Dexter’s true self is revealed in an inevitable but thrilling twist.
In Dexter’s sixth season finale, we saw Lt. Debra Morgan witness Dexter ritually kill the Doomsday killer, Travis Marshall. As the seventh season begins, we pick up right where we left off.
Well, not quite. “Are You…?” opens with Dexter racing down the highway toward Miami International Airport and checking his getaway bag for cash and passports. He buys a ticket to Budapest. Has he finally decided to run away from it all? “It’s simple human nature to keep little secrets about ourselves,” Dexter narrates in his silky tone, “We all do it.”
We’re soon back in the church, where Dexter claims the murder was in self-defense as a flabbergasted Deb struggles to take control of the situation. He tells her he snapped thinking of Rita’s murder. She points out Travis is wrapped in plastic. He says he is a forensics expert, so it came naturally to him. She wants to call it in and claim temporary insanity. He says he’ll lose everything. Then he has a spark of inspiration: What if they made it look like a suicide?
Deb, in her shocked confusion, gets on board. They stage the scene as a ritual suicide, “one final tableau,” enacted by Travis in response to his failure to bring about the end of the world last season. Dexter plunges a sword into the knife wound and they set the church alight. But not before Dexter’s latest fetishistic blood slide falls to the floor and through a grate. Goddamn it.
When Dex and Deb are soon called back to the scene, they fight the tension and the evidence as their stalwart peers do what they do best. Capt. Maria LaGuerta sees something in a grate… and she finds the slide.
Dexter gets home to find creepy intern Louis Greene nosing around his things. We know from last season that Louis is obsessed with serial killers and he’s becoming a serious liability. Later, we see him cancel Dexter’s VISTA credit card. What gives?
Star cop Mike Anderson calls Deb about some suspicions about the Travis scene, but soon gets shot by a roadside Eastern European gangster with a dead girl in his trunk. And there goes Mike.
It’s a shame, especially because he had potential to serve as a romantic foil to Deb’s incestuous attraction to Dexter. His death is given play for the rest of the episode, but not in as substantive a way as it would later in the season and not as much as he deserved, really.
Deb, running on her treadmill, sees repressed memory flashes of her near-murder in the first season finale at the hands of Rudy Cooper/Brian Moser, Dexter’s brother, the Ice Truck Killer. She calls Dexter, shaken: “How were you so prepared to kill Travis?” Dexter’s responses build lies upon lies and Deb knows it, however reluctantly. Then she gets the call about Mike, and responds with, “Jesus f—!” Classic Deb.
Turns out the dead girl’s a stripper who works with a bunch of Ukrainians and Russians in some shady criminal enterprise. That story line is forced and bland, practically a dime a dozen after the success of 2007’s Taken. But it doesn’t really matter — Dexter has found his next target, one Viktor Baskov, Mike’s murderer. Some bigwig in Kiev, Ukraine, is apparently keeping tabs on Baskov. And we don’t really care.
Apparently, there’s a biometric database app on the iPhone that can identify fingerprints through the touchscreen. Who knew? Through some handy detective work, Dexter discovers Baskov’s en route to MIA to fly home to Ukraine. And we’re back! Dexter’s racing down the highway not to escape, but to pursue, and his getaway bag is a decoy to get him past airport security. He finds Baskov, of course, and kills him, of course. But not before some cathartic table-side chat, as always.
Why is he doing this? “Because I have to,” he tells Baskov, “Because I need control. I’m trying to make things go back to the way they were.” Oh, Dexter, you poor soul.
Meanwhile, Sgt. Angel Batista and Joey Quinn get flak from the strip club’s denizens and chit-chat over drinks in Mike’s memory. They’re back in each other’s good graces after some slip-ups last season. And LaGuerta asks the always-eccentric Vince Masuka about blood slides; only season two’s Bay Harbor Butcher — who was (and is) actually our protagonist, not the late Sgt. James Doakes, as the public thinks — took blood slides, Masuka says. LaGuerta pockets the slide. What are her motives?
We see Deb remember everything about her near-murder, including Dexter’s presence and his fighting back of his urge to kill, even when his sister is on the table.
Dexter comes home to Deb in his apartment, everything overturned, knives and blood slides scattered on the living room table. She gives him a piercing gaze. One final tableau.
In one of the most intense scenes in modern television, Deb asks him, “Did you kill all these people?” while staring directly into the camera. “I did.” She stutters, “Are you — are you a serial killer?” Dexter sighs, “Yes,” and closes his eyes.
I got chills watching and writing about that scene. It’s one of the best in the show’s history. It’s been a long time coming, and there are literally dozens of ways the writers could have worked it in. But this feels right, not forced or fake.
It’s the episode’s final showcase of Carpenter’s serious acting chops. This is her best performance in a long time, possibly her best of the show. Seeing her world melt before her eyes is a shattering experience and she plays the part perfectly. Carpenter absolutely carries the episode and cements herself as a force to be reckoned with this season.
The episode mirrors Carpenter’s intensity — it’s a varied and fresh, yet satisfyingly retro take on a show that had unfortunately stagnated last season. Dexter’s cheerful nabbing of Baskov in an airport bathroom harks back to his satisfyingly smooth kills of the past. It feels good to see him get what he wants, in the erotically deranged way this show always feels good. We see him scooting around the kill scene in a wheelchair waiting for Baskov to wake up from his tranquilizer injection, fully in his element.
It’s as if the show runners put season six on a table, cut its cheek and decided to move on to better things.
king@umdbk.com
