Grimm’s weekly plotlines, developed around Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s 1812 Children’s and Household Tales, follow the modern crime genre format. The series follows Detective Nick Burkhardt, a Portland police officer dismayed by his great aunt’s revelation that he is a “Grimm” – a descendent of the Brothers Grimm whose powers allow him to see pseudo-shape-shifting Wesen whose otherwise human faces transform into grotesque configurations reminiscent of big bad wolves, evil witches, giants, and the like. What’s worse, these creatures-in-disguise often partake in inter-species violence, resulting in many of Portland PD’s murder cases. The series is as much police drama as fairy tale, featuring—like CSI, Criminal Minds, and NCIS—dimly lit camera shots, stealthy detectives with guns and flashlights, and, of course, women’s bloody and broken bodies.

Dead women are standard set dressing on most crime dramas, so I wasn’t surprised by the ill-fated red-hooded coed in Grimm’s pilot. But the more I watched, the more I realized the women in this series aren’t usually homicide victims – they’re monsters. The first morphing face belongs to a beautiful Hexenbiest (loosely translated “witch bitch”) named Adalind whose Barbie-esque blond exterior hideously contorts to reveal that Grimm’s beauty is only skin deep. Adalind makes consistently dangerous choices, using her beauty—and the monstrous truth beneath it—to ruin men. Not only does she cast a love spell on Nick’s partner Hank, she also kills an elderly cancer patient and unleashes an impressive physical attack on Nick – she uses her beauty, NBC muses, to “put any man completely at her mercy.” Adalind is the monstrous feminine who seduces men before castrating them, at least figuratively, with her power.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by Grimm’s monstrous femininity. Fairy tales (and crime dramas, for that matter) are morally instructive, recycling cultural fears into cautionary tales, and Grimm funnels the mythos of women’s irresponsibility and cold indifference into a crime drama. “Tarantella,” for example, features a Spinnetod (or “black widow”) – a mother who seduces men before sucking out their internal organs through their abdomen – and the Cinderella-turned-Murciélago (“hideous bat-like creature”) in “Happily Ever Aftermath” emits a shrieking sound that explodes her entire family’s eyeballs, leaving herself heir to her father’s fortune. It is from these stories that we learn what a “good mother” looks like, and she certainly wouldn’t seduce men in the name of eternal youth. And “good women” like Cinderella are rewarded through quiet suffering, not monstrous murder.

Grimm emerged from a cultural climate particularly interested in moral instruction, as evidenced by recent legislative fervor over women’s choice. Last week, Kansas legally allowed pharmacists to withhold prescriptions they “reasonably believe” could terminate pregnancy, the “Protect Life Act” allows hospitals to “let women die” rather than perform life-saving abortions, and of course, transvaginal ultrasound legislation requires women to be probed vaginally before terminating a pregnancy. These bills are just as terrifying as, say, tales of fire-breathing lady-Dämonfeuer, which also come from the assumption that women’s free (and presumed irresponsible) choice destroys American morality in a fury of fire and brimstone. Just as Grimm’s monstrous women threaten men, GOP politics frames women’s rights as a threat to family values, “fetal rights,” and men’s sovereignty. Grimm naturally channels this milieu, borrowing from traditional anxiety about strong, independent women encapsulated by the Brothers Grimm.

As Grimm’s first season wrapped up, the monstrous women were back. Adalind sicked her cat on Nick’s fiancé, turning her into a modern-day (comatose) sleeping beauty, and the mysterious “woman in black” unleashed a flurry of ninja-like moves before revealing her identity as (spoiler alert) Nick’s mother, long thought dead. Missing mothers are common in fairy tales, but Grimm’s finale raises the question: if Nick’s mother has been alive all of these years, why hasn’t she been mothering him? Even though the woman in black may not be the archetypal “evil stepmother,” I’m not holding my breath for a “happily ever after” moment in Grimm’s second season – what kind of a boring fairy tale leaves a “good mother” alive? We’ll have to wait until fall to see if her crime was drinking children’s blood or simply disappearing from her child’s life. Or maybe Grimm will give us a truly updated fairy tale – you know, one with progressive female characters.