Not long after Dorothy (Jamie Neumann) returns to Times Square after leaving sex work for a new life of feminist activism, she meets an untimely end and is found dead behind a dumpster. We don’t see who her killer is, leaving us to wonder: who killed Dorothy?
To think that there are people out there who wanted Dorothy dead comes as no surprise. Her newfound calling of creating rights and establishing agency for the sex workers she once worked alongside makes her an obvious target by anyone standing to profit off of the women working on the streets and in front of the camera in the porn industry. We see her return at the start of season 2 a changed woman. She has joined a feminist group and she comes back to Times Square to face her former pimp CC (Gary Carr), who would seem like the most likely suspect in her murder...had he not already been killed in the previous episode.
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Still, that does not mean another pimp didn’t kill her. Dorothy represented a way out of sex work and a future that didn’t have to include an exploitative and dangerous environment. Pimps wouldn’t want the women working for them to think they could just leave at any time for a better life. Dorothy did inspire many of the people around her to pursue something better. Lori (Emily Meade) and Darlene (Dominique Fishback) both leave their pimps.
Some viewers theorize that we may never learn who Dorothy’s killer is. Between season 1 and season 2, there was a six-year time jump from 1971 to 1977. According to TV Line, season 3 starts off in 1985. With the foreshadowing of what the future holds for the porn industry and the looming knowledge that the then-mayor, Rudy Giuliani, puts an end to the porn theaters dotting Times Square in the ‘90s, completely making over the Manhattan neighborhood, The Deuce could have quite a lot of ground to cover before the series ends with season 3.
Everyone who was close to Dorothy is left mourning her death. Given the historic lack of respect or follow-through crimes against sex workers receive by formal channels of law enforcement, perhaps Loretta (Sepideh Moafi), Abby (Margarita Levieva), and Vincent (James Franco) do some investigative work of their own in an attempt to find out whether the killer was someone they all knew.
Still some hold onto the hope that perhaps it wasn’t Dorothy who died after all. She was killed off-camera. As the viewer, we only see a shot showing her feet and her driver’s license, but not her face or a scene of her alive just before, confirming that it was definitely her. Dorothy could have disappeared with the help of the feminist group she was a part of. She probably knew she had a lot of people who were displeased with her newfound calling of standing up for the rights of sex workers.
Season 3 of The Deuce premieres on HBO on September 9.