Thankfully, after its fifth episode of the season, Dexter is on its way to being top-notch again. A possible affair scandal! Creepy "f**k buddies" around the baby! Sex offenders galore! Harrison scratches another baby at Mommy and Me playtime!
Yeah, the baby stuff does seem a bit out of place amid a slew of much more serious topics. But that little blond guy is just too cute. Most of all though, I, like Dexter, enjoyed seeing the whole police family together again on Sunday night. Dexter is (FINALLY) back to work, Deb and Angel are back to interrogating victims in hospitals, and Masuka is back to being his gross and weird self. (His leopard thong=the most shocking thing I've seen on this show about a serial killer.)
The Lumen/Dexter story is gaining some solid ground, too. Like I said last week, Julia Stiles' Lumen is much more interesting when she speaks and schemes. We learn in "First Blood" that she wants Dexter to kill the men responsible for kidnapping her. We also learn that she's a little nuts, and has apparently been keeping diligent notes on the people she suspects of, in connection with Boyd Fowler, kidnapping and raping her. Dexter first breaks into Boyd's apartment and finds Lumen's bloody fingerprints on a lot of Boyd's documents, linking him to other men who may have joined in on the brutalities against Lumen. So naturally, Dexter breaks into Lumen's apartment to find out what she knows. What he finds is that she's frantically scribbled about her suspects on newspaper clippings, andthat she sleeps in the closet, because that's where her attackers kept her. Which is really heartbreaking, and seems to stir something up within Dexter.
Something that turns out to be a huge mistake. He hastily tracks down Boyd Fowler's cell mate, a sex offender and pretty rotten dude who Lumen pegged as being one of the men to rape her. Turns out, he couldn't have because he's required to wear a monitoring bracelet on his ankle. Dexter doesn't realize this until the Harry part of his brain points it out while the skeez bag is on his table.
As always, what makes Dexter a great serial killer also makes him heartless and cruel. Likewise, when he does things that Harry warns against, he is more human but often sloppy as a killer. He feels an intense need to protect Lumen, or maybe just to get back into the killing game, and acts too quickly and without care in this case.
Luckily though, his mistake helps him prevent Lumen from making the same one. She attempts to shoot the same man, suspecting him of raping her, but is interrupted (after a ridiculously drawn-out decision to shoot or not to shoot) by Dexter. I was disappointed, thought not surprised, that she didn't kill him. It would have been more interesting. Odds are she and Dexter will share in the some sort of kill soon enough. Next thing we know, she's at Miami International, on her way back to Minnesota. What a nice, convenient ending for these two. Ah, but she doesn't leave before getting Dexter to tell her his full name.
Just one problem: She doesn't leave. She stays in Miami, presumably because she still wants revenge on her captors. But now she also can find out where to find Dexter, something the only person to ever see him kill (and remain alive) probably shouldn't be able to do.
In other boring news, Dexter catches Deb with Quinn at their apartment and finds out about their so-wrong-it's-right habit of sleeping together. (To which he replies, hilariously and in typical clueless fashion: "You need Quinn for that?") Yuck, yawn, who cares. Quinn was especially annoying me, and Deb too, in this episode, just lounging around all day. But then he recruits a (ex?) cop buddy of his to do some work looking into Dexter. While he's banging his sister, no less. Classy all the way.
In slightly more interesting (but still really dumb and poorly written) news, Angel and Maria graduate from plotlines about secret bank accounts to suspicions of an affair. Angel incorrectly accuses Maria of cheating on him, after he sees her buttoning her shirt in a hotel room with some other guy sitting on the bed. Wow, what a jerk! How could he possibly have come to that conclusion based on what he saw! Casting Angel as a jealous, overbearing, insecure wimp is no way to make the newlyweds more compelling. It's not believable, and it's not entertaining.
Deb gets a lead on the Santa Muerte case, after a rather disgusting scene in which she finds two decaying, bug-covered bodies and solves the mystery of the bad guy's tattoo. She also meets a saucy tattoo artist lady, who she's almost definitely going to befriend and perhaps have a lesbian relationship with. (Maybe after Quinn tells her he's looking into her brother and she flips a shit?)
I hope Sunday's "Everything is Illuminated" follows the same upward trend that "First Blood" did. And I hope to see more of smiley and adorable baby Harrison.
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2010.