S6:E4 On this episode of Dexter, something pretty crazy happened... or didn't happen, rather. It turns out this was the first episode in the entire series where Dexter didn't kill anyone (at least I think it was). It was pretty shocking, and if you weren't careful, you didn't even realize it. In any case, it subtly emphasized that Dexter doesn't actually NEED to kill, and if anything, this is the first episode where that compulsion was nowhere to be found.
“Body parts...spectacle?” - Dexter
Thankfully, this episode began with Miami Metro addressing the fact that it has someone sending horses galloping down the streets with body parts hanging off of them. Once Dexter gets to the scene where the horses and limbs are, he notices the horses had the same O surrounding an A symbol printed on their faces that Omar the fruit vendor had carved into his skin, and Dexter is particularly impressed with how "imaginative" the perp is. It doesn't take Deb very long to identify the body as Nathan, the man who Professor Gellar and Travis captured and forced to repent. Upon closer examination (as in Dexter taking a pair of tweezers and digging them around inside Nathan's eyelids), Dexter recovers a thin slip of paper that has the number "1242" printed on it. This makes him want to go back and peek inside Omar’s eyelids, and to his non-surprise he discovers a similar piece of paper with the number "1237" printed on it. During the briefing, Dexter points out the numbers are five days apart, which is interesting because the victims were killed five days apart. This leads Dexter to assume the killer is counting towards something.
“Do you think he’s using God as an excuse to kill?” - Dexter
However, Dexter has much more important issues to tend to -- Harrison has appendicitis and is rushed to the emergency room by his babysitter to have an emergency appendectomy. To the worried father's surprise, Brother Sam shows up at the hospital to pray for Harrison and to more obviously, explain to Dexter the benefits of believing in God. He did this by telling a story of how when he was in prison and while he was choking a man out and trying to kill him, Brother Sam said that he saw a white light that made him loosen his grip around the man’s neck, and he says he’d never felt so happy in his life when he did. Brother Sam also tells another story of how his father (who was also religious) once shot a man in front of him, and then Dexter says how it’s not good when people use religion as a means to justify their hatred towards others. And then he asks Sam’s opinion about whether or not the person who would put a body on a horse and send it parading around town could be religious, and he calmly explains that there will always be people who use religion to justify their actions. Harrison obviously makes it through surgery successfully, and Dexter goes back to the station to explain to the other cops that the cuts used to dismember Nathan are much more rugged and erratic than the incisions that appeared on Omar’s body, and this leads Deb to believe they have two people terrorizing Miami instead of just one. Later that day is Deb’s first press conference, and La Guerta tells her to just be herself instead of reading the statement that was prepared for her because the people want to know a real person is working to protect them instead of bureaucracy. So Deb goes out in front of the cameras and only after she says “fuck” and “shit” on live television does she realize La Guerta purposefully misled her and encouraged her to make a fool out of herself. Deb regroups, however, when her detectives tell her they found a man named Gellar's website, which makes him come across as completely religious and even a bit fanatical. They look him up in the system and learn he was arrested a while back for stealing an antique sword that had something to do with the Book of Revelations, and they figured out that the sword was probably in either the killing of Nathan or Omar.
“It’s just dinner.” – Travis
One night, Travis tells Professor Gellar that he’s going out on a date with a waitress named Erin. The Professor did not hide his disappointment in Travis’ decision to date as opposed to helping him execute their next stunt, and made sure Travis understood that he could go out on the date if he was willing to accept God’s consequences. Travis doesn’t think that sounds too difficult and so he trots off to go have a lovely evening with a pretty girl. Things escalate rather quickly between Erin and Travis and Travis makes the decision to bring Erin back to his house, where they proceed to have surprisingly intimate sex for two people who just met. What they don’t know is that Professor Gellar is in the next room listening to them and the next morning when Travis wakes up and goes into the kitchen, he sees Erin tied up and Professor Gellar standing over her. Through Erin’s whimpers and tears, the Professor relays to Travis that she’s part of God’s plan now, and Travis knows that begging for her life would do absolutely nothing and so he just retreats back to his bedroom.
“There’s blood.” – Deb
Deb and her crew arrive at another crime scene – this time, it is a greenhouse. They enter with their guns drawn, but immediately put them down when they see a woman (Erin) who’s fastened into some kind of apparatus and hanging from the ceiling. She has a bear trap around her neck and is dressed all in white, with feathered wings attached to her arm. Deb notices there’s a trip wire, but she’s too late in warning the officers before they walk through it and the bear trap closes on Erin’s neck, piercing her jugular and killing her. Dexter notices a trail of blood leading to a closet and once he opens, it locusts come flying out and swarm around the detectives. They all flee the building and while the other cops are dusting the bugs off their clothes, Dexter sees an impressed Travis watching the scene unfold.
This might be the first episode where Dexter didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t even realize until the morning after the show aired, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. On one hand I’m all for Dexter exploring religion and trying to figure out what his future looks like, but I’m not comfortable with him doing it at the expensive of his graphic and meticulously planned kills JUST yet. The writers should know better than to pull a move like this – previously, Dexter has shown he’s capable of learning about himself through his kills and will do anything to make time for his habit, and so it seems out of place for his character to, all of a sudden, forget about satiating his urge completely. I guess the whole appendicitis thing takes precedence here, but that storyline and one-on-one time with Brother Sam didn’t seem worthy of sacrificing the episode’s execution. However, it was pretty clever the way the writers didn’t leave any time for Dexter to seek out a victim. It essentially proved that Dexter can go without murdering someone, which in the past he was never able to do. So there’s definitely some kind of transformation happening here.