On last week's episode of Grimm, Adalind and Captain Renard added a new weapon to their arsenal - the chocolate chip cookie. The tasty treat contained a Wesen love potion that piqued Hank's interest in Adalind and had an unfortunate side effect on the cookie-stealing Sgt. Wu.
One of my all-time favorite films is “The Stunt Man”, Richard Rush's defiantly independent paean to film-making and the blurry line between fantasy and reality (hmmm, sound familiar?). So, the announcement that Barbara Hershey, that film's female lead, would play Regina's mother, Cora, was one I greeted with great relish and anticipation. What I didn't anticipate was an episode where the show's creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, step in and take a major corrective yank on the show's tiller. After the mid-season doldrums, there's promise of much smoother, swifter sailing ahead.
It looks like the writers for “Grimm” are trying to step back and reintegrate concepts and plot threads from earlier in the season, and the result is a largely stand-alone episode that doesn’t quite have the same punch as more recent offerings. There are some signs that Adalind’s presence will finally amount to something, but this is very much a transitional episode, rather than a payoff.
Fear of the unknown drives nearly every character in this episode. It's entitled "Tea Leaves," which I think is a clever way for Matthew Weiner and his writers to give out the message that everyone in the Mad Men world cannot accurately predict the future. The people in charge at the agency are slow on the uptake to change, with the young guard always eager to replace the old, and keep the struggling company from going under. Change is coming for them, and if they don't adapt, they will die.