Spoilers for last night's "Dexter" coming up just as soon as I put on a suit and tie... Okay, now we're getting somewhere. After several weeks where I felt like the show was dragging, the pace finally picks up -- and not just in the very funny and disturbing sequence where Dexter had to rush his way through the cruise ship kill so he could get off the boat in time. Michael C. Hall did a great job in that sequence of reminding us that part of Dexter's pathology is his commitment to the ritual. Having to rush through it was like bad sex for him -- it satisfied the need, but barely even that.
Meanwhile, the Prado thing starts to get interesting. Dexter and Miguel's confrontation at the episode's end was the highlight of the season to date, with Jimmy Smits continuing to bring this unsettling intensity and Hall playing Dexter in full retreat.
Now, do you suppose Miguel told Dexter about the wife-killer as a test? It seems a little too convenient and easy for him to have made that deductive leap if he didn't go into the situation suspecting the truth about Dexter, and that might also give us an alternate explanation for why Oscar Prado was at Freebo's place with a bayonet: maybe he was playing Miguel's avenging angel, and with Oscar dead, Miguel's trying to get Dexter to fill the role?
The supporting character subplots still bore me -- other than the detectives finally standing behind Masuka to get Ramon to go away -- because even though we have a bunch of good actors here (David Zayas in particular does a whole lot with almost nothing to work with as Angel), it's clear that the B and C-stories are always there just to fill time and keep Hall from exhausting himself, and little else. Maybe if the writers kept the ongoing story arcs confined to Dexter himself and used the B-plots for self-contained spotlights on the ensemble, the way that shows like "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" have done, I might be more interested, but I just don't care about finding out whether Quinn's dirty or how Angel's going to seduce the vice cop.
What did everybody else think?
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