I've been re-watching season three of Grimm, and I noticed a small but significant detail in episode eleven - "The Good Soldier."
After a murder, Nick and Hank investigate Jim McCabe, a coworker of the murder victim. They visit him at his office, where he has a statue of a lion on his desk:
After two similar murders, Nick and Hank discover that the murderer they're looking for is a manticore. (Unbeknownst to them, there are actually two murderers.) In the trailer, they - along with Juliette - learn that the manticore has the body of a lion (or a Lowen, in the Grimm terminology) with the tail of a scorpion:
The lion statue on his desk appears innocuous early in the episode, but it seems to function as a sort of fore-shadowing that McCabe, who committed two of the murders, is a manticore:
The episode's plot mostly revolves around Frankie Gonzales, an army specialist who was raped. (Her colonel kills one of her rapists as a sort of vengeance, and McCabe kills an-other of her rapists and his wife in order to prevent a confession that would reveal him as a third rapist.) Gonzales carves the date of her attack (November 11, 2010) into her arm, and - in one instance - blots the wound with a napkin so that the date transfers in her blood:
She then gives this to one of her rapists in an attempt to get him to confess.
I think the date is significant. November 11 is Veterans Day, so it has a connection to the military. It's also the date of the Armistice in World War I (which Veteran's Day came out of), but in the episode, it marks the opposite, as it's the beginning of all the problems.
