Peculiar episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I just saw.

Peculiar episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I just saw.

You want to hear about it?

It was a bit like Otto Preminger’s Angel Face starring Bob Mitchum. The end was protracted and impotent – there was a false crescendo, a premature ejaculation, and then half an hour of just noodling. Like A Passage to India or Huckleberry Finn. Imperfect resolutions in each.

Leland it was who said, “I only had three hours sleep. I wasn’t even halfway through my dream.” Leave it to Leland to come up with the gnomic Heraclitean summary of the episode. Actually, isn’t that the beginning of Dante’s Commedia?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the dream that is our life
I awoke to find myself
In the SUV with Dad chasing a fugitive
Who was no longer a fugitive.

The fugitive in question, one Nono, a serial beater of women (although everybody who knew him swore he was a swell all-round fellow), had gone down to the county sheriff’s “around about midnight” and had his girlfriend Mary “go his bail.” They kept quiet about this and went ahead made a deal for Nono to “give himself up” to Dog and his crew. The idea, it was surmised, was to catch Dog and his team for false arrest and so get them in turn humiliated and arrested while Mary – the schemer behind the scenes – would simultaneously collect some money off Dog for her “informing”.

A scheme worthy of Machiavelli – or the sinister minds behind the JFK assassination.

That’s complicated I realize. Imagine how I felt watching it. There were conspiracies everywhere. Beth said she was conducting “the investigation behind the investigation” and she made it a gendered issue (as they say in the academy) by solving the mystery with Mary Ellen while Dog was blundering around with this guy “Scott”. She kept making the same joke: “Girls rule, dogs drool.”

Scott was a four foot ten double-agent sent by Nono’s malicious shadow militia to sabotage the Dog camp from within. Scott was expert at this, blundering and stuttering the whole time and ballsing up any investigation with his vacillation and hemming and hawing. Dog was naturally incapable of combating this cause he’s prone to hem haw and space out vacantly himself.

Scott was so short he was like a sinister dwarf from a circus of crime. I expected him to turn up at any point in a clown suit and turn somersaults while throwing skittles at the team. But he lost out in the end because Beth donned her deerstalker and solved the conspiracy and begad she had the last laugh. She said, “Scott, we caught you out, interloper at the margins that ye are, and now you are expelled from society.” Scott, who you see had once been a bounty-hunter himself and had found a sort of kinship there that he had never felt before outside of the circus, walked across the parking lot sniffling with his head hung in shame. He looked even samller than usual, the figure he cut there as he trundled into the distance. He walked out to the perimeters of the outer city limits and then he kept walking down tords the creek. Perhaps he is still walking – or perhaps his figurative hat is floating.

I was puzzled, though, why Dog and crew would pursue Nono after they knew that his bail had been paid and his warrant had been pulled the night before. They knew he was trying to scam them, but they still showed up. For what?

To taunt him, was the reason. I watched this story unfold for an hour just to see some childish chest-puffing and drubbing at its end?

Dog and his “pound” need to really work on their narrative endings.

Sometimes the cops come into Dog the Bounty Hunter and foul up the whole story. Dog is always put out by this, largely because he doesn't get his money when the cops arrest the perp. But also it makes for a poor show. Sometimes Dog is duly obeisant and says that the cops are "our big brother" but other times - like today - he spits the word "cops" like everybody else does.

It really is important to be able to finish a narrative with a flourish.

Wisht I coulda-------