“We both
chose murder. Maybe we are both a little crazy.”
“Maybe…”
“What did
you do?”
“…you didn’t
belong with him.”
“F**k. F**k!
F**k! Will you f***ing go? Will you go!? PLEASE go!”
“I came here
to save you!”
“Deb, look
at yourself. You’re lost.”
“I am not
lost. I know exactly where I am. I am in some sh*tty f***ing hell, which is
exactly what I deserve! YOU are lost.”
“Aren’t you
the one that’s always saying ‘bad people deserve to die’?”
“Debra was
right. I was wrong. It’s me who’s lost.”
What made this
episode for me was its absolute relentlessness in fleshing out exactly where
both Dexter and Debra are in their separation from one another. They are two
halves of an incredible whole—but when those halves are not united, there is deprivation. There is desperation and confusion and the loss of identity and self.
Without Debra, Dexter’s ready to take his road rage to unprecedented heights. He
is scrambling to make sense of the day-to-day, snapping at his son over very
resolvable accidents and rip-roaring around with the kind of tunnel vision
that sees her, and only her. It is made tragically clear just how strongly
Dexter’s sense of his own humanness and worth is invested in Debra. On his own,
he is as volatile as they come. His experience of the world is suddenly inflamed with a nearly primal energy as he tears away everything
between him and that ONE constant. His rock. His anchor. The burning sun to his
subtle moon. Without the borrowed yet brilliant luminescence of Debra’s spirit
and confidence in him, he is forced to find a new source of light. The only
place where he knows any kind of light is that of an inner rage—the kind of
rage that propels him to swiftly kill Debra’s pseudo boyfriend. She is quicker
to mourn the loss of someone who made her feel “okay” but obviously enabled her
self-destructive behavior, than she is to recognize the agonizing love that
turned Dexter on him in such a sick-swift reflex of hurt. There was no way he could
stand there and pretend to be the “loser” she painted him out to be at the supermarket
again. There was no way he could watch her erase their enduring bond all over
again and walk back into that cheap motel, hand-in-hand with the symbol of her
desire to escape and compromise in every area she’d once left untouched. The
more Debra abuses her true self, the more Dexter loses grip on his fleeting
sense of self that is now starving without Debra’s loving admiration and faith.
Why be human when the one person who connects you to the rest of the world is
rejecting their humanity… because of you?
One of the most heart-wrenching moments in the
entire episode, for me, was when Debra vehemently proclaimed herself worthy of
this living death—that she is the kind of “bad person” Dexter has always said “deserves
to die.” I could try to count how many ways this BREAKS Dexter on my fingers and toes, but I’d need a few thousand
more to cover the rest of the areas in which Dexter registers pain from this!! He is on the verge a volcanic meltdown, the likes of which haven’t even
remotely been witnessed since the deaths of Brian and Rita. The meltdown comes
to full fruition when Debra pulls away from Dexter as he tries to take her by
the arm and deliver her from this, once and for all. If she is convinced that
she is a sh*tbag of a human being and uses the physical and relational position
she’s in to authenticate this belief, Dexter will destroy the manifestation of
her self-loathing. And he does exactly that, in a stunningly brief yet visceral
confrontation that ends with a knife in that embodiment of Debra’s willful destruction.
“You didn’t belong with him,” he tells her emphatically, with an almost childlike
bewilderment at her inability to see the truth—the
truth he has clung to and seen in her time and time again. But, now, is it that
the truth is outdated? Has the love that “endures” run its course? The cinematography
in the episode’s final moments richly plays into Dexter’s sense of loss as he
realizes that, just as Debra said, he is lost.
He is the only one who hasn’t yet paid for full price… and, oh, he’s starting
to. The blood on Harrison’s stuffed animal speaks to the destruction of his
ability to compartmentalize—that peculiar quality about him that enabled him to
have a smile on his face after the fiery scrap with his ex-lover, Lila, in season
two. He doesn’t get to define his life and who or what fits into which square;
not anymore. His truth is known and it can’t be erased for the life of him. As
it diffuses into all the sacred places, he comes face to face with just how perplexing his way of life fundamentally is. He can’t make Debra be okay with
what she’s done any more than he can make her be okay with the things that have
defined him. Now, they have redefined her.
Intriguingly, this is where the razor-sharp Dr.
Evelyn Vogel steps in: to get Dexter to claim his identity. She does this, of
course, in a very dramatic and roundabout fashion. Making good on an old
connection with Matthews to wriggle her way into a new Miami Metro case, she
sees to it that her and Dexter’s paths intersect and ultimately reveals that
she knows the Code of Harry by which Dexter has abode for years upon bloody
years. That psychopaths are no mystery to her, nor are they even monstrosities.
She lithely brings up the irony of her and Dexter’s connection to the world
of murder in their respective career paths, cozies up to him about the Bay
Harbor Butcher… all the while refuting Dexter’s attempts at describing him in
such a way as to suggest she is revealing her version of Dexter. Knowing that
he is the Butcher; a masquerader and
a mover of heaven and earth, in his own shadowy way. Suddenly Dexter is known
inside, outside, upside down and backwards—but by whom? Someone to be trusted,
or someone looking to tamper with a man too shattered to know and own who he
is?
As a whole, this episode rocked me on innumerable
levels. We got much less of Dexter’s typical inner-monologuing, with a
necessarily heavier emphasis placed on his immediate and emotional experience
of the world. That gave this premiere a very atypical climate and feel at times,
and yet it is so incredibly fitting for where Dexter is at that we hear less of
him theorizing and see more of him in action. He is finally confronting the
things that make him feel helpless, uncovering new vulnerable places in the
process. We see Batista’s struggle to move past LaGuerta’s death and his
disconcerting reaction to Dexter’s outburst as Batista attempts to give him a
piece of her pottery to memorialize her by. By disconcerting, I mean that this
scene gives me the sense that Batista isn’t going to be able to let this go. He
just might be one of the characters to piece it all together by the time we reach the
end. Masuka is donning the most flamboyant shirt of his bodacious collection
and keeping things lively. Quinn and Jaime are goin’ at it like dogs, and
something tells me that Debra’s instigation of communication with him might add
a dimension of awkwardness later on. Matthews, too, is back in the game;
everyone has their little niche in the midst of the enormous plot rolling into motion. “A Beautiful Day” kicked it up a fearsome notch and I am ready as ever
for the rest of what’s sure to be one of the most phenomenal seasons yet!!
Leave all of your thoughts and reactions below as we brace ourselves for what’s
to come…