On January 6 the TV show Grimm begins its sixth and final season. As a fan I’m disappointed to see the show end. Worse, the final season is half its normal length. But I’ll take what I can get. At least the story will come to an end instead of terminating abruptly, and I’ll find out what happens to the characters. I especially wonder about Juliette Silverton (Bitsie Tulloch), the hero’s girlfriend. She’s had a rough five years. From the start I’ve harbored the uneasy feeling that the show’s writers aren’t quite sure what to do with her. She’s too important to the narrative to remain static. She has to change. But how?

The saga of Juliette

Life is goodA perky veterinarian, Juliette lives with Detective Nick Burkhardt in a delightful old house in Portland, Oregon. Life is good. Then Nick begins seeing people’s faces change into monsters. He thinks he’s going nuts and doesn’t tell anybody. Shortly thereafter, his Aunt Marie (Kate Burton) shows up with an Air Stream trailer full of weird artifacts and some news for Nick. Grimm’s fairy tales are real and he’s a Grimm. Like many of his ancestors he has the ability to see various species of monsters called Wesen.

They look like ordinary humans, but under duress Wesen show their true forms. Sometimes the transformation becomes so complete that ordinary people see them too. Hence the legends about werewolves etc. Some Wesen are dangerous and predatory, and Nick’s duty as a Grimm is to hunt them down and kill them. As a cop he already chases bad guys, so that’s handy.

Nick’s new identity spells the beginning of disaster for Juliette. She gradually becomes aware that he’s hiding something and their relationship suffers. Then one of his enemies, the Hexenbiest (witch) Adelind Schade (Claire Coffee), casts a spell on Juliette, a weird coma beyond the doctors’ understanding. This plot twist takes Juliette out of action for several episodes.

The writers could have let her die, but that would be too easy

Nick’s boss, Captain Sean Renard (Sasha Roiz), happens to be a Zauberbiest, the male equivalent of a Hexenbiest. At first he’s in league with Adelind and her mother against Nick. Later he allies himself with Nick against “the Royals,” European aristocrats who use Wesen to maintain their power. As the King’s bastard son, Sean has never had a comfortable relationship with his family.

Juliette learns to shootSean and Adelind’s mother devise a spell to awaken Juliette. Unfortunately it has side effects. Juliette doesn’t remember who Nick is and she develops a sexual obsession with Sean. (Before your imagination runs wild, keep in mind this is NBC, not HBO.)

By the time everything is sorted out, Juliette’s life has radically changed. She lives in a world of monsters. Even Nick’s friends, the perfectly nice couple Monroe and Rosalie (Silas Weir Mitchell and Bree Turner), are Wesen. But Juliette adapts. She becomes a team player in the ongoing battle against the Royals and various species of evil Wesen. The trouble is she doesn’t have much to do. Her knowledge as a vet occasionally comes in handy, but without magical powers or physical prowess, she can’t do much.

Adelind strikes again

Adelind gets her powers backAfter Nick takes away her Hexenbiest powers, Adelind endures an arduous and disgusting ceremony to regain them and proceeds to take away his Grimm powers. Hey, tit for tat. It’s only fair. With a magic potion she takes Juliette’s form and seduces Nick, who acts surprised when she comes on to him. I get the sense that Nick and Juliette’s love life hasn’t exactly been on fire.

Now that Nick is no longer a Grimm, Juliette hopes for a normal life. No such luck. He’s now helpless against his enemies. Nor can he protect Monroe and Rosalie from the Wesen Nazis who consider their mixed marriage an abomination. (Rosalie is foxy and Monroe is wolfish.) The only way to regain his powers is to reproduce Adelind’s spell. Ever the good sport, Juliette drinks the potion, takes Adelind’s form, and has sex with Nick.

And turns into a Hexenbiest herself.

As one might expect, the transformation is disastrous for her relationship with Nick. Nor does it do wonders for her personality. Once perky and sweet, she becomes sarcastic, jealous, and vindictive—like a witch should be. When Adelind ends up pregnant with Nick’s child from their single encounter, Juliette flies into a rage. She’s on the brink of killing Nick when his Grimm apprentice, Trubel (Jacqueline Toboni), brings her down with an arrow from a crossbow.

Photo by: Scott Green/NBC

Of course Juliette doesn’t die

She’s spirited away by a secret organization devoted to fighting a secret organization of Wesen trying to take over the world. (The organization is called Black Claw like the daemon enforcer in my Daemon World series, so I must point out that my daemon existed long before Grimm‘s secret organization. If anything, they borrowed the name from me.) After extensive conditioning, Juliette reemerges into the narrative as Eve, a Hexenbiest who does nothing but fight. A weapon without life or personality, she appears not to care that Nick has hooked up with Adelind. Maybe she would have been better off dead.

Juliette slain

But here comes another twist. In the final episode of season five, Juliette is grievously wounded and healed through the power of a mysterious artifact. In the process she changes and becomes . . . what?

Poor Juliette. Human beings are merely at the mercy of fate. TV characters are at the mercy of script writers.

 

Photos from fanpop.com and NBC.

This is my husband’s acid comment when he catches me watching an episode of Sons of Anarchy for the second time. It annoys Joe when I view TV shows more than once. He and a coauthor write books on film and eco-criticism, and they study certain movies over and over to analyze them. Maybe he wonders why I would subject myself to the monotony for no productive reason. Or maybe the obsessiveness of my behavior disturbs him. (He’s threatened to divorce me if I re-watch another series that shall remain unnamed.)

The blond psychopath he’s referring to is Jax Teller, hero of Sons of Anarchy, played by Charles Hunnam. And yeah, I like looking at Jax. A more macho version of Brad Pitt, Hunnam frequently displays his lean, muscular, elaborately tattooed body in the shower and in bed. He talks in a flat, kind of dumb California accent and — in the early seasons before experience hardens him — walks with the swagger of a juvenile delinquent. Somewhere inside me, a sixteen-year-old self is altogether smitten. “He’s so tortured,” the sixteen-year-old sighs. “He’s good at heart, I just know.”

For those who missed the series, it follows the exploits of the Sons of Anarchy, a biker gang who make their living as gunrunners. They buy weapons from the IRA and sell them to other gangs, who seem to go through them the way a whore goes through condoms. The Sons style themselves as a motorcycle club and have a clubhouse at the Teller-Morrow automotive repair shop in the bucolic town of Charming, California. They even have their own acronym, SAMCRO (Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original), pronounced Sam Crow. The townsfolk call them Sam Crow as if they were one individual, which is about right. Like any gang, they’re a tight-knit group with one set of rules among themselves and another set for the outside world.

However likable they seem at times, the Sons are psychopathic ruffians. Hardly an episode goes by without them gunning down two or three dozen people. If they walked into the bar where I was sipping my non-alcoholic beer, I’d head for the nearest exit. Slowly. I wouldn’t want them to notice me. Yet I can’t get enough of them on screen.

Episode-5-12-Darthy-Promotional-Photos-sons-of-anarchy-32833730Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), the grizzled club president, is one of nine founding members of the Sons. Another is John Teller, who died years ago in shadowy circumstances. It’s gradually revealed that Clay and John’s wife Gemma (Katey Sagal) — now married to Clay — caused John’s death. As John and Gemma’s son, Jax is heir apparent to the club’s leadership. He eventually takes over from his unwilling stepfather.

The other Sons, in fact all the show’s characters, are given enough complexity to make them real. Bobby (Mark Boone Junior) earns extra cashes for alimony payments by performing as an Elvis impersonator. It’s hard to reconcile the overweight, sequined guy on stage with the hitman who guns down a venal government official. Tig (Kim Coates)  is eager to pull the trigger but tortured by guilt afterward when his bullet hits the wrong target. Chibs (Tommy Flanagan) burns for vengeance against the psycho IRA guy who sliced his face from ear to ear and stole his wife and daughter. Wayne Unser (Dayton Kallie), Charming’s chief of police, has been in bed with SAMCRO for decades and at times almost seems like a member of the club. He’s in love with Gemma. When she’s framed for murder and on the run, he aids her without a moment’s hesitation.

Jax finds himself torn between his father’s idealism, as revealed in the journal he left, and the hard pragmatism and ambition of Clay and Gemma. His ambivalence about the club’s criminal enterprises drives much of the conflict within the family.  There are echoes of Hamlet, with Jax as the brooding son and Clay as the uncle who has taken his dead brother’s wife. Gemma, however, is no foolish Queen Gertrude. She’s more like Lady Macbeth without the guilt.

When Jax marries his childhood sweetheart, Tara (Maggie Siff), Gemma’s connection to her son is threatened. A skilled surgeon, Tara stitches up the Sons’ gunshot wounds and learns to shoot a gun, but she doesn’t want the outlaw life for their children. She urges Jax to abandon the Sons. He also wants something better, but his loyalty to the club and lack of middle-class job skills keep him from walking away. After Clay cedes the presidency to him, he tries to move Sons out of gunrunning and into pornography, a less violent business, but various forces work against against him. Tenuous alliances with other gangs and with the IRA suppliers depend on the continued arms trade. Feuds with other gangs and various federal investigations require his immediate attention. And both Gemma and Clay want things to remain as they are.

Clay will do whatever it takes to protect himself and SAMCRO. He coldly orders the death of Opie (Ryan Hurst), a brother he believes has turned rat. Opie has been set up by villainous ATF agent June Stahl (Ally Walker), but Clay doesn’t know that. When Opie’s wife is killed by mistake, Clay feels — kinda bad, but not bad enough to fess up. The truth would destroy the club and turn Jax against him since Opie is Jax’s best friend. So he deflects blame onto a rival gang, leading to needless killing.

Tara discovers the truth about John Teller’s death. Clay tries to have his daughter-in-law killed. The attempt fails, so he settles for destroying evidence and killing a club member in whom Tara confided. Once again he deflects blame onto another gang. More needless killing.

newclubimage-sons-of-anarchy-37962003Knowing that Tara is serious about leaving Charming for good, Gemma frames her daughter-in-law for a crime and testifies against her. To save Tara from prison, Jax makes a deal. If the DA’s drops the charge against Tara, he’ll plead guilty to one of the many crimes he’s committed. It comforts him to know his children won’t grow up to be outlaws. Gemma learns that Jax is going to be arrested and assumes Tara has ratted him out to save herself. In a rage Gemma stabs Tara with a carving fork and drowns her in a sink of dirty dishwater. A brutal scene, but far from the worst in this series.

Jax goes crazy after his wife’s death. Gemma fingers an Asian ganger for the murder she committed, leading to yet more needless killing. (Seeing the pattern here?) Of course Jax wants revenge. He tortures and kills the poor guy. Brutally. At great length . . . Well, at least he strips off his shirt before getting to work. Those muscles and tattoos look good even with blood on them.

 

Photos courtesy of always fabulous fanpop.com.

 

Video streaming is dangerous for me. I’m obsessive, and unlimited access to TV episodes has turned me into a binge viewer who consumes up to fourteen 40-minute episodes in a single day. It’s unhealthy and certainly unproductive. Over time patterns have emerged from my viewing choices. Disturbing patterns. I prefer stories with violence — lots and lots of violence— and heroes who are psychopathic and downright scary. Now I’m setting out to understand who these characters are and why I’m drawn to them despite the terrible things they do. I’m beginning with Dexter Morgan, protagonist of Dexter. I wrote this post a few years ago, while Dexter was still on cable (and before poor Rita gets slaughtered by the Trinity Killer), but my feelings about the lovable serial killer haven’t changed.

As one of six million plus Facebook followers of the Showtime series Dexter, I occasionally visit his page to view the photos and video teasers. Photos of Dexter (Michael C. Hall) draw effusive comments from women who think he’s “so Hottttt!!!!” and “soo sexy.” A more thoughtful fan muses that he’s “nothing special,” but nonetheless “that guy is killing me softly.” Not that I’m judging anyone here. I’ve watched every episode of Dexter at least twice. Like the women who coo over the photos, I’m besotted. Sometimes I do wonder why. Dexter is, after all, a serial killer.

The third fan is right, it’s not his looks. Though Michael C. Hall has a certain animal magnetism, he isn’t wildly handsome. The attraction is to the character he plays so well. Thanks to his foster father, a policeman, Dexter has learned to channel his murderous impulses for the good of society. He only kills murderers. “Taking out the garbage,” he calls it. His job as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police allows him to identity the people who have gotten away with murder, and he takes care to find them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But he’s still a psychopath with a compulsion to cut people into little pieces. It’s really, really icky.

Dexter-Morgan-dexter-8253574Much of the credit for Dexter’s lovability goes to the show’s writers. The stories are told from his point of view with voiceover narration, so viewers see the world from his perspective. At the beginning of the series, he presents himself as a monster incapable of connecting with other human beings. His loneliness is touching. Every season a story unfolds, and at the heart of each one is Dexter’s quest to find somebody who sees and accepts him for what he is. Things never work out. His would-be friends and lovers are either so homicidal he’s forced to kill them, or like Lumen — a woman seeking revenge on the men who raped and brutalized her — they aren’t homicidal enough.

This need to be truly seen could explain some of his ritual. He speaks to the murderers on his killing table and confronts them with their victims. He wants them conscious when he cuts their faces to make the blood slides he keeps as trophies. They must see what they’ve done. And they must see him.

Despite his expertise in killing and not getting caught, Dexter is hapless on a social level. He’s perplexed by the most ordinary situations. Since he can’t feel emotions the way others do, he has no idea what to say or how to act. Often he mimics what he observes other people doing or saying. Dexter botches his wedding proposal to Rita twice. Then he hears a stalker confess to killing the unreceptive object of her passion. “My life was an unanswered question,” she tells a detective tearfully. “He made everything real.” Dexter recycles the lines when he proposes to Rita a third time. She bursts into tears and says yes. As much as I like the character of Rita, I can’t help laughing at how easily she’s taken in.

As the series continues, Dexter slowly discovers his humanity. There are dramatic turning points. In the first season his biological brother – a psycho killer like him – demands that he kill his foster sister. “Does it have to be Deb?” he asks plaintively. “I’m – fond of her.” But of course it has to be Deb. Forced to choose, Dexter slays the newfound brother who sees and accepts him rather than the sister with whom he has grown up and who has “a blind spot” when it comes to him.

Rita-Season-2-dexter-17806622In the second season he chooses the clueless Rita over Lila, his soulmate. Over and over he thwarts the monster in himself and affirms his humanity. In the end he becomes a lovable human being with a bad habit. Messy and morally dubious, but no worse than drug addiction. It’s both apt and ironic that Dexter has to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings because Rita thinks he’s a heroin addict. Speaking to the group, he describes the Dark Passenger that compels him without specifying what it compels him to do. The other addicts assume he’s talking about drug addiction and nod in understanding.

Poor Dexter, he can’t help himself. He was traumatized as a child. And the world is better off without the murderers he kills. I’ve had my problems with substance abuse. I get lonely too. Sometimes I have no idea how to behave around people and have to fake it, just like Dexter. We’re so much alike. And now that I really look at him, he’s so Hottttt!!

I see you, Dexter! I love you just the way you are.

 

 

Photos from Fan Pop

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” — Oscar Wilde

My husband, the always perceptive Joe Heumann, recently pointed to an alarming pattern in my TV obsessions. The shows that hook me have disturbing elements in common. Crime and violence. Lots and lots of violence. A lead character who is a conflicted sociopath—Dexter, Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, or any of a dozen characters in The Wire. And now Walter White , the high-school chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth to pay for his cancer treatments in the AMC series Breaking Bad.

A Midlife Career Change

Family Guys Get No RespectWalter (Brian Cranston) is a talented scientist who—for personal reasons that remain shrouded—turned his back on a lucrative career as a researcher  and became a high-school teacher. In the first episode, he’s so underpaid he works part-time at a car wash, where one of his smartass students takes a picture of him wiping tires, a shot that will no doubt pop up on two or three hundred adolescent cell phones. What unbearable humiliation. Yet Walter bears it.

Then he’s diagnosed with lung cancer. The medical bills will wipe out the family’s meager savings. No college for Junior. A diminished future for the daughter soon to be born. During a ridealong with his DEA brother-in-law, Walter sees the piles of cash confiscated from a busted meth lab and wakes up to the unvarnished truth about life.

Nice Guys Finish Last

Walter is done being a nice guy. He teams up with a former student (Aaron Paul) and begins his transformation into master meth cook Heisenberg. By the end of the first episode he’s already snuffed a guy. True, the guy is going to kill him, so he doesn’t have much choice. With this initial killing Walter takes the first step onto a long and very slippery slope. By the middle of season two, he’s responsible—directly or indirectly—for the deaths of quite a few people. Hundreds if you count the midair plane collision caused by the grieving air-traffic controller father of Jesse’s girlfriend, whose life Walter could have saved. He watches as she chokes to death on her own vomit. The bitch is just too snotty and inconvenient.

Near the end of season three, Walter casually plugs a bullet into the head of a man lying wounded in the street.

Fragments of the old Walter remain. At one point he gives up cooking to keep his wife from divorcing him. But it’s too late to go back. When he sees it won’t work, he signs the divorce papers and accepts a three-million-dollar offer to cook for a drug kingpin, whom he eventually assassinates.

There’s Something about Walter

I love the way he keeps calling Walter "Mr White"I can’t help liking this renegade high-school teacher. He doesn’t have Dexter’s animal magnetism or Jax’s slinky sexiness. He has the face of a guy who should have started using sunscreen decades ago. If he’s going parade around in his underwear, he needs to take up Pilates or weight-lifting. For viewers who want sexy, there’s his partner, Jesse, played by Aaron Paul. But Cranston brings such compelling and charismatic energy to the role that I have to get behind Walter. I hope he resists the urge to destroy himself. I hope he crushes his enemies, ends up with piles and piles of cash, and enjoys a quiet retirement, his cancer in remission. One evening he’ll be eating dinner at a posh restaurant where the jerk who snapped his picture at the carwash now works as a busboy. Walter could give him a hard time, even kill him. But why bother? Stepping on the little jerk would mean getting shit on his shoe.

Yet I know the story won’t end like that. Nice guys might finish last, but bad guys don’t escape retribution. One way or another, Walter has to go down in flames.

 

Photos from FanPop

 

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