Article first published as DEXTER Season 8 Premiere Review on Seat42F.
Grade: 93%
Grade: 93%
The title of Showtime’s DEXTER’s final
season premiere is “A Beautiful Day,” which is misleading because there
is nothing beautiful about the days in which the episode takes place,
six months having passed. Dexter (Michael C. Hall) is in the darkest
place he’s arguably ever been in, with Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) out of
touch, off the grid as a renegade private investigator, taking the
tough, dangerous cases. And from there, it only gets worse.
It’s not surprising that Deb has taken
off. After killing La Guerta (Lauren Velez) to protect her brother, Deb
finds she has trouble living with those decisions. The people that do
kill in DEXTER tend to be psychopaths, and since Deb is a ‘normal’
person, she can’t find it in herself to accept such heinous crimes. As
such, she flees from Dexter and her life as a cop, unable to move past
what she has done.
Dexter, on the other hand, is a
psychopath. He is someone who doesn’t value life or the feelings of
others. He has been able to fake it all these years, but has never
learned to truly care, except in very rare cases. With one of those
exceptions, Deb, gone, Dexter has a hard time getting by.
Could it be that Deb is the one person
that is holding Dexter together all along? Because he values his sister,
the girl he is raised with, Dexter keeps himself in check to spare her.
Last season, when he ditches the code that Harry (James Remar) taught
him, it’s to protect Deb, proving that his feelings for her override
pretty much everything else.
Now, with her gone, Dexter is going off
the deep end. He snaps at work, says incriminating things, and even puts
his son, Harrison (Luke Andre and Evan George Krunthcev), in harm’s way
to save Deb’s life. His behavior is erratic and dangerous and he will
get himself caught if Deb can’t forgive him and come back sometime soon.
It’s pretty unfortunate that just as
Dexter is slipping up, Dr. Evelyn Vogel (Charlotte Rampling,
Melancholia) comes onto the scene. Unlike past investigators, Vogel
knows right away who Dexter is and what he is capable of. By the end of
the first hour, she makes a move that may be either very smart or very
dumb, but viewers and Dexter alike will not be kept wandering how close
she’ll get all year. Instead, what remains in the dark is her motivation
and what she wants.
It’s very likely Vogel has ties to
Dexter’s past. She is acquainted with Captain Matthews (Geoff Pierson),
and has relics from Dexter’s childhood. What is her connection to Harry,
how long has she known about Dexter, and why is she doing what she is
doing now?
Also, there is yet another serial killer
in town. I can’t help but feel, giving Dexter’s penchant for twists,
the fact that this is the final season, and the absence of seeing the
killer in “A Beautiful Day,” that this particular murderer just may be
someone we’ve seen before. Doakes and the Bay Harbor Butcher are
elements of DEXTER that won’t just go away. Perhaps it’s all part of the
same plot.
La Guerta’s death has shaken up the
department in more ways than just running off Deb. Both Captain Matthews
and Batista (David Zayas) have canceled their retirements and returned
to the force in order to fill in gaps in the ranks. For Matthews, who
was forced out, this makes total sense. But for Batista, who leaves the
job after careful consideration, it’s kind of disappointing. I get what
the writers are doing, wanting to keep him involved in the show, and
given the way he is taking La Guerta’s passing, it makes sense. Yet, it
also feels like an unnecessary step backward for him.
As many might have expected by the end
last season, Quinn (Desmond Harrington) and Jamie Batista (Aimee Garcia)
are now regularly hooking up. It seems mostly about sex, but they are
definitely very into one another. I’m not really sold on this
relationship, feeling like she can do better, and he should pick someone
more age appropriate, but I’ll try to reserve judgment until we see how
it all plays out.
We have a couple of new faces around in
“A Beautiful Day,” too, as usual, but unlike past years, none of them
stand out as well-known casting coups. That’s good, keeping the focus on
the central players in the last year, which is important to end the
series properly. There’s a good guest turn by Entourage’s Rhys Coiro,
but he won’t be sticking around, so it doesn’t detract from this.
It’s too soon to tell if DEXTER’s eighth
season will be more like its fantastic seventh or its lackluster sixth.
However, with only a dozen episodes left to tell the story, there will
definitely be closure. DEXTER feels like it’s moving into its final act,
exploring the last corners of Dexter’s personality, making him
desperate right before his triumph or downfall, depending on which
direction the show goes in. It’ll be interesting for invested fans to
find out which choice has been made.
DEXTER airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Showtime.
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