[spentrent]

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The sponsor character is interesting, but this episode was disappointing to me. I don't like Dexter falling apart and making so many clearly reckless decisions, it is way out of character for him. The "dark defender" thing is pretty stupid as well.

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Yeah, I posted immediately after watching the episode, but after I had 5 or 10 minutes to think about it, I thought it made no sense at all that Dexter would be out on the boat with the blue light. In the first place, he was way too careful to not know if there were blood splatters on his boat. He would have had the boat as clean as it could possibly be right when he dumped the bodies.

And secondly, if he was going to clean the boat, he'd at least take it out on the water. He wouldn't be doing it right in the harbor when he knew that the cops already had an idea which harbor the bodies had been dumped from. The whole timeline there just didn't make sense at all.

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The sponsor is [censored] up Dexter's game. He's being too human now and being lazy. I wanted to think that the late-night boat cleaning was not believable, but I think that he's healing -- becoming the human he really is -- and losing the capacity to stay focused on staying under the radar.

He never really looked for external justification before. He accepted that he was [censored] up in the head as axiomatic; Harry's Law gave him an outlet and excuse for his psychopathy rather than a moral justification.

This episode however seemed to mark a turning point. It hammered away at Dexter's new need for external justification, righteous moral approval even, from his satisfaction at overhearing the guys in the booth at the very beginning of the episode, to the Dark Defender stuff, and finally to reassuring his sponsor that she did the right thing in offing the dealer boyfriend.

This was never on Dexter's mind and now it's all there is.

I like the idea of Doakes becoming an inside man. I think it's possible but I question it after his dance with his Special Ops bro. Sure, Dexter isn't killing innocent wives, but Doakes seems driven to enforce the law in the name of the law as a beacon for the greater good, not driven to support simple vengeance, righteous though it might be to the individual hurt by the assailant's crime.

In any case this season is keeping me on my toes as much if not more so than last season. What a great [censored] show!