The biggest accomplishment of Sin City Saints‘ first season is building out its secondary cast. Sapphire, Melissa, Byron, LaDarius, Bernice… all of these minor characters add flavor and color to Sin City, which brings the office comedy aspects of the show to life. When Sin City Saints is struggling, it is always focused on Dusty and Jake, who may be the two leads of the show, but are written as broadly and open-ended as the minor characters of its world. This creates a weird imbalance in Sin City Saints, particularly in the final two episodes. Both “Urine” and “Because Vegas” careen between characterizations of its main characters, entwining them in an unnecessary will they/won’t they story, undermining some of the hilarious, light-hearted material surrounding it.
“Urine” suffers from this a bit less, if only because it doesn’t have the pressures of a season finale on its hands – there’s so much going on in the last five minutes of “Vegas” that it’s hard for any of it to have impact beyond a quick laugh, be it Jake’s impotence, a terrorist deciding he didn’t want to invest in the team, or Andy killing himself with Artok’s crossbow; rather than build these stories out a bit more (like Kevin’s creepy back story), “Vegas” is so busy trying to get the audience invested in Jake and Dusty, it ends up giving the viewers whiplash as it flies from scene to scene, centering itself on the two most annoying, inconsistent characters on the show, lessening the impact of each event as a result (where’s Melissa when everything is going down? I need her reaction faces and snide comments!).
The intense focus on Dusty and Jake is really what robs this episode short; anytime their conversation gets interesting, it immediately shifts to become about whether or not they’re going to sleep with each other, and after Jake can’t perform thanks to anxiety from losing his fortune, the episode jokes about his failures in the bedroom. It’s trying to sell this story of Dusty slowly coming to realize the good in Jake, but that ‘good’ in him is mostly only spoken, his actions even when helping LaDarius ultimately serving only himself. It makes their relationship hard to invest in and, being that it’s the focus of these final two episodes, unsurprisingly doesn’t end the season on a high note.
Instead, the joys in the final episodes are found in other characters: a heartbroken LaDarius, a sexually charged (and probably high) Melissa, or Kevin contemplating returning to his violent past as a way to gain control over his life again (and don’t forget Sapphire, who is a riot in both episodes). These stories are inherently more interesting than those of Dusty and Jake, because Sin City Saints has spent more time bringing complexity to their stories through the season. While everything is ultimately played to comedic effect – character development is suggested in the finale, but never actually built through these eight episodes – Sin City Saints still finds ways to make its secondary characters feel unique and vibrant through these series of goofy, often trite stories, which keeps these two episodes afloat against the weight of Dusty and Jake’s conversations regarding their “feelings” (usually opening with some sexual euphemism from Jake, continuing his well-noted ‘charming’ streak).
It would’ve been nice to see “Because Vegas” challenge Jake in ways that had an impact on the events of the season’s final act, ways that explored him as more than the formerly rich tech jerk and earnest team owner. I kept waiting for Sin City Saints to make Jake and Dusty actually human beings in this first season, and aside from a few lines here and there, the show was really only concerned with how many funny things they could say, no matter how awful or hypocritical it painted their characters (though only Dusty gets called out on it, of course – for all the show does with sexual politics involving Melissa, it fails Dusty on a number of levels). In the end, Sin City Saints‘ final two episodes leave an unsatisfying taste in the mouth: amusing at times but poignant in few, the series never really established an identity beyond “Damn, Vegas is random!” in its brief first season. Hopefully, if the show earns a second, it’ll double down on the ensemble work, and find ways to make Dusty and Jake a little more complex. Without some major tweaks, however, Sin City Saints will continue to be an uneven array of random storylines and personas, as it was throughout much of this unfocused first season.
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