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Five Thoughts on Stumptown‘s “All Hands on Dex”

By | March 27th, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

“Tell me your sins.”

It’s a line that comes right around the midpoint of this finale episode of Stumptown’s first season, and in many ways it’s the keystone of not just this episode but the entire show. It’s the piece in the center that holds together an entire character arc. On one side, you have all the things Dex has suffered, the traumas that have unfolded around her and layered themselves over her psyche. On the other, there’s Dex’s choices, her manipulations and pigheaded destructive tendencies that have exploited the people she loves and put them in harm’s way. The sins committed upon her versus the sins she’s unleashed on the world.

This is the end of the road, gumshoes–a possible combination season/series finale, depending on how the renewals shake out. Some way or another, Dex has to reckon with not just her past and the fight that’s right in front of her face, but also with the consequences that stretch on into the future. Here’s five thoughts on the final episode of Stumptown, “All Hands on Dex,” spoilers below.

1. Chickens, Meet Roost

We open the episode feeling the full consequences of Dex’s actions–she wakes up, after a nightmare where she shoots and kills her best friend Grey, handcuffed to a hospital bed and told that she’s in custody for murder. The cops found her passed out on the ground next to the dead body of her dead lover Benny’s army buddy, and naturally they put two and two together and assume she was the killer.

Naturally this doesn’t make much sense, and you’d think it wouldn’t track very much for the cops that Dex has spent the last year working with, but the episode needs that to be the driving conflict so that’s the driving conflict. We don’t see anyone so much as give a second thought to what Dex says happened outside of Hoffman (more on that in a second), but Stumptown has never been particularly even-handed with its cop storylines. Why expect them to start now?

The implication coming from Dex’s nightmare is more interesting, however, and points to the conflict raging beneath the episode. Although it’s not hammered home, Dex’s misery crashing down on the people around her is thematically central to both the show and this episode, and it’s nice to see that at least on some level Dex understands that too.

2. Hoffman on the Fence

Dex is kept from the police’s grasp only by the timely intervention of Hoffman, who calls for assistance from his lawyer father. It’s a nice move that helps give a little more importance to the clunky family feud storyline Hoffman endured earlier in the season.

It’s also, not for nothing, the most interesting plot the series has managed to find for Hoffman. He often has been written as a very stereotypical cop, the member of the cast that you could most easily fit into a “type,” which often led to him feeling flat. This episode gives him something deeper to work with, and crucially gives Ealy the space and the screentime to appropriately play his internal conflict.

He isn’t just running after Dex and attempting to save her because he’s in love with her, although that’s probably a factor. He senses something off about the case, and he truly does feel trust for Dex, and those two things combined are leaving him internally confused.

3. Daddy Issues

Grey, meanwhile, has his own drama to deal with. His formerly deadbeat father has come to apologize for standing him up recently, and Grey offers him a place to crash for a few days before he heads home. It gives the two a chance to bond, and allows Grey’s father the chance to impart some fatherly wisdom while Grey (and Dex) are in a time of distress.

It was ultimately always going to ring a little bit hollow, as Stumptown never fully sells the idea that Grey’s father might be fully on the up and up. But what it does manage to do is get Grey thinking a little more responsibly about how to protect the things he loves.

Grey takes that advice to Dex, in a poignant scene that draws on the strength of Smulders and Johnson’s chemistry. Grey points out to Dex that she doesn’t really have a goal in mind at the end of this; she’s chasing a feeling, a sense that she might feel some satisfaction if she can get some semblance of understanding. But Grey knows that’s not real, and that when she’s pushed to the end of this story she has to think about the consequences of whatever path she puts herself on.

Continued below

4. The Final Confrontation

It’s pretty good advice. She doesn’t take it.

Dex punches and kicks her way through the case wherever it takes her–including, at one point, assaulting a priest–and follows the case to its natural endpoint. True to Stumptown’s eternal flaws, it’s a very predictable one: she finds that the man who killed Benny was the member of his unit that seemed to actually care about him. Grey takes a bullet in the penultimate scuffle (just as Dex was worried he would) and, after making sure he would be ok, she runs off to confront the man behind her biggest trauma.

For a moment, it seems like she might have the upper hand, but it’s once again her inability to separate from the traumas of her past that does her in. Flashes of the explosion that killed Benny cloud her long enough for the man to knock the gun out of her hand and start a full on brawl. She manages to pick her gun back up and shoot him down, putting an end to this long running plot.

With her name cleared, Dex is left to pick up the pieces of her life, only to find that she hasn’t really moved on from her struggles. Benny’s mother, Sue Lynn, finds Dex at Benny’s grave, and offers words of wisdom: there was no way solving this one case was going to bring her peace. “When the hole’s big enough, there’s no filling it,” Sue Lynn says. “It just becomes a part of you.” Somehow, that way she says it, it comes across as a message of hope.

5. And in the End…

The episode sets up enough interesting threads to pull the next season along: Dex and Ansel’s mother shows up at the door; Hoffman leaves the force, unsatisfied with his own priorities and his ability to tell right from wrong; and Grey finds himself on the hook for his dad’s misdeeds once again. It lays a clear enough path for where the series could continue (as a show in limbo like this probably should), but I find it pretty satisfying as a finale as well.

Stumptown doesn’t get there entirely elegantly, and this effect might not be fully intentional, but it reminds me of one of my favorite TV finales: “Not Fade Away,” the final episode of Angel. Instead of finishing on a clear, unambiguous resolution to its various long-running sagas, the show instead decided to blow up the world, putting an enormous fight in front of the heroes just as the series was coming to a close. The implication is that the fight goes on. Nothing is ever going to be easy, and as Sue Lynn Blackbird implies, the pain doesn’t go away. All you can do is keep going.


//TAGS | Stumptown

Reid Carter

Reid Carter is a freelance writer, screenwriter, video editor, and social media manager who knows too much about pop culture for his own good. You can find his ramblings about comics and movies at ReidCarterWrites.com and his day to day ramblings about everything else on Twitter @PalmReider.

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