Dexter Review: “Everything is Illumenated”

Thank you Dexter, my interest was starting to slip, my head was nodding and then BAM! Finally some action! Not much has happened since Dexter freed Lumen, culminating in last week’s episode, one of the more boring of the series, but now things seem to be picking back up again, and more importantly, this season has a purpose.

Mercifully, the subplots took a big backseat to the main story this week, something Dexter forgets to do some of the time. All that really happened was the gang staked out a club looking for the machete brothers, Deb admits she has feelings for Quinn and LaGuerta and the captain butt heads like they’ve been doing since season one. Oh, and Harrison says his first words, “bye bye” which Dexter interprets as “die die.” This is just getting silly.

I kind of wish more had been developed with Quinn looking into Dexter, but I guess we’ll probably  see more of that next week. Could Quinn really be the one to bring Dexter down? I’m not sure how much longer the series is going to go on, but I really do want him to get caught eventually, and have an entire season devote to his arrest, trial and then naturally, his ultimate escape.

He can flee to Mexico and start abducting and murdering drug kingpins and cartel hitmen.

But enough of my fantasy conclusions, what’s going on for real? Well Dexter is out on the prowl, looking for an “easy kill” in the form of a gay dude who picks up dudes on Craigslist and then murders them. Pretty sure there was an actual serial killer like that. Easily enough, he bags and tags the guy, but as he’s about to do the deed, he gets an urgent call for Lumen.

She did NOT leave Miami as we saw last week, and instead stuck around and tried to murder one of her attackers who somehow she identifies by odor and a feeling of “just knowing.” She shoots him (presumably) dead, and calls Dexter to help her clean up as she’s, you know, new at this.

He sprints over, but by the time he arrives the totally-not-dead man has fled, and they must track him down via his blood trail. Once they do, Dexter starts questioning him to see if he is in fact the bad man in question.

How does a family man dentist know a loner roadkill remover? Who are the other guys?

But, in a move the show pulls at least once a season, the police show up to one of Dexter’s escapades and he must scramble to make it look like he was there because of a call. Things only get worse when his latest victim, with the drugs worn off, awakes in his truck and sprints around the warehouse area.

There’s a scene that had more tension in it than anything I’ve seen on the show in a while, where Dexter must wrangle the escaped guy as his sister and Masuka hunt for the man he currently has cuffed to a pipe inside.

Well through a series of extremely fortunate events, they discover the man IS lying, and was one of Lumen’s rapists, so Dexter kills him, his other victim, and stages the thing to look like murder suicide. I’m sure forensics would prove otherwise, but hey, he’s forensics.

Erotic mummification asphyxiation.

So Lumen is his new sidekick, and the mission this season will be to hunt down Lumen’s other attackers. How many of them are there? It’s Dex’s last question of the night, but one we don’t get an answer to yet. With half the season to go, I’d say no more than 3,  but maybe 2. Dexter views this as some sort of retribution for Rita, though I’m not precisely sure why.

Is it just me, or does Dexter seem generally pretty unconcerned that this woman knows his secret? But we know he does like having a friend, which is why he was torn about killing his brother, and why he trained Miguel to kill with him in season 3. I guess he has dirt on her as well, but if she slips up the way she did tonight, she could go down and take him with her. It seems awfully risky for him, though I guess what do you do at this point? Kill her? That’s breaking the code to such a degree, I don’t even find the idea plausible for him.

I’m sensing a little bit of a love connection between the two, and I have to imagine that’s going to develop further as the season wears on. Will Dexter tell her the full truth about how many people he’s actually killed? And really, shouldn’t she be asking HIM a lot more questions as well? Both sides seem pretty complacent about their exceptionally complicated relationship.

I like her better than Rita already. At least she’s murdering bitches.

But in any case, good episode, and I hope the rest of the season follows suit.

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8 Comments

  1. Very tense episode, which was wonderful. Lumen, I don’t find all that attractive, but Dex should still hit it at least once. She was in his bath and borrowing a robe. Dex doesn’t have those type feelings tho, so She’s going to have to rape him.

    The idea of a tourture/rape/murder crew that works together is intriguing and I can’t wait for them to get into it in more depth.

  2. I think he is projecting the feelings he had for Rita on to Lumen. Using her as an emotional crutch so to say. After all if the very first episode we hear that what drew him to Rita was that in her own way she just as damaged as he was due to the abuse from her husband. This seems similar to the condition of Lumen. Of course there is also the blonde pretty factor and so on

  3. Lumen, not Lumin which you spelled incorrectly when using her name twice in one sentence…. plus, do you proof-read your stuff before you post as there are always quite a few grammatical errors (i.e. “he gets an urgent call from Lumen”, not “for”?)

    other than that, i think he should just kill her. she’s annoying and he keeps making mistakes which is unlike his character. he is supposed to be very thorough and precise, not a bumbling idiot that makes poor choices at every turn like they’ve made him out to be this season and a good chunk of last season.

  4. @chelsea

    Actually I spelled it wrong every time, but was corrected and went back and tried to change all of them. Missed some.

    When you write 8,000 words of blog posts a day across four sites on a tight schedule, some stuff is going to slip through the cracks, even after a readthrough or two. Wish we could hire an actual editor, but that’s not in the cards.

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