Forensics

[captainsblog]

Jack is confirmed as being free of tiny livestock. I got the call from our vet on Wednesday that his sample had tested negative. THAT news came after we'd locked him up over the weekend to get a sample, he finally provided one, but then we wondered if it would still be viable by the time we got it to our vet some 48 hours later. Between the snow, the holiday and their general short staffing (they're no longer open on Saturdays), Eleanor wound up calling one of the specialized 24-hour emergency vet places in Orchard Park to find out if we'd need another. They thought it would be a good idea, so we re-isolated Da Boy all Tuesday morning until our vet finally told us the original would be okay. A day later, he checked out just fine.

The telephonic detour to OP brought back memories of  bad experiences we've had and heard about with emergency vet practices.  That's not the one we went to- first time in over 30 years we ever had to go to one- when we took Boz in for his terminal diagnosis two Decembers ago. That was a bad experience- some due to the coldness of the season, some the impersonality of still-pending COVID restrictions, but also their business model.  You don't even get your furbaby in the door without payment of a steep upfront diagnostic charge. Every other step along the way is met with similar walletectomies.  The one closer to us, where Boz spent hours, became internet-infamous a few months later when they treated a dog named Jethro, and when he died sent a "sympathy" card to his family naming him "Death Row."  Other friends have told similar stories about their competence and parsimony.

But at least they're there; in fact, with all those late-night visitors coming in at their full rack rate, they've significantly expanded their building and even added a doggie play facility. Furparents in Rochester aren't so lucky now.  When we lived there, we didn't know of any 24-hour emergency locations, but over the years since, I'd seen one had opened near one of my former offices, across the road from Monroe Community College's main campus in Henrietta.  Now, though,....

For more than 20 years, Rochester-area pet owners with sick animals needing emergency care in the middle of the night could find it at Veterinary Specialists and Emergency Services, 825 White Spruce Blvd., Brighton. That changes Monday, Jan. 17, when the clinic will begin operating from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily instead of around the clock.

A memo to VSES staff cited staffing shortages as the reason and particular difficulty finding people to work after hours or overnight shifts.

ORLY?

A group of 130 workers at Veterinary Specialists and Emergency Services (VSES) are now unionized, following a vote of 65 to 28 to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The VSES employees — including licensed veterinary technicians, veterinary assistants and front desk staff — had expressed frustration with working conditions since Monroe Veterinary Associates, a group of 15 practices in the Rochester area, including VSES, was sold in 2021 to a Texas company with more than 400 veterinary clinics nationwide and a private equity firm as a major stakeholder.

Private equity and health care. What could PO$$IBLY go wrong? Maybe ask people at the former Rural Metro ambulance service, which got taken over by a hedge fund and bled it into Bankruptcy Court after giving the world the brilliant idea of the $3,000 ride to the hospital.  So now private equity is getting into animal care. It's a growth industry, especially since COVID; it mostly avoids the bureaucracy and bullshit of insurance reimbursements; and it preys upon people who will do, and pay, anything for their beloved furbabies.

There's got to be a better way. Unfortunately, veterinary training opportunities haven't kept up with the demand. The only established doctorate-level vet college in this state is hundreds of miles away at Cornell, and at last count there were only 28 of them in the entire country. So building an emergency system on residencies, as medical and dental colleges do, really won't work.  Our 30-plus years of experience with our own regular vet practices, here and in Penfield before we moved, have been near-universally good, but there's a lot of stress and turnover in the offices. One vet we met through LJ years ago, who has a mostly farm-animal practice not far from my sister's, has written about the pressures on her and her colleagues, in dealing with demanding human clients, ridiculous student loan and other payment obligations, and the emotions of having to treat or give up on patients who can't say anything for themselves.  Meanwhile, Rochester peeps are now faced with a 90-mile one-way drive to OP, or even further trips to Syracuse or Cornell, if they have a  vet emergency in the middle of the night.

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Now let's move on to our fictional forensics case.

A few weeks back, Prime offered up a free viewing of the premiere episode of the Dexter: New Blood miniseries, which seeks to correct the horrible ending the original show left us with: Our (Anti)Hero, killing his sister, shipping his son off to Argentina with a future Gilead Wife,  faking his own death, and then showing up alive in a final sequence, living in complete solitude as a lumberjack in rural Oregon. A decade later, show star Michael C. Hall and original showrunner Clyde Phillips signed on to give ol' Dex a happier ending than that. Ten hourlong episodes in his old Sunday night Showtimeslot, where he's separated from his Dark Passenger, changed his name (to something close to that of the original novel's author), brought along the ghost of his dead sister as his new Jiminy Fucking Cricket conscience voice, and traded rural Oregon for the only worse place in the universe:

Upstate New York.

"Iron Lake, New York" does not exist, and its stand-in for filming was a rural western Massachusetts town that doubles reasonably well, although this eagle-eyed viewer caught a since-published goof in the free premiere.  Where, exactly, it is Upstate is unstated and unclear: the frigid climate and seeming easy distance to NYC suggest something Adirondacky, and there's a reference to Fort Drum being nearby which implies an even northerner country than that. But then, "Jim" has a 716 area code on the number that shows on calls from his mobile, and his police chief girlfriend, her adopted daughter, and many of the locals are clearly identified as Seneca Nation natives, a territory which does not extend beyond our western area code.  The Senecas probably come out the best of anybody in the series- respecting the land, mourning the dead (human and animal), and, far as I could tell, not committing or being subjected to brutal crimes like most of the Wypipos were.

Last weekend, I clickied the free week trial so I could binge the remaining nine, and with one day to go, I'm through the penultimate episode, leaving just the finale, which so far hasn't been spoiled.  I've seen his once five-year-old son track him down as a teenager and learn his secrets; I've seen a couple of other characters from the original series, other than Ghost Deb, make appearances of varying plausibility; I've seen a very annoying subplot involving a ditzy woman doing a True Crime podcast that doesn't have any of the intentional humor of Only Murders In The Building; but mostly, I've seen Dex Being Dex because his little town of no fixed latitude/longitude seems to attract serial killers like Angela Lansbury's town in Maine had the highest per capita homicide rate on the planet. But then, as the original series and flashbacks in this one make clear, Dexter was apparently only one of several hundred serial killers in just the Miami-Dade metropolitan area, with everybody from creepy clowns to a future Winston Churchill getting in on the axe. Plus, you know, the Florida Man trope is quite real.  Still- of all the hick towns in all the rural backwaters in all the other 49 states in America, why does "Jim" walk into this one?

I have other questions.  His now-teenage son Harrison just bops into town, gets signed up for school, and sport, and even a job working for the Big Bad of this series, without anybody ever asking for school records or even any questions about his Florida past, or even why his last name is different from the one "Jim" made up.  Likewise, Ditzy Podcaster did previous episodes on at least one or two of the Florida villains from the original series, but she somehow never saw a picture of the wily blood spatter expert there, who always knew exactly how the evil villain died. Hell, Big Chief Girlfriend finds out (through a very implausible meeting with one of the other characters from the original series) that Miami had such an expert who had a son named Harrison, and it takes her two more episodes to make that connection. 

Not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but don't worry. "Jim" has a whole collection of them.

I'll check back in after the finale to see which of the following he winds up:

- dead;
- killing his own son and Big Chief Girlfriend, the only ones who know who he really is, and going on with life there;
- going on the run again and becoming "Clyde Colleton" in a strange little town in Arkansas; or
- once again becoming a lumberjack 'cause he's okay, sleeping all night and working all day.

Even better, Dex, become a veterinarian. I've got some poop samples for you to analyze.


 ETA. A Fulfillingness Final Finale.  I finished it, and one of my choices was, at least apparently, correct. Click on the first comment if you want some semi-spoilery expansion on that.

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One more time, Let's Talk About Dex....

[captainsblog]

So, the final episode. No Dexy In The Shower moment after his televised death, with lumberjacks or small town hicks now surrounding him. Dexter Is Dead like a Dexter Dead Thing. Shot by his own son, at essentially his own request, after BCG finally put the pieces together of his connection to his original handiwork and threatened to send him back to Florida to face Ol' Sparky or Ol' Injecty or however they're doing it there now.

This came after the reveal in the previous episode that the Big Bad of this miniseries, played by Clancy Brown, had been running an even more elaborate chop shop and trophy case than even Dex ever did, installing all but his first victim (BCG's best friend, missing for 25 years and found in a just-underground rockpile where both her body and Big Bad's DNA were lovingly preserved for Dex and BCG to find). Here's another point where credulity went out the window and down the hatch: this trophy room is about the size of half of Harrison's high school, complete with ventilation, overhead lighting and a sound system to play his creepy kill anthem on. And contractors just did it, going in, pulling no permits and asking no questions about why anyone would want a subterranean museum buried in the middle of the middle of nowhere?

Also defying credulity is this: once Our AntiHero is finally confronted over his Florida crimes, he's put back in his cell in a tiny cophouse jail with just one cop to mind the store while Angela goes out to "get proof" of Big Bad's even worse crimes. Why does Dex wait to reveal this until he's locked up? He, or his son, could have called in the location of the trophy room to her, or the State PoPos or FBI, when he was still relatively free, and in the resulting mayhem, he and son could have much more easily slipped away without him being locked up, his jailer (also the sports coach of his son) taking a fatal bullet from Dad, and THAT being the basis for Harrison pulling the fatal trigger on Dex once and for all.

Batista is still heading north and probably will take a wrong turn at Albakoikie and never get there. I'd thought I'd read a spoiler somewhere that HE died in the final episodes, but that may have just been wishful thinking on some viewer's part. Angela sees what Harrison did, slips him a wad of cash and tells him to go west on I-86 and never come back. (AH! That places Iron Lake in the Southern Tier near Seneca country there.)

The final moments show Son of Anti Hero indeed heading west, past convoys of cop cars coming to investigate the murders both recent and not. More than anything in the nine seasons before, for me it brought to mind the final moments of Six Feet Under, Michael C. Hall's previous premium cable series, only there it was his sister Claire who was heading EAST on an interstate across the country to begin a new life. Title cards said she lived a long and creative life and died in 2085 at the age of 102. Maybe she'll meet Harrison on the road someplace and they can fall in love and make premium cable babies together.