“Dexter” — See Through
Hmmm… do random NA sponsors usually get invited into morgues to finger bodies?
Dexter is a fabulous series, but as a cop drama there are always sizable irregularities, like the pictured scene involving Dexter and a woman who he happens to invite into a make-shift morgue filled with body parts from the Bay Harbor Butcher. Call me crazy, and I’ll be the first to say that I am not, nor have I ever been a cop on the Miami police force, but it seems like it would be against procedure to let Jane Average have her way with the evidence. Luckily, this is hardly a cop show despite most of the main characters being cops or working for the MPD, so it seems OK to let things like this slide. Dexter is a show about self discovery, and sometimes the key to figuring things out is to hang out with a crazy artist into body parts. More after the jump…
Aside from the aforementioned nonsense, it was yet another good episode from the Showtime drama’s second season. Morgue-touching aside I love the addition of Lyla to the narrative — especially as such a sharp contrast to the mouse-like Rita, a character Dexter seems to be tiring of. I think what most struck me about Lyla was her ability to call bullshit on Dexter’s “I’m an emotionless monster” routine. He may believe this to be true, but over the past sixteen episodes there has been pleanty of emotion coming from the man, just not in traditional ways. I also like that Lyla is maybe a tad (maybe more than a tad) crazy herself. I don’t know about you but when he walked into her art studio all I could think was Maude Lebowski.
Also intriguing was how the media has latched onto the Bay Harbor Butcher case and more or less declared him (”him” since we know who it is) a hero as the cops have determined that almost all of his victims were murderers themselves. I really hope this angle gets explored as things move forward. It adds a whole “Watchmen” level of complexity to the proceedings, and in the current media climate seems completely apropos.
This of course ties in to Rita’s visiting mother who was the first on the series to outright say the killer is actually a hero and thus should be allowed to roam free. Still, her declaration to her daughter that “this guy is hiding something” feels like yet another red herring in the pursuit of Dexter’s undoing. Granted, if you’re a serial killer you probably should be a tad paranoid about your place in the universe, but if you’re any good at your job –Â and we have to believe Dexter is at the very least decent — what is anyone to suspect. Ma Bennett may find the man a bit off, but are we really suppose to sweat it? Is she going to be the one that cracks the case? Seems unlikely.
I could have done without the Pascal meltdown/Laguerta promotion storyline. I mean, what was the point aside from reducing a character down to a series of hormones? The Doakes substory, on the other hand, was one of the first times I felt like I understood the character’s motivations. It was more or less detached from the rest of the narrative and yet it took its time in presenting the rationalization between he and the man he was pursuing.
The show has yet to achieve greatness as each episode seems polluted with all of these tiny, annoying contrivances, but greatness is by no means out of reach. If it were to achieve it, however, it needs to happen soon. Dexter can only escape his fate for so long before we start to grow restless and find his actions less about a character doing what he needs to survive and more about writers trying to keep a series afloat.
