DEXTER Season Premiere: Living the Dream

Welcome back to Miami. It’s time once again to drop in and get a glimpse into the life of America’s favorite serial killer, Dexter Morgan. It seems like yesterday that I was writing my first ever post for GMMR about last season’s premiere, so to think it was a year ago is insane. So much has happened since then, so let’s get started.

Dexter and Rita had a bouncing baby boy, Harrison. Cody became infatuated with Marco Polo (and, really, when you think back to your childhood can you blame him?) and Astor is jonesing for an iPod to listen to her emo music on. Angel and LaGuerta are going the workplace affair thing, Deb and Anton are all lovey dovey, and Masuka is still telling crappy jokes.

Oh, and Dexter hasn’t killed anyone in a while. Which, you know, never really ends well.

The ball really got rolling this episode when Dexter botched a testimony for Quinn and let a killer go free. But, as anyone who has ever watched the show before knows, that person will not be free for long.

But, before we can tackle Dexter’s shenanigans, we must introduce ourselves to the baddest bad guy on the block, the Trinity Killer, played by an extremely naked John Lithgow. He kills in very ritualistic groups of three, or so we hear from Fmr. Spec. Agent Frank Lundy, who returns to Miami retired, with a hobby for catching fish and the one serial killer who alluded him in his career. Dexter redeems himself from his early snafu by catching on to the fact that the Trinity Killer has been killing for decades, making him the most successful serial killer who never got caught…YET!

Sorry. It had to be done.

One of the big themes this season is going to be how Dexter is going to balance what used to be a façade and what is truly inside him. He is committed to being a better father than the one he believes Harry was, but he also isn’t easily settled sitting at home and being a family man every night. He has to kill, it’s in his blood (no pun intended) and he must find the time and the means to do it.

I think all of the major characters will be dealing with conflicts of self-identity this season. Is Deb devoted to the freewheeling spirit of Anton or the cop dedication of Lundy? Who is more important in Deb’s mind: the Harry that was or the Harry she thought she knew? Is LaGuerta an administrator or lover? Does Rita really believe in the dream she claims to love? This is where the beauty of “Dexter” comes into fruition: Dexter isn’t the only nut job on the show. He just shows it in the most creative way.

The team behind “Dexter” has always done a wonderful job of mixing in humor to the show. If there weren’t bits of levity here and there, it would become daunting and depressing. Usually, those laughs come from Masuka or Dexter’s inner monologue, but the biggest laughs of the night, for me, came from the redux of the opening theme. To see everything that is done with precision done sloppily was fantastic.

A lot of other ideas were started tonight and they will continue to unravel throughout the course of the season. Some will have to be resolved quicker than others. After Dexter’s car crash at the end of this episode, body parts are somewhere…if only Dexter could remember where. This can’t last for too many episodes, as it will become increasingly unrealistic for evidence to be sitting somewhere with no one stumbling on it. Also, any “Grey’s Anatomy”-esque office relationships need to either stay completely separated from the work, or just disappear altogether.

What we WILL have to look forward to is the hunt for two different killers, or so it looks at this moment. On one hand, we have the Vacation Killer, someone killing tourists. On the other, much less official hand, we have the Trinity Killer, someone who has been doing this for more than thirty years, we can assume.

This hour of television flew by for me, which is a good thing. I’m really looking forward to watching the rest of the season and discussing it with all of you fine readers.

What’s your favorite new storyline of the season? Trinity? Vacation Killer? Dexter the family man?

Philboy is a Midwesterner who spends his days doing PR for a small Catholic university. His can’t miss shows are “24”, “HIMYM” and “Dexter”. His thoughts for the week are, “COLTS WIN!” and “Where could those bags of body parts be?”