For four seasons, Grimm was one of my favorite shows. Unfortunately the fifth season kind of destroyed everything that I loved about Grimm. Before Grimm was the closest TV heir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the family-like camaraderie of the team, but the fifth season fractured the overall chemistry by having each character have almost separate storylines that barely intersected with the main one, created so many new storylines (Black Claw) and crushed so many well-developed ones created over the previous four years (the Royals, Hadrian’s Wall) that Grimm could not keep all its balls in the air.
For me, the crucial failure of Grimm’s fifth season was the heavy-handed efforts to make Nick and Adalind a romantic couple. While I liked Juliette and Grim as a couple, everyone knew that they were probably not getting together forever. Before he attempted to propose again and before anything dramatic happened, Juliette cut him off at the pass and dodged his efforts to take their relationship to the next level like a pro. Juliette was fine with the status quo, but a break up was going to happen eventually.
In the fourth season, Adalind raped Nick by using her powers to look like Juliette in order to take away his Grimm powers. She got pregnant, and he had to protect her in order to protect their baby. While I don’t mind using rape as a plot device in a TV show, I do mind the way that TV shows like Grimm and Once Upon A Time handle rape perpetrated by women against men.
These types of rapes are depicted as affairs although the men are not guilty of anything. The men are not treated as victims of sexual assault, which they are. They are treated as unwitting adulterers, and the rapist is introduced as a potential love interest or at least a challenger to the current person that the man is in a relationship with. In order to further dilute the guilt of female rapists, the rapist becomes pregnant, which of course can happen. The man is not shown getting counseling or at least dealing with all the complex issues that would arise from this rape. Instead he is depicted as willing to jump into the protective role of supportive partner and father. Male rape victims do not get to at least simultaneously deal with the pain of violation, loss and gender normative expectations that are dissonant with the reality of the situation. Making a rapist and her victim a couple just erases what happens before: they love each other now, move on, star-crossed lovers. Um, no.
I will watch the last season of Grimm, but I’m terrified how much more this formerly wonderful show will devolve in it its final season.