Dexter meets his match
The opening act in Dexter’s final season is an episode called A Beautiful Day, and if you detect a note of irony there, you’re not far wrong.
Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter play television’s most emotionally tortured brother-sister couple, and last season ended — spoiler alert — with ambitious, overachieving detective Debra Morgan discovering her vigilante-murderer brother Dexter in the act, as it were, of silencing a witness to his many misdeeds. His fateful last words to her, as she trained a gun on him, overwhelmed by the scope of what he’d done, were “Do what you gotta do.”
The new season opens with an idyllic father-and-son moment, Dexter flying a kite with his now-toddler son Harrison (Jadon Wells) on a windswept hill, with Dexter’s familiar, oddly toneless voice-over, saying, “There’s nothing like a crisis to help define who you are.”
It’s six months later, and all seems well in Dexter Morgan’s life. He’s coaching a kids’ soccer team; he has his bowling team back together, made some new friends, and is finally ready to admit to himself that he’s a survivor.
The good times last all of seven minutes of Dexter’s opening hour. Charlotte Rampling, one of the finest actresses of her generation, appears as neuropsychiatrist and famed criminal profiler Dr. Evelyn Vogel, newly assigned to Miami’s police department to help them deconstruct the mind behind the still unsolved ‘Bay Harbor Butcher’ murders. Dexter fans know the plot by now, and at first glance Dr. Vogel is just the latest in a long line of criminal profilers who’ve matched wits with Dexter Morgan, and lost every time.
This time is different, though, and not just because this is Dexter’s last season. Vogel seems to know a lot more than she’s letting on. She’s calm, reflective and observant, not given to making snap judgments. When Dexter says, half-jokingly, at a particularly grisly crime scene that “People are crazy,” she sees the double meaning in a heartbeat.
Dexter is consummately well acted, not just by its lead actor, perennial Emmy nominee Hall, but by one of television’s most competent, proficient cast ensembles. Hall is always good, but the revelation in Dexter’s season opener is Carpenter, as his slowly spiralling-out-of-control sister Debra.
Sunday’s season-opener is riveting television, both as a new chapter in a long, involving novel, and as a standalone mystery. Midway through the hour, when Dexter first meets Dr. Vogel, he looks terrified, as if he realizes the jig is up and he’s finally met his match.
If Dexter has taught us anything in recent seasons, it’s to never assume that events will play out as one might expect. This time, though, could be different. The cumulative effect is strangely alluring. (Movie Central – 9 p.m.)