Comedy
Shifting Gears
Matt and his estranged daughter, Riley, embark on a restoration of the dented bumpers of their relationship.
Dex Parios is not someone you want to underestimate. She’s a former Marine, and she’ll pummel you six ways to Friday if you give her reason. Then she’ll just pop open a brewski with her best friend, Grey, at his bar and settle in for the night.
‘Course, the pummeling talent can come in handy, considering her job.
After using the investigative skills she learned in the military to find the missing daughter of a casino owner, Dex gets roped into further private investigations by Grey and decides to make a business of it. A few amateur mistakes and overall lack of experience cause Dex to make some hasty (and illegal) decisions that land her on the wrong side of an interrogation room more than once, but in the end, she always catches the bad guy.
Grey helps Dex sort out her life as much as possible. He employs Ansel (Dex’s younger brother who has Down Syndrome) at his bar, bails Dex out of jail when she bumps heads with the police and even takes it upon himself to “detox” Dex once a year with a three-day non-alcoholic juice cleanse. However, Grey has some issues of his own. He’s an ex-con, and while he’s been doing business on the up-and-up, it’s heavily implied that the money he used to open his bar was obtained through shadier means.
As fierce and formidable as Dex is, the woman is clearly dealing with a lot. Rarely seen without a drink in her hand, Dex has shown a certain propensity for gambling away her disability check each month, making it difficult to provide a stable living for herself and Ansel.
Dex also blames herself for the death of her ex-boyfriend, who was killed by an explosion in Afghanistan while visiting her. She handles her grief in frequent benders that usually end in one-night stands (sometimes with women and once with Grey.)
Whether it’s the nature of the job or Dex’s apparent penchant for violence, there’s certainly a lot of fisticuffs in Stumptown. There’s also a peppering of some mild profanities and innuendos, but much more concerning are Dex’s low moral standards. Because although Dex appears to be on the verge of cleaning up her act and making an honest living with the private eye business, her flaky choices will have many audiences saying, “Forget it. It’s Stumptown.”
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Dex is hired to track down a woman that a man fell in love with at a bar after the woman gave him the wrong phone number. Grey’s ex-partner-in-crime tries to convince Grey to give him money to pay off a dangerous third party. We see how Grey and Dex met six years ago and how they became best friends.
Dex gets into brawls with three different people and is nearly choked out by two of them. She ultimately gains the upper hand by spraying one in the face with cleaning solution, knocking another out with a phone and knocking a third unconscious with a gun. A cashier and woman are held at gunpoint during a convenience store robbery. A man is found nearly suffocated from a plastic bag tied over his head. Dex is knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant. The police investigate a corpse found by the river. A couple is heard yelling and smashing things from the hallway outside their apartment.
After an implied sexual encounter, a woman is seen gathering her pants and exiting an apartment in her underwear and a revealing shirt. A man is later seen in boxers and a tank top. Dex turns down a potential infidelity case because she already believes the wife is cheating. A woman tries and fails to get special privileges from a police officer whom she previously had a sexual encounter with. It is implied that two different women were previously involved in same-sex relationships.
Dex struggles to avoid alcohol during a detox and immediately starts drinking shots when the detox is over. A woman blackmails a bartender for information after discovering the bartender forgot to check the ID of a potentially underage woman. Dex, aided by Grey, illegally adds herself to a man’s credit card alert in order to track down a con artist. Two crooks are involved in a fleecing scheme that resulted in at least one death. A man conspires to commit insurance fraud. A woman lies about a delivery to gain entrance into an apartment building. “P–s” and “h—” are each heard once.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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