Grimm recap: 'The Seven Year Itch'

Eh, the stretch of top-notch Grimm episodes had to come to an end at some point, right? At least tonight’s monster-of-the-week entry was saved from out-and-out meh-ness by the killer (literally!) last 10 minutes.

We open on a cicada. A huge, man-sized cicada, a.k.a. every nightmare you’ve ever had when you saw one of those creepy buggers the size of your pinky hanging out on your front porch.

It claws its way out of the ground in the middle of Stillman Park, woges into a filthy, rag-covered human, and stares at the people walking nearby with hungry eyes — and not the sexy Patrick Swayze kind. A kind park-goer offers to call 911 for him and gets killed for his pains. Rude.

In the awkward love-triangle section of Portland, Eve comes to in the cave with bloody knuckles, a sigil on her palm, and carvings all over the bricks around her, while Nick, sleeping next to Adalind, has nightmares of being shot during the Black Claw fight in the finale.

Next, we get a load of Renard’s amazing new non-mayoral house. I want to pack up my life and move into that sleek mid-century modern masterpiece with the floor-to-ceiling view of Portland. Not saying Adalind should choose a partner based on real estate, but compared to this, Nick’s loft is a dark, dank hole. Renard unpacks Diana’s murder puppets but pockets the stick she used to compel him to kill Bonaparte. Probably wise. Unfortunately, Meisner followed him to his new digs. Renard tries to make nice, saying he doesn’t do “sorry” well, but he does appreciate what Meisner did for him, Adalind, and Diana.

That’s definitely not good enough for Meisner, who’s keeping Renard from sleeping. “Fine. You get the bedroom,” Renard snaps, storming downstairs to angrily drink, which is never not a good idea. Meisner appears and tells him to battle his demons by visiting their hell, then manifests a bunch of dead Meisners on the ground.

Time for some baby news! Monrosalee’s at the OB-GYN, where they learn she’s carrying not one, not two, but three little Blutbad/Fuchsbaus. Monroe takes this exactly as calmly as you imagine, but he’s able to pull it together to assure his wife, “I love you, and we can do this.” These two, I swear. Best couple on TV.

During what I can only assume is their daily “describe your dreams last night” session, Nick tells Hank about the feeling that he was dying before he… wasn’t. “I keep thinking I need to be carrying that stick,” he admits. Being without it feels like missing a piece of himself. Sure, yeah. We all feel that way about our phones.

Hank starts to tell him to for God’s sake please move it farther away than the tunnels when Wu dispatches them to the park.

In my dream house, Adalind’s collecting Diana after her overnight stay. She rats out Renard for his bad dreams, and as they’re leaving, he comes so close to asking for Adalind’s help before stopping himself. Do it, Renard! Time for your redemption arc already!

Nick and Hank contemplate the dead man in the park who’s missing his clothes, wallet, keys, and cell phone, while a bundle of rags was discarded nearby. When they consider asking witnesses whether they saw a naked man last night, Wu reminds them, “Uh, this is Portland. I might have to narrow that down.”

Then Nick suggests that this was a sadistic sexual encounter gone bad. “Really?” Hank asks. “No, it’s Wesen,” Nick replies. Ha!

Their inappropriate cop/Grimm humor’s interrupted when a child falls into a nearby hole and finds a skeleton covered in rotten clothes. Whatever happened to you today, I promise it’s not as bad as falling onto a skeleton in a hole in a park. The cops realize that the hole’s too big for just one body, and with the disturbed dirt, they start to figure out what they’re dealing with.

NEXT: Cicada-man knows how to get a party started

Speaking of, cicada-man’s being a hog in a restaurant, telling the grossed-out waitress it’s been a while since he ate. He further creeps her out by over-sharing that the “last one” wasn’t as big as she looked, and he was distracted by her pretty face. He’s incredibly cheerful about all of it, waving a chicken leg around for emphasis and asking for a couple of Bloody Marys to go with his rare steak. On the one hand, yuck. On the other hand, life goals, a little?

Proving that he’s a terrible murderer, cicada-man uses the dead guy’s credit card at the restaurant, where they get the rundown and a description from the waitress. Next comes the autopsy of the victim from the hole, which shows she was in the ground longer than five years and some of her skin was preserved with a waxy shell similar to digestive fluids. Her organs were removed, and there are teeth marks on every bone in her body.

At the loft, Diana tells Adalind that her dad shouts Meisner’s name a lot. Adalind carefully explains that he was killed by bad men but doesn’t confirm or deny that Renard was one of them. Diana remembers Meisner from the helicopter and calls him nice. “He wanted the king to fly,” she says, and we flash back to Meisner pushing Frederick Renard out of the helicopter.

Diana says she wants to see Meisner again, even though he’s dead. “Oh, and Eve is here,” she casually drops.

Sure enough, when Adalind investigates, she finds Eve collapsed in the tunnel. Adalind physically boosts up her to the loft and helps her collapse onto Diana’s bed. Diana disappears down the tunnel hole and lets her eyes go purple, and when Adalind retrieves her, she notices all the glowing sigils on the tunnel walls.

Nick’s research at the spice shop yields dirt on their monster. It’s an immortal Greek Wesen whose name translates to “party animal.” He’s the inspiration for Dionysus, god of wine and orgies. He resurrects for one day every seven years, and in those 24 hours, he needs to find a food source to take underground to sustain him through his next hibernation, which means they need to find him that night.

Clearly, they should start checking the Portland nightlife, where cicada-man’s sending a drink to a zaftig woman at a bar. The guy she’s with doesn’t care for this tactic and invites cicada-man to step outside. Cicada-man woges and kills him without even spilling his drink.

Back inside, the woman confirms that she just met her date. “Then it should be too hard to forget him,” cicada-man purrs. He turns, orders a round for the whole bar, and asks them to turn the music up. Everyone’s doing shots and dancing, and this feels like the most Portland scene Grimm has ever done.

Cicada-man and his date for the night (and possibly the next seven years) leave the bar arm in arm. The woman declares him fun, and he says, “Gotta live for the moment.” Nobody actually speaks this poor woman’s name in the episode, but she’s listed in the credits as Mandy, so Mandy she shall be.

At the loft, Eve’s finally awake, and she explains that she wanted to leave, but every time she tried, her body couldn’t move. She’s feverish and starving, oh, and also, Diana was drawing the same thing Eve was carving, which isn’t weird at all. And then something long overdue happens: Adalind apologizes for what she did to Eve/Juliette. Before Eve can respond, Nick shows up. They explore the tunnel drawings, and then Hank calls about the dead man behind the bar.

At the park, cicada-man and Mandy stroll. He understates that he’s lived the area for a very long time and tells her that in 1850, Portland was a frontier town with five men to every woman.

“I’d be happy with one good one,” she quips. Aww, poor lonely heart!

NEXT: Renard’s in a glass case of emotions

Monroe, meanwhile, is staring at the police sketch of cicada-man and beating himself up because he can’t place the familiar face. Then inspiration strikes. He draws in a beard, Wooly Willy-style, and viola! It’s William Stillman, one of Portland’s early settlers, who’s immortalized in a statue in the park that bears his name. “No wonder he donated the land,” Monroe says.

Okay, that’s solid planning if you’re an immortal, but… I mean, how did cicada-man pull this off if he only has 24 hours above ground every seven years? Did he have a cicada-man Rumspringa that gave him free rein for longer than a day? Because otherwise, with only one day every seven years, how would he become a city founder, amass enough money to buy a huge tract of land, ensure that it was it was legally preserved in perpetuity, and also pose for his statue?

Whatever. Renard’s about to get shirtless.

He enters a pawnshop where the owner, Steiger, spookily tells him, “Things haven’t been going so well for you.” Renard tells him he’s being haunted by someone whose death he was responsible for: “I killed him to put him out of his misery, and this is the thanks I get.” He wants to know if the ghost is real or if he’s losing his mind.

Renard brought him a ring that was his handed down from his grandfather. Steiger examines it and also demands Renard’s royal ring (not a wedding ring!) as payment. In order to find out if the ghost is real, Renard has to step into a large glass box called an aspirateur despirt — a spirit vacuum — to pull out any spirits attached to him.

“Take off your clothes and get in,” Steiger instructs him. Steiger’s good people.

In the park, cicada-man and Mandy are still walking, and bizarrely, they start paraphrasing Emily at the end of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. “So many people just miss living,” he says. “They don’t appreciate what they’ve got.” “We move too fast, don’t we?” she replies.

Cicada-man kisses her and tells her they’re going to be spending lots of time together, and she smiles sweetly up at him. Then he woges and bashes her over the head. Again, rude. Kind of hate him.

At this point, the cops race into the park, past the Stillman statue, to find the Wesen in his nightmarishly enormous cicada form, rather hilariously digging a new hidey hole. He leaps into battle. The cops aren’t making much headway until Mandy wakes up and woges into a sort of hippo creature and BITES HIS FREAKING HEAD OFF.

“You’re the Grimm,” she says.

“Yeah. Thanks,” Nick manages.

“What’s a girl gotta do to find the right guy in this town?” she laments as she strides off.

Okay, I love the “sisters doin’ it for themselves” of it all, but did Grimm make the plus-size lady a… hippo… Wesen? Great twist ending, but I’m not sure about the sensitivity of the execution.

Whatever. Renard’s shirtless.

Not just shirtless, but for a second, it looks like he’s been slathered with baby oil to be squeezed into the steampunk-y aspirateur despirt. I think he’s actually supposed to be sweaty, but I’ll let you decide which version you prefer.

When the spirit vacuum fires up, a spirit does, in fact, detach itself from Renard. Then sparks start flying (literal, not emotional), and Steiger falls to the floor. Meisner ends up outside of the box, tweaking the controls, and Renard screams as the glass shatters.

Next thing we know, Renard comes to fully dressed (boo!) in the pawn shop. It’s actually an empty storefront with a “For Lease” sign out front.

“A mind is a terrible thing to lose,” Meisner smugly tells him, and we cut to credits.

Bread crumbs

• Can we get a scene of Nick congratulating someone in every episode? Doesn’t matter why he’s happy for them; I just enjoy how sincerely he extends his good wishes.
• What did you think about Adalind’s apology to Eve? An important step, or too little, too late?
• Fun fact: Steiger the pawnshop guy is played by Pet Sematary’s dead cyclist Brad Greenquist, in case you didn’t already have enough nightmare fuel with the man-sized cicada.
• Like I said, I thought this was a ho-hum episode saved by the final scenes of the victim saving herself and Renard’s huge mind trip. What do you think? Were my expectations too high after the fantastic run of episodes leading up to this?
• But seriously, A HIPPO??