Five-Legged Iguana

DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 6
‘Dex, Lies, and Videotape’
Written by Lauren Gussis
Directed by Nick Gomez
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Last episode’s hopeful note is shot to sh!t as things unravel on Dex rather quickly.

Discovering Harry’s affair with his mother, Dex realizes that the man he’s idolized and followed all these years was less than the paragon of virtue he believed him to be.
And without that foundation to depend on, Dex realizes he doesn’t know who he is anymore, or who he’s supposed to be. Lila believes this time of uncertainty allows Dex the golden opportunity to reinvent himself.
Dex has one triumph (he’s able to delete the footage of his cleaning his boat, during a juvenile fire alarm diversion), but gets clipped by a whole mess of other things.

Doakes gets back on Dex’s a$$ when he has a conversation with Deb and she tells him quite plainly that, No, of course Dex isn’t an addict.
So Dex finds Doakes listening to the tapes of Harry and his mother, getting Dex and Doakes into that potentially violent stare off that we’ve all been waiting for.
Dex ends up bringing the whole thing to LaGuerta, who manages to convince Dex to hold off on the official complaint while she talks with Doakes.
LaGuerta’s chat with Doakes only convinces LaGuerta that Doakes is obsessed, a side of him she’s seen and a side of him that cost them their relationship. She tells Doakes to let this one go. (We all know he won’t though, right?)

Lila meanwhile, has dinner with Rita and Gail (at Gail’s instigation), an encounter that leads to Rita overhearing a phone message from Lila to Dex, where she stupidly mentions, “Oh, it’s good I didn’t slip up and mention the road trip and that we spent the night together.”
Duh.
Rita dumps Dex’s a$$ in an emotional New York minute.
Pissed off about that (and the thing with Doakes), Dex gets angry at Lila, the sort of angry that conveniently alchemizes into hot sex. Then, just as Dex leaves Lila to get back to work, Rita calls him and says they should talk later that evening.

While all that psychodrama’s going down, there’s a Bay Harbor Butcher copycat who makes a botched attempt at a home invader just out of jail.
The copycat turns out to be Ken Olson (Prison Break’s Silas Weir Mitchell), whose mother was once hurt by the recently released jailbird, and claims to have been inspired by the Bay Harbor Butcher’s handiwork. When Dex digs around to find some dirt on Olson, he discovers that Olson‘s actually killed before, so Dex does him in, but doesn’t bother to dispose of the body parts this time out, leaving them for the cops to find.

After his date with Olson, Dex drops by Rita’s and they have their talk.
Dex says the road trip was for him to try to get closure regarding his mother’s murder, and that it was strictly sponsor and sponsee between Lila and him.
And though Rita’s hurt that Dex chose to share this pivotal moment in his life with Lila and not her, she’s apparently willing to accept that.
But.
She asks Dex if he had sex with Lila in that motel room, and Dex says, “No. Not then.”
And once again, Rita dumps Dex’s a$$ in an emotional New York minute.

Dex leaves Rita’s, walking out into a downpour, symbolic of his becoming a new man, as all that was taught him by Harry has come to be suspect.
And who does Dex go to after leaving Rita’s?
Lila.
Ugh.
This better be resolved quickly, as I’ve come to really care about Rita as she’s grown into this stronger person since Season 1, and I’ve never really warmed to Lila. (And let’s face it, it was her big mouth that got Dex into hot water with Rita in the first place.)

Over on the Deb front, Lundy’s sudden interest in Dex (which gets Dex para over a fair section of the episode) raises her issues about Dex always being the “Morgan superstar.” When she brings this up with Gabriel, he instinctively hones in on the fact that Deb’s crushing on her boss.
Towards the episode’s end, Deb’s gotten anxious that Lundy’s about to turn the whole investigation over to the FBI (thus returning her to “retard” status, since she feels Lundy was the only one who really took her seriously), and she asks him flat out, and he says, “No. I’m afraid you’re still stuck with me.”
Then, when Lundy asks for Dex yet again, Lundy notices Deb’s reaction, and calls her on it. So Deb spills the beans, but Lundy says it’s not about Dex. It’s just that Masuka’s getting on his tits and he wants some other forensics dude to depend on.
Relieved, Deb hugs Lundy, a little too long, and quite definitely awkwardly…

Parting shot: Congratulations to Michael C. Hall, Tim Schlattmann and all the other writers on the show, as well as the entire cast and crew, for getting the Golden Globe and WGA noms, and the AFI nod. (See Afterthoughts (33) & (34) in the Archive.)

(Image courtesy of sho.com.)