Spoilers for last night's "Dexter" coming up just as soon as I find the perfect Key lime pie...Bay Harbor Butcher.
These are three words that needed to be uttered in this episode, possibly more than once. How can Prado be smart enough to figure out that Dexter is capable of being a vigilante killer and yet not connect the dots to the vigilante killer operating out of Dexter's office a few months ago? How can Angel and Deb talk about the possibility of Ramon Prado being a serial killer without once invoking the name of Sgt. Doakes?
I can give the writers a pass (for now) on the Prado front, depending on what exactly this guy's motivations really are. If, as I've guessed in the past, Prado was using his brother Oscar for similar purposes, then maybe he knows exactly what Dexter really is, and has all along, and is somehow confident he can avoid suffering the same fate as Doakes. But if that turns out not to be the case, then Prado's an idiot, and he deserves the Saran Wrapped fate I think we all assume is coming to him by the end of this season.
The Ramon subplot's a little trickier. I can understand Angel being paranoid about going after a fellow cop (and the brother of an influential DA), but for him to be in disbelief about Deb's theory, so soon after they were told one of their own was a prolific serial killer? At the very least, they should have had Quinn, as the newbie, bring Doakes' name up to suggest that maybe our veterans have a blind spot about this kind of thing.
Whatever the reason, it was distracting, and in the middle of one of the season's more uneven episodes.
On the plus side, Michael C. Hall and Margo Martindale were perfect in their scenes together at the hospital. Dexter's relationship with Camilla, which we've seen going all the way back to the pilot, is yet another sign that our protagonist isn't the emotionless robot he so often claims to be. I'm curious to see if Dexter ponders putting Camilla out of her misery, or if his own experience with the nurse who tried to euthanize Harry would keep him from going there.
On the minus side, all the ancillary stories -- Laguerta with the defense lawyer, Deb with the terrible actress from IAD, Angel trying to date the vice cop -- felt as uninteresting as usual, even when the plots in some way (like Laguerta's) tie in with the main Dexter story.
And I feel like I missed a couple of steps in the Dexter/Prado relationship. Dexter went from freaked out to, if not comfortable with, then at least resigned to the knowledge that Prado knows his secret. And the scene where Prado was alone with the Aryan was confusing. Had this guy been threatening Prado's family for a while? (In which case, that's one hell of a coincidence that Dexter would select this guy as an example for Miguel.) Or had the threats only begun once Miguel started working on this plot to have the killer transferred to the courthouse?
Kind of a muddled episode that typified what's been to me, unfortunately, a muddled season.
What did everybody else think?
No comments:
Post a Comment