Welcome back gumshoes! Here we are in 2020, a year since I’ve had to–*ahem*, I mean, had the privilege of watching an episode of this show. OK, fine, it’s been a month, but let’s be real the last week alone felt like a year, right? Now we get to kick back, relax, and watch another episode this old fashioned crime dramedy to escape from the real world for a bit.
When we last left our PI heroine Dex, she had successfully managed to cause the breakup of her best friend Grey and his (admittedly, maybe a sociopath) girlfriend Liz, and then went ahead and seemingly started up a more serious (read: massively unprofessional) relationship with her fling/police contact Detective Hoffman. I’m relatively sure that Dex is supposed to be the good guy in all of these scenarios, but let’s see if this episode offers us up a…judgment in this case.
That was a very funny joke, I promise, because this episode is about a judge, get it? Here’s five thoughts on Stumptown‘s “Reality Checks Don’t Bounce,” spoilers below.
1. Judged and Found Wanting
After a fun cold open where a client of Dex’s takes her to the bluntly named reality tv court Black Justice, Dex is called back to chambers. It turns out the Honorable Antonio Price (Mike Epps) has a family problem that he needs Dex’s help to iron out. He needs her to serve a court summons to his brother, Lataurus, who sold their family house behind his back and put their mother out on the street.
When Dex tracks Lataurus down, however, he seems to be in a lot of trouble after a get rich quick scheme went sour. Then, before Dex can fix the problem, Lataurus disappears in what looks like it might be a kidnapping. It’s Dex’s job, then, to give the family the titular reality check and help make sure it titularly doesn’t bounce.
The strongest aspect of this very solid episode is that the set-up of the procedural plot plays well to both Dex’s skills as a PI and her flaws as an individual. The squabbles between Antonio and Lataurus reveal Dex’s heart–she can’t bear to just take the money and do the job, it’s just as important to her that she does her best to set things right, in whatever shape that takes. As a bonus, the plotline also patiently seeds the idea that this impulse to fix things that makes her a good PI can’t always function in her personal life. She can’t control everything–but more on that below.
2. Movin’ Out
The judge hiring Dex to track down his brother digs up problems in her own life that she’s been pushing down. Her brother Ansel wants to move out, and Dex has mixed feelings. I’ve been critical in the past of how Stumptown has handled Ansel’s Down syndrome, but this storyline works really well. It plays perfectly to Dex’s flaws–her difficulty placing the feelings of those close to her above her own personal struggles–and it gives Ansel an agency that several plotlines in the first half of the season have denied him.
Dex demurs discussing the move out on multiple occasions until finally things boil over. She gives multiple excuses for why Ansel can’t move out–we can’t afford it, you’re not living with strangers, you’re not ready–but what it really boils down to is that she’s not ready.
3. Police Misconduct is Good, Actually
Detective Hoffman gets a visit from Dex looking for a tip to track down the brother, revealing that…she turned him down! I’m not a huge fan of either Hoffman or their relationship, so let me tell you I am giddy at this development. Things are awkward for him and Dex, so when he screws up at work and ends up having to track down his boss’s stolen car, he turns to Grey for help instead of Dex.
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because I’ve been hinting at it for several reviews and it seems to have somehow gotten worse as time goes on: Hoffman is a terrible cop. Not terrible in the sense that he’s bad at his job–he certainly seems to work his cases effectively–but terrible in the sense that he repeatedly does abusive, cruel, or downright illegal things to get results. Sometimes it’s not even to get results, it’s just to get what he wants. In this episode, Grey points out that Hoffman could send a normal, actual cop undercover with the car thieves instead of Grey–y’know, a civilian with no undercover training–but Hoffman threatens to send him back to prison unless he cooperates.
Continued belowJust to reiterate: that’s an officer of the law pressuring a civilian to go undercover with potentially dangerous criminals against his will, after said civilian expressly said they didn’t want to be involved. And this guy is supposed to be one of the good guys? Anyways, this gives Grey and Hoffman what will likely be their plot line for the back half of the season, so expect to see plenty more police abuse in this show’s future.
4. Family Matters
Judge Price pays Dex and advises her to drop the case, assuming his brother is pulling a con. “I’m not in the family mending business,” Dex says, like a liar, so of course she encourages the judge to keep digging into his brother’s disappearance. As she is in all (professional) things, Dex is right, so the case of course turns violent and Dex has to fix things.
As is par for the course with this show, the case is pretty straightforward–what appeared to be a kidnapping was, in fact, a kidnapping. But that straightforwardness works to the episode’s benefit. Now that the show doesn’t have to waste time repeatedly telling us that Dex is a good PI, we are allowed to just watch Dex be a good PI, which makes for far more compelling television. Plus, Mike Epps is one of the standouts among an already impressive list of Stumptown season one guest stars. He sells the comedic scenes well, of course, but he also handles the dramatic beats with his brother surprisingly well. The melancholic end of this plotline wouldn’t be nearly as poignant without Epps’s work.
5. Reality Check
The resolution of the case teaches her the required procedural life lesson: she can’t control her brother, and she has to let him live his own life even when it hurts. Previous episodes have struggled with making the case of the week feel relevant to the events in Dex’s personal life, but here the two sync up wonderfully. Dex allows Ansel to move in with Grey, and she spends the final moments of the episode thinking over how her past choices have left her feeling alone.
This might just be my favorite episode of the series so far. There was a remarkable patience on display here that has been wholly absent in past episodes–shots linger on characters faces to let us get a sense of how they’re feeling, extraneous characters don’t hog airtime, plotlines don’t feel like they’re hurtling toward a conclusion, and things don’t just happen because the plot needs them to happen. Narratives that are driven by motivated character decisions make for good television. Who knew?
