“Dexter” — Left Turn Ahead
So Deb, got something to tell ya…
I don’t know if Dexter will ever go down in history as GREAT television, due in large part to the fact that the seasons tend to sag in the middle. That being said, the show really knows how to bring it when push comes to shove comes to mass murdering. There are still flaws. Deb and Lundy I find to be physically repellent, and perhaps the reason I’m rocking a 100-degree fever right now, and while I more or less love watching “crazy,” Lila might be going over the edge a bit. I guess we’ll have to wait until next week to see where all of this leads, but this episode, the penultimate, was a ton of fun. More after the jump? Of course…
Like last week, this week was carried by Michael C. Hall (natch) and a surprisingly great performance from Eric King (Doakes). To think that we had gone through so much of this series with Doakes being little more than a bald head and a snear. Their give and take at the cabin was brilliantly fun to watch and led to the very logical conclusion of Dexter deciding to turn himself in… for a while. I have to be honest, part of me wishes he would have gone ahead and turned himself in and then ended the show, but of course this can’t possibly happen when a series is popular. Knowing that in the end he has to escape justice makes the pursuit and the character’s moralizing less dramatic (because we know in the end everything will be AOK). What’s nice about fantastic characters is it’s able to put this knowledge off to the side and fall wholly into the scene.
It’s probably a good thing that Lila found the cabin (even though the idea of this is mostly ridiculous) because as good as Dexter and Doakes give and take may have been, it’s time to move forward and to put a bow on the season. I suppose it could go in one of two directions. Dexter gets away with all of it and Doakes goes down, or the more crowd pleasing finale would involve some sort of brilliant paint-out-of-the corner twist where everyone finds a way to coexist but where Lila takes the fall — since she seems to be the one character without particularly redeeming qualities (is frequently naked and often gorgeous a redeeming quality?). I guess we’ll know in four days.
I suppose I also wouldn’t be surprised if everything came down to the feds somehow screwing things up as their organization seems to be almost as inept as Miami’s Keystone Cops. The thing is, as much as Dexter may be a police procedural at its core (the reason CBS is eying to bring it over to the network as strike-filler) I could really care less about that whole side of the drama. The character of Dexter is all we need, and then longer he’s on the screen the better the series becomes.
