Opening quote: "To kill Koschei the Deathless, first you must find his soul, which is hidden in an egg, in a duck in a lead chest buried beneath an oak tree."
Back in Portland, a healer named Boris Myshkin (Mark Ivanir) heals a woman from a pain she has been suffering.
Renko manages to escape but upon arriving at his hotel room, he begins to experience pain for the cumulative poison inside his body.
Using his Russian lessons, Renard tells Boris and his wife, Olga (Aleksandra Kaniak) that they can be trusted and offers to put a patrol on their house.
Nick then tells them about what he saw and Renard deduces that Boris is a Koschie and decides to call people in Moscow that are expert on it.
Along with Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), Nick and Hank look in the trailer and find that Joseph Stalin used Wesen as bodyguards and Grigori Rasputin was a Koschie too.
Meanwhile, Renard finds out from an informant in Moscow that Boris was an assassin for the Federal Security Service and that everyone died from radioactive poisoning.
Club's Kevin McFarland gave the episode a "B" grade and wrote, "The last thing Grimm needs to add is more subplots.
But 'Red Menace' kicks of Grimm's 2014 by heaping on another multi-episode arc, where Juliette's longtime friend — who's never been seen or heard from before — Alicia finally leaves her violently abusive husband, and decamps to Portland.
We hit, however briefly, on the strings left dangling at the end of the mid-season finale: Nick still has zombie powers, Adalind is still in Vienna; it's like someone ticked the plot points off of a checklist.