Saturday, November 15, 2014

Grimm - S2E18 - Volcanalis

This post contains some spoilers.

By episode eighteen of season two of Grimm, Juliette is starting to regain some of her memories.  What's interesting is how that's portrayed visually.  At first, it's completely black and white:


Then Juliette herself is the only element that has any color, and even that is sort of washed out:


But as she continues to interact with her memory, more things start to gain color.  At first, it's Nick:


Eventually, the whole room is in color, although it's still a bit desaturated in order to differentiate between the memory and what's happening in the present:


It's a subtle shift, and I don't even think I noticed it the first time I saw the episode.

There are also some interesting things in the police part of the episode.  While it's not really Wesen, the suspect in the episode is Volcanalis, a priest of the Roman god Vulcan.  An-other person of interest in the case is Markus Hemmings.  Markus (spelled more normally as Marcus) is a very Roman name - apparently it derives from Mars, the god of war - so it fits well with the other element of Roman mythology.  Also, the derivation from Mars (and the bellicosity which it implies) fits with what Nick finds in the books in the trailer about Taureus-armenta (the type of Wesen that Markus is): "Many have been found in the front lines, first to volunteer, willing to face down any enemy, with nerves of steel under fire."

There's also a possible reference in the name of the geologist at the very beginning of the show - Jill Pembrey.  A lot of episodes of Grimm come out of fairy tales, and the Jill in this one, along with the mountain, seems to suggest the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill."  The other geologist is named Tom though, and there aren't any other elements in common between the nursery rhyme and the episode, but I still feel it worth mentioning.

An-other minor point is the name of geology business - Eon Industries:


An eon is a unit in the geologic time scale, so it's an apt name.