Hemlock Grove - Birth

Birth was Hemlock Grove’s big episode for the season. It has a number of deaths to main characters featured during this season, with pivotal melodrama involved.

*** / ****

“You are not a warrior. You are a dragon.” –Olivia to son, Roman, before his fangs emerge and he takes a bite from her neck, revealing himself to be a vampire (Upir)

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“You talk too much” – Says Roman after ripping out his mother’s tongue from her mouth during an incestuous kiss.

So Christine, as the white wolf, seems to kill Peter, a grey-black wolf, by literally going for his jugular in the run-down church. Then arrives Shelley to heroically snap Christine’s neck (in wolf-form) when Roman and his sword fail to do any good. And Letha could only look on in horror, very pregnant, as it all unfolded. And it all happens in a matter of seconds. Not to stop there as Sheriff Sworn arrives with a belief that Shelley is the serial killer in Hemlock Grove, considering she is standing right next to the dead human form of Christine (but is she really dead?). Several shots from his pump action blast through Shelley as she flees, with Roman giving chase through the cemetery. So this hints at Shelley also perishing eventually, getting away so that no one else can be harmed. Sworn now is enraged with Dr. Pryce for making sure “that abomination” (Shelley) was able to survive, shown much later building a bomb, indicating that the towering Godfrey Institute could be his target for demolition! Letha sure enough gives birth…but the process leaves her beyond help. Letha’s father begs Pryce to resurrect her but he assures that is not possible.

So Dr. Norman leaves his wife for Olivia, Letha’s lost, Peter was able to return from the dead because of his love for Letha (and vice versa, according to his mom) but no longer has her so he (and the mom) decide to leave Hemlock Grove (but not before going bald, perhaps as a form of mourning), Roman tries to commit suicide when he learns it was he who impregnated Letha (the angel, he spreads his wings before descending upon her!) while Olivia barely registers any emotional response (because she knows it will just transform him into the being she has longed for), Olivia narrates a back story of her involving a slave she had run away with (a pregnancy resulted as did her removal of a tail with a sharp rock when the lover left her with all the jewelry and animals, allowing us to realize why she has such disdain for gypsies), Peter sees the vision of Shelley as Roman visualized her in his dreams, Roman refuses to kill the baby born from a now-dead Letha (opting to instead attack and [it appears] kill Olivia with a good bite to the throat), Christine is buried (but a sound could indicate she didn’t quite die as proposed!), Pryce has an entity cocooned in that box in his institute, and the priest that was giving orders to Chasseur tells her brother that Roman was responsible for his sister’s death. Yes, this finale was indeed loaded, but a lot of unanswered questions [natch] lie ahead in the second season.