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.)

DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 3
‘An Inconvenient Lie’
Written by Melissa Rosenberg
Directed by Tony Goldwyn

Dexter’s at his first NA meeting and while others are sharing about their need for another pill and another hit, he’s going down his own shopping list of needs: duct tape, rope, etc. Anything to damp out the same repetitive, whiny story from junkie loser after junkie loser. All the while, he’s being eyed with interest by one particular female junkie (Jaime Murray, from TV’s Hustle and the upcoming The Deaths of Ian Stone), until he sneaks out a mere ten minutes after the meeting’s started.
But Rita rips him a new one when he gets to her place without his Newcomer Chip. So he promises to get one the following night.

Meanwhile, the Bay Harbor Butcher investigation goes into full swing, as Masuka is named LFI (Lead Forensics Investigator), and Deb and Angel are pulled into Lundy’s Task Force.
The department is then subsequently flooded by relatives and loved ones of missing persons, anxious to know if their husband/wife/son/daughter/lover/father/mother is one of the still unidentified victims.
Deb is assigned to interview the concerned relatives and staring this sort of desperate loss straight in the face initially proves too much for her, and she talks to Lundy to get her off the Task Force, claiming a backlog on her other cases. Lundy agrees to find her a replacement.
But when a day has passed and Lundy still hasn’t taken her off the Task Force (and she’s faced with a grieving mother looking for her little girl), Deb again confronts Lundy, saying she’s the last person who should be on the Task Force, as she was engaged to a serial killer and didn’t even know it.
Lundy says that’s exactly why he chose her for the Task Force, because she’s “seen into the heart and mind of a killer.” And because she got through it, and continues to get through it.
As a compromise, Lundy tells Deb to finish the interviews for the day, and if she still wants out, then he’ll find her a replacement.
Before the day is out though, Deb stumbles on what could be a pattern: two of the missing have criminal records. And when Deb puts the idea in front of Lundy, that maybe the Bay Harbor Butcher’s victims were “bad guys,” he tells her to check the remains against the criminal database.

When Dex returns to NA, he gets a Newcomer Chip, and shares, introducing himself as “Bob” and claims to be a heroin addict. The “one particular female junkie” who was eyeing him the previous night approaches him at the end of the meeting and takes him out for coffee.
Her name’s Lila and she calls him out on the bullsh!t he spewed at the meeting. As their conversation goes on, Dex realizes that when Lila talks about what it feels like to be an addict, she’s talking about things he can identify with. Things he knows.
Unnerved, Dex hurriedly leaves the diner. And when he tells Rita that NA won’t help and he’d rather face this alone, she takes him at his word and kicks him out, later on making it clear that she won’t take him back unless he does NA.

Confused, Dex starts scoping out his new victim, Roger Hicks, a used car salesman who’s murdered two women thus far. What starts out as a recon mission to get some of Hicks‘ DNA though, ends with Dex buying a mini-van (apparently due to Hicks‘ spiel about the roomy back, which can actually accommodate a deer carcass).
On a second recon trip, Dex sees Hicks‘ next potential victim, and feels he must act before this woman becomes Hicks‘ third, but can’t because of the on-going Bay Harbor Butcher investigation and Doakes’ continued interest in his affairs.

Back at work, Masuka gets Dex onto his team, and shows Dex the Field Morgue, where the recovered bodies are being stored. It’s an eerie sight, seeing Dex enter this huge, refrigerated space, where the body parts of his victims are laid out, incomplete and in disarray.
Later on, dropping off some dental records for Masuka, Dex runs into Lundy, who is sitting amongst the dead, waiting for them to answer the question: Why were they chosen?
During their conversation, Dex says that, of course, killing someone can never be justified. Lundy says, actually, there is one justification: if it would mean saving the life of an innocent.
Dex realizes that Lundy and his father would have agreed on that.
So he finally goes after Hicks, and it’s during their conversation that Hicks makes Dex realize that he does, after all, truly care for Rita, the subconscious reason for his purchase of the mini-van (what LaGuerta called a “Mommy Mobile”). Of course, Hicks pisses Dex off when he says, rather unwisely, “You’re better off without that c*nt.” Dex ices him for that.

Upon that realization—that Rita and the kids really do mean a lot to him—Dex returns to NA, and shares, revealing his real name, and talking about the “Dark Passenger” that rides with him.
Doakes arrives at the meeting, and it suddenly all makes sense to him, that wrongness he felt about Dex. And in a great reversal, Doakes sympathizes with Dex’s apparent plight, and says, Ok, just don’t get in my way at work, and we’re cool.
Triumphant—now that Doakes is off his back—and on a catharsis high, Dex visits Rita and shares his elation. Rita’s happy (and she loves the mini-van), but that all comes to a screeching halt when she sees who Dex’s sponsor is: Lila.

So the season is unfolding quite nicely, with the Bay Harbor Butcher investigation and Dex is an addict subplots developing in interesting ways. And though I did suspect they were going to make Lila Dex’s sponsor, and that this would set Rita off, that final shot of her at the wheel of the mini-van, as she sees Lila, and Dex totally oblivious to Rita’s reaction, was priceless.
There’s also something about Lila I can’t quite pin down at the moment, though I wouldn’t at all be surprised if she’s got some deep, dark secret aside from being an addict.

(Image courtesy of sho.com.)

DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 2
`Waiting to Exhale’
Written by: Clyde Phillips
Directed by: Marcos Siega
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Dex’s failure to dispatch Little Chino last episode results in the death of the mother who inadvertently asked Dexter to kill the hulking man-mountain in the first place, putting some more guilt on his plate, as if the guilt stemming from a) his murder of his brother, the Ice Truck Killer, and b) the effect of Paul’s death on Rita and the kids, wasn’t already enough.

Meanwhile, the discovery of Dex’s dumping ground last episode brings FBI Special Agent Lundy (Robert Carradine, undoubtedly familiar to the tween set as Lizzie McGuire’s dad) down to Miami. Lundy’s a “rock star,” responsible for corralling the Green River Killer, among others. And now, he’s here to track down the Bay Harbor Butcher, the tawdry monicker the newspapers have given Dexter, much to Dex’s annoyance.

Even as the salvaged bodies are being pieced together and the Bay Harbor Butcher’s body count rises, Deb is still unsuccessfully dealing with her rage and trauma. Those unresolved issues lead up to her putting a gun to the head of a teen-ager, who squeals on Little Chino’s gang to save his skin from the crazy gringa cop.
Little Chino (who is absent when the police round up his fellow gang members) soon tracks down the little snitch, only to fall right into Dexter’s hands.
Finally, Dex is ready to end his kill moratorium. And he’s found a new, safer way to dispose of his victims: use the Gulf Stream to drag the bodies far away from Miami. And Little Chino gets the honours of being the first to take the trip down the Stream.

Following the services and funeral for Paul, Rita confronts Dex, about the shoe, about the attack and set-up Paul claimed took place. After Dex admits to attacking Paul though, Rita comes to the wrong conclusion regarding where Dexter got the drugs for the set-up: she thinks Dex is an addict, and that this is where he sometimes disappears to like “Clark f*cking Kent.”
When Dex says—rather truthfully—that, yes, he has an addiction, Rita comforts him, and vows she’ll be with him every step of the way to beat this thing.

Once again, Dexter takes those strange riffs and makes for some of the most off-kilter primetime television viewing around today.
And the ensemble is having a grand time with these characters, notably Jennifer Carpenter, Julie Benz, and Michael C. Hall, of course.
Rita, in particular, is a fascinating character. Clearly, she is a stronger woman now than when we were first introduced to her at the top of Season 1. And yet, she still has a blind spot where the man she loves is concerned. First Paul, and now Dexter. And now this “Dex is an addict, I’ll help him through this” subplot is opening up, and that should be interesting to watch as it develops.

(Image courtesy of nymag.com.)