Dexter Review: “In the Beginning”

I love getting to the home stretch of Dexter every season. All idiotic subplots fade away and the show kicks into high gear each and every single year as the action heats up, Dexter goes to full-on hunt mode, and someone is usually hot on his tail.

Gone was this season’s completely useless Muerta Bros. subplot, and honestly I’m not even sure if that will ever come back up despite one brother still being on the loose. It would be a cop-out if Deb uncovered Dex’s secret, then he shows up to shoot her, but I doubt the show would pull a trick that dirty. Or would it?

Rather all of Miami Metro’s efforts are now focused on finding the barrel killers, which is unfortunately the same thing Dexter and Lumen are trying to do. Deb is being way too good at her job, and has connected Boyd to Cole to Dan the Dentist to Jordan Chase, and seems to be right on Dexter’s trailer with a theory that a vigilante is hunting down the rape posse.

“Hell ****ing yeah, we’re doing some mother****ing police work now!”

Dexter and Lumen have a breakthrough of their own when they track down a woman who was the very first victim of the gang, back when Jordan instructed his camp buddies to tie up and rape her when she was a junior counselor.

But stranger still, we learn that she still has a relationship with Chase, despite what he’s done to her, and told Lumen the truth so Chase could set her and Dexter up as they try to kill the fifth member of the gang, Alex, who I must say looks like a younger, smaller Louis CK to an almost uncanny degree.

Jordan is a motivational speaker, sure, but it appears he has the ability to charm people to an almost supernatural degree, talking his friends into becoming monsters while he sits there and watches, and charming his first victim to seemingly adore him.

This episode made me think that this is definitely the darkest season of the show yet, and the rape posse the most terrifying villains. Sure, Dexter’s met plenty of evil folks, but these guys? Worse than Ice Truck, Trinity or The Skinner. It’s one thing to kill, it’s another to torture and gang rape women over the last fifteen years. And seeing all the images and hearing all screams from the DVDs that were unearthed really brought that to life in a way I found unexpectedly bone-chilling. And here I was thinking I was all but immune to media violence.

Yeeesh.

The series had one of its most tense moments when Jordan summons Deb and Quinn to Alex’s house right as Dexter and Lumen are supposed to be killing him. Fortunately, they just miss the pair, who are instead camped out next door, but I have to admit, I was on the edge of my seat for a few moments there.

This got me thinking a lot about how all this is going to end. Deb has now figured out that the 13th victim might be responsible for the murders, and I thought  Lumen could take the fall for Dexter at season’s end, but Deb has seen her living at Dexter’s, and I can’t imagine they’d write that off as coincidence if she ends up getting caught.

Not to mention perhaps the MOST important development of the show, that Robocop now knows that Dexter and Lumen probably have murdered/are murdering people, as he’s now wired Dex’s apartment with hi-tech surveillance gear.

“Ho-leee shit!”

But now what? What does he do with this information? He’s a disgraced cop with little pull with the department. He could turn what he’s found over to Quinn or Deb or LaGuerta, but all of it was obtained illegally, and everyone involved would be screwed. It just seems like a giant clusterfuck waiting to happen, and I can’t see this ending cleanly other than Dexter finding out about this and killing him. But A) that’s a severe code breach, as this guy is a dirty cop but no murderer and B) Dexter has ZERO idea this is even going on, and with two episodes left, a lot would have to happen in order to make this storyline resolved. Is this setting up for the plotline of the next season? The fall of Dexter Morgan?

But before that, we’ll stay in the present, where Dexter and Lumen finally hook up after her first kill, and it’s the first time I think Dexter’s really truly cared for someone on the show, and has actually had passion during sex. I always maintained he was with Rita purely to fit in, and he probably grew to love her a bit eventually, but it always felt like his life with her was just “cover” for the most part, and through proximity he grew close to her and her family. Here however, this is something completely of his own making, and he can be 100% himself with Lumen, and now has someone to share his life with.

Soulmates? But for how long?

Buuuut, how long can this last? Dexter as a show is never about happy endings, and I can’t see Julia Stiles sticking around until the series ends. What’s going to happen with her? She can’t be arrested,  because of her connection to Dexter, but can they really kill her, when they’ve just done the same to Rita last season? And it’s not like she’s just going to go back to the midwest and live her old life. Something’s gotta give here. Either she’ll be made a regular, and or strangled to death by Jordan Chase, and I really hope it’s the former.

Only two to go!