Stumptown (1×01) Forget It Dex, It’s Stumptown. Review

Will this witty P.I. with a troubled past be enough? If anyone can do it, it’s Cobie Smulders.

Synopsis: It follows Dex Parios, a strong, assertive, and unapologetically sharp-witted army veteran working as a P.I. in Portland, Oregon. (IMDb)

Cobie Smulders is great and all but Stumptown better go somewhere pretty fast since her charm can only go so far. Needless to say, this charm helped propel this episode, entitled Forget It Dex, It’s Stumptown.. Smulders’ character, a seemingly every-woman former army veteran and now P.I. working in Portland, named Dex is certainly an interesting character so it will definitely be interesting to see where the series goes from here. As far as this first episode was concerned, it started with Dex working a case in a sequence that was foreshadowed in the series’ many previews but it did not quite start there.

Flashing back to three days prior, we learn that Dex unsurprisingly indulges in plenty of vices like drinking and gambling. The problem with that was that she wasn’t very good at the later. After appearing to lose her money again at a casino, she was called to the office. She clearly had a history with its powerful owner named Sue Lynn Blackbird (Tantoo Cardinal) (she was supposed to marry her son Benny who died in the war) who tasked her to find her granddaughter Nina (Blu Hunt) to which she reluctantly accepted as Dex and her special needs brother Ansel (Cole Sibus) were struggling to make ends meet.

Suffice it to say that the case would not be easy for Dex, arguably having to play dirty to get by. Nevertheless, she found Nina with her boyfriend Michael (Dylan Colton) but didn’t have her for very long after she was taken by pair of assailants who got away and left her knocked out. Luckily (or not) for her, Detective Miles Hoffman (Michael Ealy) arrived only to arrest her for some unpaid parking tickets (because obviously). After she was determined to not be a suspect, Dex’s supportive friend Grey (Jake Johnson) bailed her out (not without being mildly annoyed). Her next stop was to talk to Michael again who gave her a tip about a disgruntled ex-associate of Sue Lynn named Baxter Hall (Jon Bass) (for which she stole a car from).

However, Dex was told that Nina was back with her mother. In a moment of weakness, she found solace in Hoffman for which she had a one-night stand with before remembering in the middle of the night to pick up Ansel at Grey’s bar. Grey was worried about Dex’s potential PTSD but nevertheless, she persisted. After trying to do the right thing and giving Michael Benny’s engagement ring though would only get knocked out again and taken hostage for her trouble (thus insinuating that Michael was a part of it).

Now we are back to Dex riding in a trunk of her own car (with a malfunctioning tape deck that provided a cool soundtrack) but we already know that she won’t be there for long as she finds her way out and takes control of the car and also her kidnappers by putting them in the trunk and driving to the alleged exchange site (that she got from her captors). The police, who were on the lookout for her car, followed Dex there just in time to save Sue Lynn and Nina.

The episode ended with Hoffman offering Dex a card of a friend who was willing to hire her. Grey knew there was something going on with the two of them.

All in all, a promising start that will hopefully continue to flesh out Dex instead of being an action romantic-comedy.

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.