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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