Grimm Episode 209
“La Llorona”
Written By: Akela Cooper
Directed By: Holly Dale
Original Airdate: 26 October 2012
In This Episode...
A man and his son (Luis and Rafael) are fishing at the river. Luis sees a distraught woman in a long white dress weeping and walking into the water. Afraid she is going to kill herself, Luis jumps in to save her. But Luis can’t find her. He looks around and sees her - leading Rafael away.
Apparently Portland PD has only one Hispanic officer on the payroll, because Nick calls in Juliette to translate what Luis and his family are saying about the kidnapping. Rafael’s mother died, so this isn’t a custody case. The police have no leads, but Luis’s sister senses that Juliette was recently very ill, and that she is at war with two different sides of herself. Juliette doesn’t want to talk about it.
In New Mexico, a woman named Valeria gets an Amber Alert on the Portland case. She books a flight immediately. Upon arrival, she meets with Nick and Hank. She has ben following this case for five years, after the same woman stole her nephew. Every year, on Halloween day, the woman would steal three children, always two boys and a girl. She drowns the children after midnight and disappears for another year. Some of the more superstitious believe this to be La Llorona, a Mexican legend about a woman who drowns her three children as revenge for her husband, who was cheating on her. It is thought that La Llorona kills these children to take the place of her own. But Valeria doesn’t believe in ghosts - she is sure this a living woman who believes herself to be La Llorona.
A second child goes missing. Then a third. They only have a few hours to find the children. It took Nick far too long to realize that the children are each abducted along one “arm” of two rivers that flow together, and therefore it makes sense that the kids are being killed at the juncture where the two rivers meet. Nick, Hank, and Valeria race to this point, in time to see the woman walking the kidnapped children to the water’s edge. Nick tackles the woman into the water while Hank and Valeria gather the children (who don’t know how they got there.) Nick fights the woman, she tries to drown him, gets a terrifying zombie face - and disappears. No one has an explanation, but no one wants to say she was a ghost.
Dig It or Bury It?
I liked the La Llorona tale. It was nice to mix up the format a bit. The world of Grimm can support a certain amount of supernatural anomalies, but once they bring in, say, a vampire, it’s all over. La Llorona leaves room - a teeny bit of room - for belief that she isn’t a ghost.
Plus, bonus points for Monroe’s over-the-top Halloween decorations.
Big Bad...
...Balam. Valeria is a Balam, a blue jaguar-like creature. To me, she looks like a Na’vi reject. We only see the Balam for a few seconds; it does not come up again in the episode.
Prophecies?
A serial killer comes to town, and his victim of choice are wesen. Is this a new Grimm or a copycat?