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Five Thoughts on Stumptown‘s “At All Costs: The Conrad Costas Chronicles”

By | February 21st, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back gumshoes! Stumptown has been on a bit of a hotstreak lately, coming off three very strong episodes in a row. This season had a very shaky start and several clunky storylines, but the cast has clicked into place nicely and the week to week shenanigans are really starting to sing. How can they manage to keep that energy alive this week?

Get out your sunglasses, your dreams of stardom, and your lack of self esteem–it’s time for a trip to sunny Los Angeles.

Here’s five thoughts on Stumptown’s not at all absurdly named “At All Costs: The Conrad Costas Chronicles,” spoilers below.

1. Cold Open? More Like Hot Open. Get It?

We start with Grey and Dex in a house that looks enough like Dex’s house to make me yelp when someone threw a molotov cocktail through the window. It’s a hell of a start to the episode, and it only makes the small twist revealed in the next scene more satisfying–it’s not Dex’s house, it’s a house they’re renting. More importantly for the episode, though, they’re not in Portland anymore.

Taking Dex and Grey on a trip to Los Angeles is a smart play for a ton of reasons, but chief among them is that they get to stop pretending that their shooting locations in Los Angeles are actually Portland. Freed from the constraints of pseudo-Stumptown (the city, not the show), we get treated throughout the episode to some nice shots of skyscrapers, beaches, rolling hills, and bitterly gridlocked freeways. In short, this is one of the most visually interesting episodes of the season.

2. Credit Where Credit is Due

The case that brings the dynamic duo down to Los Angeles is one that put a chill into my aspiring screenwriter heart–a very nice lady up in Portland wrote a script about her uncle, a police hero who exposed corruption in his precinct in the 70s. She sent it to a producer who had said he had no interest, only to go into production with seemingly her exact script. Dex’s job, should she choose to accept it (spoilers: she does) is to go on down to L.A. and find proof that the script was stolen.

Dex is reluctant to take the job, though, because she knows a clue to Dex and Ansel’s parents’ disappearance is waiting for her down in the city of stars. Her aunt Maribel, who seemed to know why her parents left, sent Dex a letter from L.A. five years back. She was consumed by anger at the time and never followed up on the lead, and now she’s left wondering if she should go searching for the people who abandoned her and her brother.

There’s a lot of weighty themes being juggled in this episode, about memory and broken connections and what we’re owed. Dex spends a lot of the episode musing on the things she’s inherited from her parents, from their personalities to their frequent sayings and their inability to watch people–or, in some cases, robots–suffer. The loss Dex feels from her missing parents has never felt more defined, teeing us up for a wallop of a finale.

3. Mr. Grey Will See You Now

While Dex is doing battle with Hollywood moguls, Grey has his own family troubles to iron out. He encourages Dex to take the job because he was planning on taking a trip down to LA anyways to check out a car that reminded him a lot of the one his father owned when he was a boy. Turns out, the car isn’t similar, it’s the same car, putting Grey on the track to reunite with his long lost deadbeat dad. Or, at least, once upon a time deadbeat dad.

The storyline of a neglectful parent who gets it together for their second family after abandoning their first is a common enough one in film and TV to make this storyline feel a little pat, but Jake Johnson as always delivers some good work and makes it sing. His father (played by veteran character actor Matt Craven) matches Grey’s intensity with a restrained self-awareness that fills the scene with pathos. Grey’s dad knows what he did, and there’s nothing he can really do to take it back.

Continued below

Grey’s path to stability has been an interesting one throughout the season–more often than not we’re told Grey is unable to adjust to a normal life instead of being shown it. Part of that is in how repressed Grey is, but mostly that seems to be a result of the role Stumptown is asking him to play. He’s the show’s rock, which hasn’t left him much room to display his trauma in the way it’s given Dex.

4. Bad Times at the Bad Alibi

For the second episode in a row, the weakest aspect of the episode belongs to Hoffman, who is still feuding with his family and is looking to smooth things over a touch using his mother’s birthday party. After much prodding by Tookie, Hoffman agrees to throw his party at the Bad Alibi. The story here not working isn’t really Hoffman’s fault this time–Hoffman’s family and his cop narrative, the two least appealing aspects of the show, barely make an appearance in this episode. The story is incredibly slight, however, and the show feels uninterested in it.

There are some hijinks involving the fact that Tookie, Grey’s new business partner, is throwing the party without Grey’s consent, and with a missing family heirloom of Grey’s. None of them are as amusing as the show thinks they are, and it all wraps up with a dismissive shrug at the end of the episode. It gets just enough screen time in the episode to warrant a mention, but thankfully not enough to really tank the episode.

5. Remember Me

Dex pretty easily manages to prove the script for the film is stolen, but in the process runs afoul of the film’s star, a recovering drug addict who was counting on the film to be his big break–and, as a result, firebombs her apartment. When she exposes his wrongdoing, his struggles finally tie in together with Dex’s difficulties in trademark Stumptown fashion. He feels forgotten, like at one point he truly mattered and then he was left behind.

That’s not the gut punch of the episode, though. When Dex works up the courage to go see Maribel, she’s greeted warmly and things at first seem like they’re going smoothly. When Dex works up the courage to ask about her parents, things quickly unravel: Maribel’s mental faculties have diminished, and she’s mistaken Dex for her long lost sister.

Maribel can’t give Dex much beyond the knowledge that she very strongly takes after her mother, but she does offer one nugget of information: Dex’s parents might have left to protect her and Ansel from something. It’s not much, but it’s a twinge of hope. Dex agrees to sit with her aunt for while, a woman lost in her own mind who seems lonely, and we’re left to stew on those implications for a full two weeks while Stumptown goes on break. Very, very rude.


//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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