“Dexter” — Resistance is Futile
Up against the wall.
Before reaching the rather awesome, rather “yikes, how the hell does he get out of this one” conclusion to last night’s episode I was thinking to myself about the series’ strengths. One thing this show does so well is making Dexter’s escape from justice more about the particular situation, not about the actual ins and outs of the police work (or luck) that keep him from capture. More on what I mean after the jump…
It’s one thing that Lundy figured Doakes for the killer instead of Dexter, giving our “hero” a convenient out of this mess — an out that was perhaps too television-convenient to be taken seriously — but for me the pay-off was not in Dexter’s initial freedom but in the fact that he was assigned a security detail, precisely the type of proximity that makes it impossible for him to do the things he is accustomed to doing. Now, none of this is particularly believable, but I’m starting to think that that’s besides the point. It’s all about exchange of problems. The trading of evils. Of course it is Dexter’s skirting of that very security detail that got him in Doakes’ literal sights by the episode’s end.
And speaking of the end of the episode, I don’t really understand how Black-Ops-Specialist-Doakes allowed himself to be captured or why he didn’t put a bullet in Dexter’s thigh or something to keep him from charging him or how Dexter, taking that bullet too late to stop him from strangling Doakes with his cuffs, got the guy into a cage and… believability isn’t this series’ strongest component. The real question is how long can the creators keep this up. Each week the situation is bigger, more dire for Dexter and seemingly inescapable. Eventually something is going to have to give. I have no doubt they can keep things going for the remainder of this season (three or four episodes), but future seasons? How long will we bite?
One more item: true or false, the goriest thing to ever be on this show were not the endless streams of severed limbs and buckets of blood, but the image of Deb lying on top of Lundy at the beginning of the episode. (True)
November 26th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
“I don’t really understand how Black-Ops-Specialist-Doakes allowed himself to be captured or why he didn’t put a bullet in Dexter’s thigh or something” Remember, Dexter is a serial killer, and “crazy” beats “trained” any day of the month.
December 12th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
How Doakes was captured was a matter of catching him off balance. Doakes never thought that Dexter would have the guts to charge him one on one.
The main disbelieving I have about the series is that the FBI never got a profiler to write up a profile of any of the serial killers they were trying to catch (the Icetruck killer of Dexter himself)
All the profiling is done by the detectives themselves, who are obviously not trained for the job.
For example, I think a trained profiler should have been able to figure out the Bay Side Butcher worked in law enforcement just from the bodies and M.O. (He managed to find killers the police couldn’t track down, obviously he should have had atleast the same resources)