DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 11
‘Left Turn Ahead’
Written by Scott Buck & Tim Schlattmann
Directed by Marcos Siega
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

So the gross, English titty vampire finally gets into the spot I had a feeling she’d manoeuvre herself into. She just took her sweet, loony, co-dependent time to get there.

Dex’s epiphany last episode—that Harry walking in on one of his kills, and the subsequent horror of knowing Dex was his creation, and what that creation was truly capable of, was the cause of his suicide—puts him in a very shaky place.
Conversations with Doakes then put Dex in a suggestible state, and Lila swoops in with her ploy to make it look like Angel roofied and date raped her. Dex realizes his plan to frame Doakes isn’t any different from Lila framing Angel for something he didn’t do.
Dex wonders if the evil and the cancer that Doakes was talking about works this way, by seeping into the fabric of all those around him.

Meanwhile, Doakes manages to escape, but runs into a couple of Hispanic goons who can’t speak English, but when Doakes says he’s police, they knock him out and bring him right back to the cabin.
Fortunately, Dex happens to have just gotten to the cabin and seen the evidence of Doakes’ escape. With Dex’s help, they overpower and kill the goons, and Dex puts Doakes right back in the cage.
However, Dex also tells Doakes that he’s decided to turn himself in, but that he needs a day to get his affairs in order.

So he takes Rita and the kids out on the boat, and gives Rita the Mommy Mobile. Then he whips up a living trust, leaving everything to Deb, should anything happen to him. He also tells Lila to drop the charges against Angel, since he really won’t be around in a few days (as he thinks he’ll probably be in jail by then).
This gets Lila’s knickers in a twist and she steals the GPS thing-a-hoo from the Mommy Mobile, which tells her all the locations Dex has driven to in the recent past.

And while Lila’s sniffing around Dex’s affairs, LaGuerta makes her way to Haiti and talks to Doakes’ contact there. She finds out that Doakes wanted to have the blood slides analyzed, and that on two occasions when Doakes was on Special Ops missions, two of the Bay Harbor Butcher’s victims were killed, thus making it look like Doakes isn’t the killer after all.

Deb meanwhile, in her crusade to get Angel off the hook, discovers Lila’s name is an alias, and lifts some fingerprints off Angel’s microwave (which Lila used to nuke some popcorn). It turns out that Lila is actually Lila West and she’s in Miami on an expired visa.
So Deb drops by Little Miss Pardon My Tits’ studio and tells her she’s reported her bony a$$ to Immigrations and she wants Lila outta Miami, pronto.

Later that evening, Dex has some beer and steaks with Deb, prepared to tell her everything. But they talk about Deb and how she’s gotten her sh!t together after that whole Ice Truck Killer thing, and that it was Dex who helped her get through all that.
When Dex asks her how she did it, Deb says all she did was decide who she was and who she wanted to be and stuck to her guns.
It’s then that Dex realizes, if Deb can believe in him, then he can certainly believe in himself. He knows who he is, he’s known all along. He just has to stick to his guns.
So he decides against turning himself in, and reverts back to the “let’s frame Doakes for the Bay Harbor Butcher crap” plan.
But Deb gets a call on her cell: they’ve found Doakes’ car and the search pattern is homing in on the Everglades.

At the same time, the gross, English titty vampire uses the GPS thing-a-hoo and finds her way to the cabin…

(Image courtesy of sho.com.)

DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 9
‘Resistance Is Futile’
Written by Melissa Rosenberg
Directed by Marcos Siega
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Let’s run through the subplots first.
Deb and Lundy are indeed getting it on now, as we actually see them in a post-coital snuggle. And in some post-coital pillow talk, Lundy is all for full disclosure at the station, which Deb isn’t so crazy about.
Deb however, blurts it all out to LaGuerta (with Angel in earshot), when LaGuerta starts to pressure Deb to convince Doakes to hold off on announcing the identity of the Bay Harbor Butcher case’s primary suspect (see below).

Rita meanwhile, gives Dex a call, admitting that she still has feelings for Dex, and oh, by the way, the kids miss him too.
After Dex has assured her that the Lila experiment is so over, Rita suggests a sit-down talk, and Dex agrees, so a date is set.

And having mentioned the gross, English titty vampire, she shows up at the station, having called Angel up about the “decorating” job. Dex has a word with Lila, but she still wants to help Dex carry the weight of his mask.
At the station, Dex tries to warn Angel that Lila is just using him, but Angel’s only too willing to be used at the moment, still reeling as he is from the divorce.

Now to the meat…

So Doakes’ abrupt departure from Lundy’s office puts him on the FBI superstar’s radar, and all the background poop on Doakes points glaringly in his direction as being the Bay Harbor Butcher: military background, abusive father was a butcher, the two recent on-the-job shootings.
Circumstantial, yes, but when a search warrant is taken out on his a$$, Lundy’s boys find the box of blood slides he nicked from Dex’s place in the trunk of Doakes’ car.
As if doing Dex a favour, Doakes left the damning evidence in his car, which he left at the airport, since he took a quick flight to Haiti, to help arrange some discreet analysis of the slides.

With a primary suspect in Doakes, and aware of the friction that has always been present between Doakes and Dex, Lundy arranges to have Dex put under protective custody (and ironically, have him be lead investigator on the analysis on the slides).
While the forensics work on the slides allows Dex to further cover his tracks and eliminate anything that may point back to him, the hovering FBI goons make it difficult for Dex to get back to the cabin to clean Jimenez up.
But Dex is resourceful, and manages to ditch them and get to the cabin, but even as he’s taking out the body parts, Doakes shows up, having tracked Dex there via his boat’s GPS. Doakes keeps a gun trained on Dex and gets him in handcuffs, but Dex goes for it, managing to lay Doakes out by cutting off his oxygen with the cuffs’ chain (though not before Dex catches a bullet in his leg).
This episode’s great cliffhanger has Doakes locked inside the cabin, while screaming at Dex, “You’re gonna have to kill me, Morgan!”

So the plot rushes along rather nicely towards season’s end, and there are some great scenes in this one, from seeing the tender emotions that lie between Deb and Lundy, to LaGuerta’s phone call with Doakes, and the very apparent desperation that grips her as she continues to protect Doakes even after all the fit has hit the shan.
There’s also the great face-off between Doakes and Dex, and that nail-biting cliffhanger.

What’s Dex to do? He’s in a prime position now to pin everything on Doakes, but he has to ensure everything will fall perfectly into place when Lundy comes in to eyeball the mess.
And of course, if Dex does frame Doakes, he will have to off the angry black man…
Let’s face it, Dex framed Paul, but he didn’t kill him. What’s killing Doakes gonna do to Harry’s Code? Doakes isn’t a murderous piece of scum like Dex’s usual victims, but then again, Harry’s # 1 rule was “Don’t get caught.”
So, what’s Dex to do?

(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.)