Dexter s1:7 review
Dexter's past comes back to haunt him again, and - was Deb actually right about something? Bloody hell. If this keeps up, even Laguerta might learn from her past mistakes...
I love it when we get to see Dexter actually doing his job. Like, his real job, the one he gets paid for, the one he very rarely does because he’s too busy either killing people or skulking around crime scenes suspiciously while not ever doing anything useful.
So, anyway, we open on a crime scene, and a very stylish one, at that, all pink lights and pretty surroundings with a corpse right in the middle, and Dexter actually, you know, looks at the blood spatter and the knife wounds and realises… he’s seen this before. He knows who did it. That floppy-haired kid from episode 3, the one Dexter thought he could see himself in, has killed again. Which means Dexter fucked up by not killing him. Oops.
Meanwhile, Deb and Angel have a lead on the Ice Truck Killer, and the evidence is mounting up: the guy’s home is full of photos of crime scenes which were never released to the press; there’s a ton of what they’re calling “crypto-taxidermy”, weird misshapen stuffed animals, basically; and the guy’s computer cache is full of websites on how to carve up human bodies. It doesn’t look good, but it’s also all circumstantial evidence. And, brilliantly, the episode actually acknowledges as much.
Right, so that’s two stories, are we ready for a third? Naturally, it’s a Rita subplot, and, if anyone took my bet last week, cough up now, please. Rita’s husband (yeah, they’re not actually divorced, oops) is out of jail and back in her life, picking up the kids from school and randomly bringing doughnuts round for breakfast. And no-one mentions the restraining order, or calls the police, or in fact does anything other than look a bit scared. Good casting on this guy, by the way; he looks almost exactly like Michael C. Hall, which is a nice touch.
I’m getting a bit tired of Rita, though. Granted, the scene where Rita and Dexter are rubbing one another’s feet and confiding in one another is nice; they’re much more intimate with one another than they were six episodes ago, for one thing, and it’s cute.
The conversation where she confesses she thinks there’s something wrong with her because she only falls for men with dark sides (until Dexyboy, of course) is nice, too, because you get the moment of empathy for Rita, but then the scene continues – just long enough to bring the focus back round to Dexter; where it should be, since he’s the star of the show and all.
This narrowly misses out on being my favourite moment of the week, both because Rita is starting to grate on my nerves, and because there’s that bit where Dexter’s spouting off about how this guy they’ve arrested couldn’t possibly be the Ice Truck Killer, but in the background, they’re digging up a corpse. That’s lovely. That, right there. Do that more often. I like it.
The different threads in this episode tie up a little clumsily towards the end – the interrogations are a bit odd, as is Dexter’s random rounds of the prison, but because everything ends properly, it’s kind of okay. There’s still a slight problem with obviousness, though. Because from where I’m sitting, it’s horribly clear that a) the guy they’ve arrested might have kidnapped one hooker, but he’s just a murder groupie and nowhere near good enough to be the Ice Truck Killer, and b) that guy Debs is chatting up at the hospital IS THE ICE TRUCK KILLER.
Obviously, I don’t actually know that, because I haven’t seen the rest of the series, but since my last bet paid off: cash money on it being him. It’s blatantly him. They couldn’t have signposted that any more clearly, at all. It’s him it’s him it’s him. It’s got to be!
Aaahhh. As creepy as Dexter’s final smile in this episode is, I have to sympathise; I’m grinning just as much. Please, please, please, let the quality stay consistent this time. Please?
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Sarah is a freelance writer and editor. She loves horror movies, unusual storytelling techniques, and smoking jackets. Ask her about the Saw movies. Go on, ask.