“Are You…?” gets off to a rousing start, with a brief glimpse of Dexter on the run, or so the viewer is led to believe, followed by his tension-filled discussion with Debra at the scene of his own crime. Watching Dexter try to maneuver his way out of trouble served as a reminder of just how far gone Breaking Bad‘s Walter White really is, as I saw in Dexter shades of Heisenberg as opposed to the other way around. To Dexter’s dismay, though, this is one person he’s not going to give the run around. Like Doakes, Debra is too smart, too persistent to buy Dexter’s justifications.
Apparently, so are her detectives. Unlike her, they’re not sure who it is they’re chasing down, but they’re on his tail just the same. Laguerta finds the slide Dexter carelessly dropped down the grate in his hurry to get rid of the evidence and set fire to the church. He notices it’s missing when he checks to make sure his slides are still tucked away where they always are. It’s too late though and he knows it. You can hear it in his voice as he says to the sleeping Harrison “it’ll all be okay,” an affirmation he’d already told himself earlier, except with a certain level of confidence.
This is the most rattled Dexter has been in quite some time. During the Bay Harbor Butcher case, he was also fighting a war on multiple fronts but still had a modicum of control over matters, or at least felt he did. Now though, he has to risk everything by satisfying his Dark Passenger the day after his carefully crafted facade fell completely apart in front of his sister, all to regain some semblance of control. His rationale makes little sense. Viktor’s murders having nothing to do with his own, save for the fact that he happened to (conveniently enough) kill Mike, the other detective who was unknowingly after him, goes a long way in showing just how out of control Dexter actually is.
For every answer he provides Deb, she has another question at the ready. Before the episode’s up, she’s figured it all out, having ransacked his apartment and found both his blood slides and the real tools of his trade. Dexter has no alternative but to tell her what he is, a serial killer. Despite his desire to get out under her watchful eyes, part of him seemed to want to tell her.
As a kid, there was a time when he came near revealing his true self to Debra. Because of Dexter, Harry took Debra’s dog away, worried Dexter would kill it. Dexter tried to explain this to her but Harry stopped him before he could, saying it was because Dexter was allergic. This time, however, Harry wasn’t around to stop him from confessing his guilt.
Not just for the murders, but for what he’s done to Debra. With one plunge of the blade, he undid everything Debra once knew, or at least thought she did. Further, it was him who put her on that table back in season one. Physically speaking, it was Brian, but Dexter’s the one at fault for bringing her into it. He can try and put this on Debra all he wants, as he seems to do when she goes to get the gasoline at the start of the episode (“Jesus, Debra”), but it’s his fault and his alone. As he was throughout almost the entirety of last season, he was careless and it cost him.
In this case, there are no alternative explanations he can supply Debra with to get her off his scent. Not unlike the dog stolen away from her because of him, she’s going to keep her nose down until she finds what she’s looking for. On one hand, she doesn’t want to know, because it could threaten to undo all those lovey-dovey feelings of hers. On the other, though, it’s in her instincts to keep at it no matter what that means for her or Dexter.
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