Another year has passed, and with it another Dexter season. Six seasons
in is a long time for a TV show, and luckily more people than ever are watching
Dexter these days. We got the advertising for this one early on, with the
indication that it would revolve around a pair of religious zealots killing
people as Dexter tried to figure out his spiritual misgivings and what he
wanted to pass on to his 2-year old son Harrison. A year has passed since the
events of the emotional roller-coaster season 5, and with it comes a more
confident and self-reliant Dexter than we’ve seen in several years.
This was purported to be the darkest Dexter season yet, and I guess you
could say it is. The imagery is chock-full of candle-lit churches at night,
quivering women, beaten and battered, chained to the wall and dead bodies with
black symbols carved into their rotting flesh, and the religious theme is
weighty as expected, and handled with Dexter’s usual dark, artistic edge. But
the core is, as always, the characters, as each main character has his or her
own journey. And there are lots of changes this season, from LaGuerta’s
promotion to Captain, Quinn proposing to Deb and Deb becoming the new
lieutenant – all in the span of the first two episodes.
Dexter is his usual self, having bounced back from the traumatic
experiences from the previous two seasons. He’s witty and stoic and generally
we have fun watching his continued attempts to stay out of the limelight with
his, erm, hobbies. This season he
gets involved early on with Brother Sam (Mos), who is an ex-con-turned-preacher
who helps him see a chance for light in him, even through his dark passenger’s
hold. Sam is an excellent character, and adds a real presence to the show –
he’s a good actor. He and Dexter interact pretty brilliantly, and play off each
other well.
Masuka is up to more trickery and he’s bringing in interns to study in
the Homicide department. Two of them turn out to be duds, but Louis (Josh
Cooke) is a proverbial wiz-kid who knows how to dig deep into the vaults of the
internet and turn up info the department couldn’t find otherwise. Cooke is
unassuming, innocent and quiet…which makes it all the more startling when his
true nature is revealed. I dunno, I guess I kind of saw something coming, but I’m interested in exactly what they do with
his character next season. His arc hasn’t been resolved yet, and I think he’s
something we haven’t yet seen on the show.
I rather like Quinn’s arc, in which he traverses through a seemingly
endless train of drunkenness, humiliating himself and generally being an ass
after Deb dumps him. He says he’s “just being a single guy, having fun” but
clearly that’s not true, and the dichotomy between what he says and what’s
really going on make him a more interesting character than he used to be. Not
to mention scenes of him and Batista sharing a dooby in their squad car while
on a particularly slow day are priceless. At the end of the season, after
several mishaps and clashes, Batista finally puts in a request for a transfer
for him, to which he uses a loophole and some cleverly selective wording to
pass off his jackassery as a legitimate alcoholism problem – thus able to stay
in homicide if he gets help. Clever and underhanded – looks like Quinn’s going
back to his old ways. All that stuff from last season about him becoming a
better person? I guess that’s just out the window now.
The only real disappointment is the villains, who sound cool and
intimidating on paper, but I just don’t think as much work was put into their
characters as the drama between our main characters this season. Professor
James Gellar (Edward Olmos) and his apprentice Travis (Colin Hanks) are trying
to bring about the end of the world by killing people in accordance with
several Biblical tableaux. They’re just not that scary, and most of the time I
had a hard time taking either of them very seriously. Gellar is incredibly
one-note and most of his dialogue is just redundant. Travis almost gets some
depth here and there with his sister in the picture, but even that’s just
window-dressing.
In the last four episodes, it’s revealed that Travis has been working
alone the whole time and Gellar has been dead all along – basically Travis is
akin to Dexter; acting with a dark passenger ‘talking’ to him all the time. At
this point Travis basically makes the leap of no return and becomes a
completely generic ‘crazy’ villain, without much depth or intricacy to his
character at all. Too bad I guess.
One thing Dexter has always been good at is creating a great story arc.
The flow of the episodes into one another is very natural, creating some great
drama. As usual, not every episode is a stand-alone barn-burner, but as a
whole, the season has a lot of verve and energy, and everything seems urgent
and intense as hell.
One of the standout episodes is ironically the one that departs from
the arc the rest of the season is creating. It’s episode 7, “Nebraska,” and it
revolves around Dexter going to a nowhere town in Nebraska to confront Jonah
Mitchell, the son of the Trinity Killer, who is the only surviving member of
the family Dexter interacted with in season 4 – and who is suspected of killing
his family. Dexter’s whole story in this season is about his search for faith,
and what it means. Brother Sam had been helping him up until this point, but in
the previous episode, he was killed, and Dexter, despite Sam’s direct advice to
the contrary, murdered the young man who shot him. Armed then with a dark
freedom of conscience and the spirit of his dead brother by his side, as
opposed to his dead father, Dexter goes to Nebraska to kill Jonah. That along
with the cool scenery is a big reason why “Nebraska” rules.
The rest of the season goes swimmingly until episode 11, “Talk to the
Hand,” in which the show finally goes where everyone never wanted them to – a romance
between Deb and Dexter. Deb, talking to her psychologist, realizes that every
guy she’s ever gone out with, including Quinn, is a reflection of her hidden
feelings for Dexter, and through a rather icky dream sequence, confirms this. I
wouldn’t be so against it if the romance wasn’t horribly contrived. I’m sorry,
but for this show’s usual high standards for romance (witness the final scenes
between Dexter and Rita in season 4, or the ones with Deb and Lundy early on in
the show), lines like “Sometimes everything seems so perfect…and then you’re
walking away” are just crap, plain and simple. Even if they are just in Deb’s
dreams.
The final episode rules, though, with a lot of great shots, some
awesome moments and one of Dexter’s best speeches ever – listen to how badass he sounds; there is no beating that.
The man is a legend. And then the show hits us with perhaps its biggest plot
twist…Debra’s discovery of Dexter as he’s killing Travis. Dexter looks up, goes
soft and says “Oh, god,” and that’s what we’re left with, folks! Damn you,
Dexter, for your cliffhangers, as expertly placed and commercially minded as
they are! As underhanded as this is, as clearly as it is just calculated to be
a marketing ploy to keep people watching, it’s done remarkably well, and fits
perfectly with the way the season was going.
So season 6 was another firecracker for the Dexter train as it keeps on
rolling. I liked this better than season 5 by quite a bit, as everything seemed
to have more energy and power behind it, and all the actors really gave 110%
performances. The story, while lacking the subtlety of older seasons, is still
good, and I think people complaining about that are overreacting. Dexter in its
early days was indeed a more unique show, and had a lot more subtlety and
layers to it, with Dexter’s interactions with his victims and various other
people as he tried to figure out how to act in general being intricate and
idiosyncratic. These days the show goes for bigger, more overt and in-your-face
shocks and twists, and it’s safe to say the show has ‘sold out,’ in a manner of
speaking – it lacks the old school precise wit and originality in place of a
more streamlined action/detective template – but as long as Dexter keeps having
seasons this good, I’ll keep watching. Sell-out or not, season 6 is a winner.
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