the gang thinking that he was really the one who had done those crazy things ... again. The probably that I had with that idea was the fact that maybe the gang may have not known for sure about him in the beginning, whether or not he would be willing or able to do something truly heinous to another human being, but they've gotten to know him over the past 4+ seasons, and they should know him better than that now ... they should know at this point, no matter what his flaws me be, he is not the kind of person who would harm another human being like that ... not for kicks. The only thing that could really make him harm someone else is if he was trying to protect himself or others (and it's never going to be something that he just does for kicks, the way a serial killer does).

As amusing as it was when the boys were trying to figure out who it was that Beckett was seeing, and to watch Beckett and Castle freak out over the fact that they might have been on the right track about what was really going on ... I'm glad that both of the boys and Lanie now also know (along with Martha and Alexis) that Castle and Beckett are together. As much of a pain in the ass as I'm sure that it would be to keep that sort of thing away from the captain (since the captain is likely to try to keep them apart when it comes to questions of ethics, at the very least), the fact that they don't have to keep this away from the people that they are the closest to (and who are most in their lives) is probably a relief; it's no fun to have to keep things away from the people that you most care about in the world, esepcially when it's something so important to you as the person that you are seeing. If you've found love, having to keep that thing under wraps has got to be toxic to you as a person, as well as to the both of you as a couple.

Speaking of them being together: when Beckett was talking to Lanie about the whole thing ... yes, I was glad that she was clear through that whole thing that she believed in him and that she didn't at all think that he had anything to do with what the evidence was making it look like he had done ... the fact that in the midst of that saying that she knew that murder wasn't like him, that she started saying how egoistical and self-involved that he was ... that's the sort of thing that bugs the hell out of me when it comes to Beckett. She may love him, but she has never been at all forgiving when it comes to him; she always has seemed to focus on the bad parts of his character and used it to try to make him feel like there is something wrong with him, and I've never liked that about her. I've had someone do that to me (where they keep pointing out things that they don't like, in what seems like a constant effort to make me feel bad about myself, and that isn't contusive to a loving and healthy relationship. As much as he loves her right now, I have a feeling that if she continues to pick at things about him, he's going to start feeling like he isn't good enough (not just for her, but for anyone); even with the healthy self-esteem that he has at this point, it's going to wear him down after a while).

I also don't see why, after all was said and done, she refused to believe his instincts when it came to what 3XK was trying to do. After all, that's the whole reason why she was willing to keep him on in the first place, and why she went to bat for him with the new captain: he has great instincts, and can sometimes see things that the others miss, since he is so good at looking outside the box (and he doesn't have the cop mentality, where everything has to be a certain way to work). And espeically after 3XK said straight out that the only way that he could go back to killing was to pretend that he was dead for a while, and that they had taken that ability from him (and how pissed he seemed to be about that). I don't see why Beckett is unwilling to trust his instincts about this, when she's willing to trust his instincts about everything else. Maybe it's more convenient for her to think that he's gone? That's only thing that I can think of for why she would try to handwave the entire thing to make it seem like it was something other than what it actually was.

'La Llorona' -- Grimm 2x09

Warning: Spoiler Alert

So, it would appear that the woman in white has managed to make an appearance in the Grimm world now. So, not only do we need to consider all of the various fairytale creatures that could possibly cause harm upon Nick, Juliette, and Hank, but now we also need to consider urban legends and ghost stories. I'm glad that the writers decided that they would expand a little bit so that we aren't just dealing with fairytale creatures from the Grimm's fairytales, but that we're also dealing with things that have their basis in urban legends. It gives them a little bit more wiggle room when they are trying to create their mythos, since they don't have to be locked into one group of stories. It almost makes me want them to add on the fairytales by Hans Christian Anderson, but only really being familiar with the Disney version of "The Little Mermaid," I'm wondering if they would be dark enough for the series (I have bought the Barnes & Noble binding of the complete Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales, and they have been added to the pile of books that I'm planning on reading).

I was kind of disappointed by the fact that when Nick was fighting with the woman in white, the moment that she started to fall away from him, my first thought was that it had to have been midnight (and that that was really the only thing that would have caused her to break off her fight with him) ... and then, when Nick got out of the water, he was told that it was a minute passed midnight. I was kind of disappointed by the fact that that was the reason why she left, and that the boys weren't able to figure out some way to stop her from hurting anyone else in the future. Ok, it may not have been entirely plausible, since there seemed to be Grimms in the past with a lot more knowledge of their history (and what they could and could not do) who were unable to figure out a way to stop her from hurting anyone else in the future, but I would still have liked to have seen Nick figure something out ... like maybe that he was able to come at it with a new perspective since he's still new to the whole thing? But maybe that was hoping for a little too much ... especially since he still seems like he is unable to realize that Monroe and Rosalee could probably tell him exactly why it is that Wesen are able to figure out that he is a Grimm after they have gone into their Woge state. So, maybe I'm expecting a little too much from him sometimes.

And at first, I thought that Valentina Espinosa (the former detective who was trying to find the woman in white) was a Rißfleisch, and I was super excited that we were finally getting to see one in the flesh (as it were). I mean, how many times have we seen that page with the Rißfleisch? A billiony, or so? The people on this show are giant teases in that way. But she wasn't a tiger Wesen, she was a jaguar Wesen. Still cool, but it would just be nice to finally have a character example of that particular one, since we've seen the picture over and over and over again. And I totally did a facepalm when I realized that her fir in her Woge state wasn't actually purplish ... which would have been kind of cool. Stupid light from the computer screen messing with the color of her fir and making me think that it was a color that it actually wasn't. ::shakes fist::

Also, those punk kids who were terrorizing Monroe ... am I the only one who thought of the punks from Cobra Kai when they saw the kid who was dressed up as a skeleton? Those Cobra Kai punks would totally have broken Monroe's window on purpose, and they would totally have deserved having the crap scared out of them, too.