'Grimm' Comic-Con panel hints at fate of Renard, Nick

Grimm‘s third season ended with a disrupted wedding, a loss of powers, and an apparent death.

How the NBC show will follow up all the cliffhangers might not be fully known to even the show’s writers, as co-creator David Greenwalt confessed at Grimm‘s Comic-Con panel.

“We’re supposed to go [at the beginning of] every year and tell our betters at the network what they heck we’re doing up in our little office,” Greenwalt said. “Every year we have a plan, and every year [co-creator] Jim [Kouf] scares the hell out of me by saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we did this instead…?'”

Kouf added, “We keep writing ourselves into corners, and then we have to figure out how to get out of them.”

With season four now in production, Grimm‘s writers are back in the business of getting out of corners. At the Comic-Con panel—which this year had graduated to its biggest room yet, Ballroom 20—some of those corner-escape plans were revealed. Read on for some hints of what’s to come and other fun moments from the panel.

• First things first: Is Captain Renard really dead? And dead forever? No solid answer came from the panel. Sasha Roiz (Renard) at least claims he had a rather forgiving and diplomatic response to the possibility that he was getting killed off: “I wouldn’t have faulted [the writers] if they said, ‘That’s the end of you,’ cause I know that makes for great television.” But fans shouldn’t be too worried about the fate of the Captain because, well, Roiz was on the panel, and he said, “I think we’re gonna try to find some sort of interesting way to bring him back to life.”

• David Giuntoli (Nick) had a little bit to say about what happens now that his character is without his Grimm powers: “Trubel’s now my seeing-eye Grimm, which is nice. I would hope I get the powers back on some level.” He also pointed out that this change might ease the tension between Nick and Juliette: “Domestic life is much easier when you’re not having to kill monsters,” he said.

• Even though Nick lost his powers, he still has to deal with being exposed as a Grimm to all the Wesen at the wedding. That’s something Monroe and Rosalee will have to deal with too, along with the judgements thrown toward their mixed-Wesen marriage: As Bree Turner (Rosalee) explained: “We are exposed now as Wesen harboring this Grimm. We also put ourselves on the line at the wedding showing the world we’re a modern couple in the community. We’re changing the rules and not subscribing to the old-fashioned rules.”

• Fun fact: In an earlier version of the pilot, Juliette was a baker, not a vet. So actress Bitsie Tulloch had some ideas about how she could be a badass baker. “Having been a fan of Buffy and Angel, I thought I would kick some major butt. I was imagining these scenes. I got a trainer that summer [before season one]. I thought I was gonna throw muffins and sauce at everyone,” Tulloch said. Once her character was reworked as a vet, though, she was very happy because she’s “crazy about animals.” And of course the vet experience made Juliette a unique asset once she joined the Wesen-aware Scooby Gang.

• The show’s creators chose shoot and set Grimm in Portland largely for its architecture and its forests, which Kouf said are evocative of the Black Forest in Germany. Fellow executive producer Norberto Barba said of shooting in the Pacific Northwest, “The hardest time for us to shoot is in the summer because it’s sunny most of the time, which is not very grim. In September, October it starts getting gray—that’s the perfect time. There’s all this mist in the air. It’s what we call ‘the Grimm look.'”

• Like their Comic-Con panels in past years, Grimm‘s producers supplied a teaser fans are always curious about: What new Wesen will be on the show this year? Here’s what Greenwalt said: “We’re gonna see some great new [Wesen] next season, particularly coming in the first couple episodes, a character who steals your identity but in a very disgusting way.”

• Another hint of what’s to come from Greenwalt: Those keys first seen in the season-two premiere are back. “There’ll be another key this year. We will answer what those damn seven keys mean and what they lead to,” he said.

• Reggie Lee, who was welcomed onto the stage with chants of “Wu Wu Wu Wu!” from the audience, said Sgt. Wu will have his own variation on #ShirtlessRage in season four: “I think there is gonna be some shirted rage coming,” he joked. “How would that work?” Sasha Roiz (Renard) wanted to know. Lee then mimed a reverse version of Renard’s trademark shirt-ripping, anguished yell and all.