Dexter, "Living the Dream": Reviewing the season premiere

"Dexter" season four premiered tonight, and after the jump, I'm going to offer some spoiler-minimal thoughts on why I'm probably not going to be writing as much about the new season as I did in years past, followed (with fair warning) by a few specific thoughts about the premiere itself. All that coming up just as soon as I TiVo Jon Stewart...

I've seen the first four episodes of this season, and while they're definitely an improvement over season three, they weren't enough to shake me of my belief that this isn't a show that should be having a fourth season. The longer "Dexter" is on, the more diluted the concept feels, and the cuddlier he becomes. Dexter as reluctant husband and father leads to some funny moments in the premiere, and in the other episodes I've seen. But it also keeps sanding off the character's edge, in the same way the writers did by making Miguel Prado(*) a monster whose crimes pre-dated his involvement with Dexter, and who had become so loathsome that even his estranged wife wasn't upset he was dead. A Dexter who kills a once-decent guy whose soul he destroyed is morally gray; a Dexter who puts down this mad dog is a hero. Similarly, Dexter wanting to maintain his secret identity to avoid hurting his new family and "killing for two now" makes him seem a bit more noble, and the audience more complicit in wanting him to stay free.

(*) And I couldn't help noticing how far we got into the "Previously, on Dexter..." sequence before Miguel was mentioned, and how quickly the montage dispensed with his story.

Michael C. Hall is still great, and the season's story arcs are unfolding more clearly and confidently than last year's muddled plots. But there came a point in an upcoming episode where I jotted down the following note: "I care so much more about Lundy and Trinity than I do about Dexter."

Hall is good enough, and the show well-made enough, that I'm going to keep watching, but I don't feel particularly invested in it. And since I've learned it's no fun for me or for my readers for me to keep writing at length about a show where I've reached that point, these weekly reviews will be much briefer - or, in some weeks, simply opportunities for you to offer up your own thoughts on the latest episode.

And if you've made it this far without having watched the episode yet, now's the time to turn away, as I'm going to get more specific with a few bullet points about "Living the Dream," in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

• As that Lundy note suggested, I'm really glad to see Keith Carradine back, and to see how Lundy's presence so disturbs both the unflappable Dexter and the very flappable Deb. Carradine has this great relaxed charm, and it's easy to understand why half the shows on television (like "Damages," where he'll appear in the next season) are trying to engage his services.

• Angel and LaGuerta are together? Sigh... I like the supporting actors on "Dexter," David Zayas as Angel in particular, but their non-Dexter-related subplots are never very compelling, and just there to lighten Hall's workload. The one plus of this is that it means instead of having to slog through a boring romance story for Angel and one for LaGuerta, we only have to see one for the two of them.

• Because John Lithgow's most notable role of the last 15 years is Dick Solomon on "3rd Rock from the Sun," it's easy to forget that he spent much of his early career playing a series of creeps and killers. Go rent Brian DePalma's "Blow Out" for a fine example of how well he could do it then, and he still can get uber-creepy when he wants, as he did with the bathtub killing.

• I still love love love the show's opening credits, and was therefore amused by the parody of them featuring a Dexter too sleep-deprived to do his morning routine properly.

Anyway, that's me. You may be feeling more enthusiastic about the show being back, and this new story direction. What did everybody else think?

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Recap: Dexter, Season 4, Episode 3

Mini-review: With his car keys revoked, Dexter gets caught up in the tedium of suburbanite life, chases a neighbourhood vandal. Trinity kills again.

Recap: The third to fifth episodes of most television series' seasons are a crapshoot. In some instances (The Wire, Mad Men), momentum is never lost. In others (24, Lost), once previous loose ends are wrapped up — what's everyone up to? hey, something dramatic should happen right off the bat — the show's writers struggle to fill the void before the plot thickens.

Dexter, this year and last, seems to be falling into the latter category. This Sunday's episode was definitely a case of the show spinning its wheels. Only one plotline — the Trinity Killer's — went anywhere. What we got mostly was a long, tortured look at Dexter's attempts to fit into the life of a good suburbanite.

I say long and tortured because the real question is, what did we get out of it? We already know Dexter is faking it. Dropping him in the midst of one awkward social hell after another seemed like an excuse to have Dexter's inner voice make the same point over and over again: that he is not happy with any of this.

Making him specifically unhappy are 1. Rita taking away his car keys after discovering he was concussed in Episode 1's "fender bender, 2. A vandal who has spray-painted a face on the Morgan family's gate and 3. The motion-sensitive floodlight the next-door neighbour has installed that overlooks both his property and Dexter's. Dexter tracks down the vandal (a down-on-his-luck neighbour who is about to be foreclosed out of the area) thanks to a giant plot hole, which I'll address below. And he does away with the floodlight at the end of the episode after putting said vandal out of business, and is unfortunately spied by an increasingly suspicious Rita in the process.

Far more exciting were the developments with John Lithgow's Trinity Killer, who takes down his second victim, the happy mother of two, at an abandoned warehouse. He makes it look like a suicide, making life difficult for Deb, who buys Lundy's assumption that a serial killer is at work. With Maria and Quinn trying to move her on to other work, she and Masuka try to prove the victim didn't jump by throwing dummies out of the warehouse window while Dexter works on the ground with a visiting Lundy. Here, Dexter intimates to the retired FBI man that he does believe the woman is Trinity's second victim, while taking a sort of delight in the brazen manner in which his secret brother in murder is working.

This scene moves in line with a theory I proposed last week: that Lundy is in Miami as much for the Bay Harbor Butcher as he is for Trinity. Dexter catches himself praising Trinity's work and Lundy plays off our anti-hero's sudden, subtle discomfort by declaring HE is like a serial killer in his single-minded pursuit of them. Dexter falls back into the role of innocent blood spatter guy while Lundy laments his failings and we're left for now to believe Lundy isn't on to Morgan at all.
Lundy is also, as it turns out, still into Deb. He admits to her that he is happy Trinity returned to Miami so that he could as well. At the same time, we start to see cracks in her relationship with Anton, to which I say, hooray. I'm not really highly in favour of the Deb/Lundy coupling, but I'll take it if it means Anton gets written out of the show forever. Keith Carradine is at least fun to watch.

All told, though, this was just a lazily written episode because of what a waste of time the suburban stuff was. How lazy was it? This is how lazy: Dexter finds the spray paint can used to vandalize his fence. He suspects the real vandal's kid is the real criminal and swipes a pop can the kid uses to see if he can match the prints. Dexter takes the two cans into the lab, and lo and behold, the prints match. It's an excuse to get Dexter into the kid's house, where he finds out the father is the vandal, but at no point does anyone ever bother explaining why the prints matched. It was a stupid, glaring plot hole (one that could easily have been explained and never was) and a microcosm of the overall problem with the episode.

Defining scene: Let's go back to the conversation outside the warehouse between Dexter and Lundy. From week to week, it's not hard to grasp how much of a better actor Michael C. Hall is than the rest of his cast mates. But he really brings his A-game to the scenes where another gifted actor, in this case Carradine, is involved. If you don't think there is a cat and mouse game going on between these two, watch that scene again.

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Talk with Michael C. Hall

In the Screen, Michael C. Hall plays a serial killer: He's the title character in the Showtime TV series "Dexter," a mild-mannered fellow who harbors a dark secret in the deep of his heart -- after witnessing a grisly murder as a child, he developed the deep-seated urge to kill. The twist: He will only kill other serial killers.

Season 4, which will be released on Sept. 27, picks up with Dexter about to become a full-time dad. We talked to Hall, 38, Emmy-nominated twice for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, about how audiences can possibly root for a killer.

read more go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091800106.html