On the recent episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter there has been a subdued air pervading the show. Dog has been whipped; even neutered. He skulks around with his tail figuratively between his legs rather like some base, kicked cur.
In truth he has been kicked by the good people of the civil rights bureau. They condemned him and had him banished from the airwaves and then eventually there was some sort of a pow-wow (or-- "bow-wow"!) in which Dog – by the infinite charm he has – completely converted his worst most adamant gnarliest scoundreliest critic to the cause. This civil rights man emerged from the discussion saying that he insisted Dog be returned to the airwaves on every channel at an all-new time and that African-Americans everywhere, as a gesture of solidarity, must tune in.
Still the Dog was subdued. In this vacuum of bravado, somebody must step up to fill the gulping void and that somebody is Beth, Dog’s bumptious wife. As of watching four episodes I declare this show should be renamed Beth, and Her Litter of Mewling Kittens.
Beth is a good character. Never an episode passes by without my wife remarking with disgust on Beth’s considerable bosom and yet even so P____ likes her. In the recent round of bounty-hunting and (if it can be called this) detective work, Beth was always the one to lead the group, to rally them and to come up with new clews.
In a recent episode, part of a three or four part cycle, they were in “hot pursuit” (albeit with regular periods when they withdrew to the ranch to fag out on the couch) of a – what else? – Mexican drug-lord and fraudster.
Marco, his name.
Dog was depicted being thoroughly cowed by even the dumpiest fat donut cops. Ever since he got in trouble for the racist tirade he has been skulking around like a spanked spaniel, scared to say boo to a goose. He daren’t say a rash thing.
"He never said a mumblin' word."
So here he is walking tippy toes on eggshells and not doing a blame bit of good. Meanwhile his sons, Duane Lee and Leland, are lovable blunderers through life.
I like to watch Leland "explain" the detective process, his armory and so forth, in the voice of an excited six-year-old; faltering, watching his tongue, but in a different way from loudmouth Dog. With Leland it's like he is trying to conquer a stammer. At one point they were being tough guys tracking down a teenage girl wearing only a towel in the underbrush with infra-red heat-sensitive tracers on their guns and they were slipping and sliding around getting nowhere.
When they eventually caught the girl (days later and in a gas station, after Beth tracked her down), Leland was eager to ask her where she had been hiding when he was hunting around in the bushes. It was like they had been playing hide and seek. (It turned out she had been hidden back at the complex, among the laundry - mere yards from Dog and his puzzled pound.)
Duane Lee and Leland habitually overslept while they were in “hot pursuit” of the fiendish Marco, and they constantly had to catch up with Dog and Beth on the highway, congregating at gas stations.
All the bounty crew really did, in the event, was to keep going round the house of Marco's father and cousin ("Zorro") every few days, where they would lounge, eat crackers, and harass and upbraid the father. Tony was his name and he could only loosely be termed a humanoid. He was an absolutely inveterate liar. He would say anything to avoid trouble. He was a flat-out dissembler. It was a strategy he had plumped for in dealing with life. Did you ever know the type? A quivering quailing coward. A low despicable quisling. Sometimes, when the difficult questions came too thick and fast, and he couldn’t come up with a “plausible lie” on the spot, Tony would pretend to have a “panic attack.” Leland was out in the stairwell whispering to the camera: “He did this last time. It’s an act.” What was not an act was when, in the midst of a heated conversation with Beth, Tony’s teeth flew out of his mouth. It was hilarious. Later, Bobby Brown remarked: “He was so frightened his teeth flew out!,” and the lads sniggered and Beth – showing the tiniest trace of a sense of humour – smiled indulgently.
Bobby Brown wasn’t so smart himself though. This is the guy – who must be sixty-five if he’s a day – who trolls around semi-conscious after the bounty-hunting family picking up dropped scraps of fried chicken. (The other guy with the braided pigtail - Tim - seems to have vanished.) Anyway, at a key moment, when the bounty-hunters in the apartment were busting the fake-ID-using, heroin-abusing gang, Bobby was outside, in the carpark, supposedly watching the rear window of the apartment for any signs of escape. Instead he got into a “conversation” with a guy who was deaf.
This deaf cowboy had just rolled up in his car and Bobby assailed him. When he deduced that his suspect was deaf Bobby's face lit up and he ended up so engrossed in writing little notes for the deaf-mute that he totally missed the perp being lowered out of the window in her towel. It was like a scene from "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters."
Meanwhile Dog was such a meathead that he let the accomplice just walk out of there. He just said “Aloha, braw” and let him stroll along. Beth was exasperated with the men.
Can you blame her?
I don't know to this day why they didn't just wait outside Tony's place, "lying doggo" you might say, simply waiting for Marco to visit his dad. It seems the obvious solution. But I suppose their must be the appearance of work being done or the show wouldn't exist. Anyway they didn't. Marco is still out "there" ("here") ("the planet Earth") somewhere and Dog made a public service announcement at the end of the show asking for any information regarding his whereabouts.
I was excited - wanted to help the gang - to be a part of the show. Unfortunately I have no idea where Marco is.
He is not in Greenpoint.
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