Welcome back gumshoes! After last week’s season best episode, this week we’re back to a bit more business as usual, an incredibly mixed bag of highs and lows that excels at emotional beats and crashes when it attempts to thrill. When we last left the motley crew, Dex had allowed her brother Ansel to move in with her best friend Grey, while Grey agreed (under duress) to team up with Dex’s former fling Detective Hoffman.
Tension, it’s everywhere! Surely this episode will figure out something to do with it. Right?
Here’s five thoughts on Stumptown‘s “The Past and the Furious,” spoilers follow.
1. All By Myself
The episode opens on a college-style rager at Dex’s house, where Dex literally sings “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” to show that she is in fact a grown up who is handling her brother’s move out super duper well. I initially assumed this was a flashback to Dex’s college days until her present day friend Tookie shows up, shocked at the chaos and unsure of what to do about her very clear spiral.
One of Dex’s character throughlines is that she is unable to process her emotions in a healthy way. Grey–as is his sole consistent character beat–is immediately immediately able to call her out on this and directly lays out Dex’s problem: she’s afraid of being alone.
2. Do it For the Troops
Stumptown’s procedure at this point relies on setting up Dex’s personal struggle and then using the issues at the heart of the case of the week to bring her problems into starker relief. This week’s case has a more tenuous connection than last week’s heartfelt exploration of brothers, but it still manages to pack an emotional wallop within the limits of what’s ultimately an insubstantial plot.
Dex is interrupted the morning after her party by Jeremy (Robert Adamson), a good boy soldier who calls Dex “ma’am” a lot and is almost unbearably cute while asking for her help. A DNA test recently revealed that he’s 48% Native American, forcing his parents to reveal that they adopted him as a child and never told him. He asks Dex to help him figure out where he came from.
Jeremy picks at several of Dex’s unhealed scabs. His soldier background sparks discussions of her PTSD and his family issues dig up her feeling of abandonment by her parents, but at its core this is a case about something relevant to Dex’s present: the intense desire to prove that you’re not alone.
3. I Heard You Lift Cars
Last episode saw Grey and Hoffman beginning their team-up to take on a ring of car thieves (which I described in terms such as “nonsensical” and brought up such questions as “why would you get a random civilian to do this”), so this week we’re following Grey as he gets back in the game. The show dresses Grey up like a member of the T-Birds when he has to do crime things, which both a) is disgusting and b) yanks directly on the spot in my brain that never got over bad boys.
Grey fairly easily infiltrates the crew–butting heads with Hoffman along the way, of course–which seems a bit simple for this group that’s been heavily implied in previous episodes to be a dangerous squadron that’s into far bigger fish than cars. We’re treated to a surge of badass music just as we meet *the lady*, Max (Mercy Malik), so we know she’s going to be important. She toys with Grey’s head a little bit, bringing him on a couple of jobs and reminding him of the rush of thievery.
Even though Grey is among the show’s strongest characters, Stumptown is at its absolute weakest when it forces Grey into criminal mode. Whether it’s from the budget or from disinterest, basically every crime narrative the show depicts is wafer thin–the crime boss who can destroy Grey’s whole life has like two goons and a master plan of robbing the local museum, for instance. In this case, the dangerous crime ring only Grey can infiltrate is like four dudes in a warehouse, and the stakes here never rise above “hmm I guess that seems mildly dangerous.”
Continued below4. “Hail Mary, Hail Mary, um, Hail Mary”
Meanwhile, Dex’s investigations bring her to a defunct adoption agency run by a friendly church that is both definitely not up to anything shady and keeps some muscle on hand in case someone starts asking too many questions, as you do. So Dex breaks into the church, which is of course the perfect time for her to pause and relatively loudly have a heart to heart with a statue of Jesus, apologizing for her past sins (kind of) and saying that if she ever wished for Ansel to be gone, she didn’t mean it. Cobie Smulders sells the hell (pardon the blasphemy) out of this scene, absurd as it is.
Dex steals some records from the church and manages to find Jeremy’s mother–it seems she was a drug addict who died three months prior. That doesn’t seem like the full story, however–it’s only 20 minutes into the episode, too–so when Jeremy’s deadbeat father reveals that Jeremy’s mother was never an addict when they were together, Dex gets suspicious and does a little more digging.
It turns out, not only was Jeremy’s mother not a drug addict, the church falsified documents with Child Protective Services to get him stripped from her care, pocketing a kickback from the tax benefits given to the adoptive parents. It’s a devastating reveal, one given an appropriate amount of weight; it’s neither wrung for tragedy nor underappreciated.
5. Wrapping Up
Stumptown excels less in the plotting than it does in the emotions, so whether the episode works lives or dies by its final emotional payoff. What’s so affecting about Jeremy’s final scene is that it foregrounds what he’s lost, gives him hope of a way forward, and offers the audience (read: me, sobbing) a hearty catharsis.
Courtesy of Sue Lynn Blackbird, Jeremy is introduced to some of his extended family, who teach him a little bit about his family line and welcome him back into the Tribe. If you were able to blink through the tears of this reunion, you might have noticed Dex “I’m not in the family unification business” Parios standing just at the edge, ruminating on her own loneliness.
As if to remind us that this show is not an impactful dramedy and is instead sloppy as all get out, the show doesn’t end on this scene, instead choosing to finish on a cliffhanger from Grey’s already exhausting car thief plot. It turns out in one of their last boosts, the gang stumbled into something that they need Grey’s help to offload: a whole bunch of heroin. It’s a cartoonish ending, especially when considering the implication from last episode that the thieves were already into some big game is the only reason Grey got involved in the first place. If they only just recently accidentally stumbled ass backwards into some heroin, what kind of dangerous master criminals are these?
I’m sure we’ll get an entire episode in the near future dedicated to rescuing Grey from the clutches of these bad boys. No amount of greaser Grey is going to turn that into an easy pill to swallow.
