Welcome back gumshoes!
When last we left Dex & Co(TM), Dex and Grey had taken a trip down to sunny California to solve a case and learn some dark truths about their families. Fun in the sun!
This week Dex had some different traumas to explore, and Grey had his hands full with, uh, dating advice. Here’s five thoughts about Stumptown’s “All Quiet on the Dextern Front,” spoilers below.
1. Hotel California
Stumptown can often be a bit by-the-numbers in setting up its scenes and plotlines, but it rarely delivers exactly what you expect at the conclusion. Case in point: this week’s cold open, which put all the pieces in place for Dex and Grey to have an impromptu hookup in the hotel on their way back from Los Angeles. The two nearly take a second trip—this time to Boneville, if you catch my drift, wink wink, nudge nudge—but they mutually decide that they’re better off keeping it in their pants.
It’s a sign of growth for both of them, exhibiting some self control when they both can be creatures of impulse. Most importantly, it reinforces the very clear fact that Grey is probably Dex’s most functional, healthy relationship. We see it in other places throughout the episode (more on that below), but Grey brings a stability and wisdom to her life that she would be completely unable to do without. There’s a temptation to long for the two to pair up, but Stumptown is wisely setting that to the side for the time being.
2. The Chain
The case of the week brings the return of one of Dex’s charming past clients, the soldier Jeremy who Dex reunited with his long lost family. His newfound cousin has run afoul of the law, accused of a crime she didn’t commit: beating up and robbing an old man. The accusation is enough to get the cousin’s children taken away, and she needs Dex’s help to get them back—or, at least, Jeremy thinks she does. The cousin is reluctant to trust Dex at first, and Dex doesn’t help her case by having a dramatic PTSD episode in the middle of their first meeting.
Jeremy is the one who first set Dex on the path towards dealing with her problems by sending her to the veterans support group, so it’s fitting that he’s the one who’s around for this episode delving into what she considers her biggest shame as a soldier. This case hits too close to home. She sees flashes of a woman in a hijab, crying out for her children. Dex flees the meeting, heads home, and, in a traumatic panic, trashes her house, smashing plates and bottles and chairs.
It’s a dramatic moment, but the act of lashing out itself feels a little too stiff and staged. It’s the first moment of many in the episode that are meant to be big, emotional flourishes but don’t quite connect. Grey, thankfully, shows up to check in on her and manages to steady her, at least temporarily. He can’t fix her, of course, and thankfully the episode doesn’t rest all the weight of forcing Dex to confront her trauma on his shoulders. Instead, he’s a sympathetic and compassionate friend, a rock for her to lean on in her time of need.
3. Lover Boys
When Grey isn’t working to help ease Dex’s mind, he’s helping her brother get himself a lady. Ansel has a crush, which means this week’s cartoonish antics revolve around Grey and Tookie teaching Ansel how to do le romance. It’s mostly charming and inoffensive—aside from a cringe-worthy scene where Tookie rails against the “friend zone.” Tookie as the somewhat clueless, irrational presence in these B-plots can be grating, but Grey as friend/father figure is always welcome.
More importantly for the show’s overall narrative, though, all the love talk gives Tookie the opportunity to prod Grey about why he and Dex aren’t together. Grey insists that neither of them is in a place to be in a relationship at the moment, which Tookie doesn’t really accept. Grey is very correct, though—both he and Dex are absolute disasters, and both need to do massive amounts of work before they’re ready to support another person. The jury’s still out on whether or not Stumptown is having Grey deliver that statement as a classic “he’s in love with her, but he’s in denial” set-up or if the show is smart enough to recognize the truth in his statements.
Continued below4. Don’t Torture Me, Bro
Dex hits a wall in helping her client, who has been railroaded by the system with little evidence. With some gentle prodding from Jeremy, she manages to come clean with what it is that’s been eating away at her, and it’s…not as much of a doozy as the episode plays it. During her time in the military, Dex was given an order to torture the wife of an insurgent to gain information about an upcoming attack. Dex refuses the order and manages to prevent the torture, but the attack happens anyways, killing the love of her life. She’s left traumatized, thinking she caused the death of the man she loved.
The scenes, and Dex’s trauma, are undercut by a simple fact: Dex clearly did the right thing. There’s no ambiguity or moral difficulty there, and any time Dex expresses her self-loathing over her actions in the past it’s difficult not to want to shake her. Smulders’ performance is fine here, but the true let down is in the writing. The lines are very rote and don’t get at any deeper truth, to the point where they bury any sense that this is a complicated internal conflict. In a different context the quality of the writing might just come off as uninteresting, but thanks to the subject matter the simplistic execution is very off-putting.
5. Conflict Resolution
After confessing her great sin a couple of times, Dex manages to clear the case by appealing to the actual woman who committed the crime on behalf of Jeremy’s cousin’s children. With the family reunited, Dex starts to try to put herself back to a normal state until Jeremy shows back up. Jeremy spoke with his old buddy in army intelligence, and he drops a bombshell: there was more to the attack that killed Dex’s love than she had originally thought.
It’s a cliffhanger that might be more interesting if you’re invested in Dex’s quote-unquote “misdeeds,” but we don’t really Dex to go through another twist on her path to recovery, or at least one that’s so driven by the churning plot. Her PTSD has been compelling just as the story of a woman learning to cope with her trauma, and I’m not sure how well it works to make that trauma into a plot twist. Only two episodes are left in this season, though, so at least if the plot doesn’t work it can’t linger for too long.
