Pictured above is one of only two moments I would venture to call a highlight in “Argentina,” the second straight episode to fall flat on its face for me. It says a lot about the episode that I was reduced to ogling Jamie in her bikini in order to get some enjoyment out of the episode.
While Dexter is nearing the home stretch of the season, it’s doing so in a slow, limping fashion. Part of me wishes the network would take it out back to the shed and put it down, forgoing the eighth and final season that I can’t see being any good at this rate, but I know there’s no chance of that happening. So it looks like I have another season (plus these last four episodes) of let downs to anticipate.
At least it appears the (one sided) love angle between Dexter and Deb is set to die a quick death. Deb finally confessing her undying (even in the face of him being a serial killer) love for Dexter was a moment I’d feared was bound to come soon, yet hoped would be put off until next season at the earliest; however, when Dexter made it clear that her feelings aren’t at all reciprocated, I breathed a sigh of relief. It probably won’t stop the writers from trying to force Dexter into a love triangle, but I hope they have enough sense not to have him go changing his mind all of a sudden, followed immediately by him and Deb having an unnecessarily graphic sex scene along the lines of Dexter’s first one with Hannah.
On the subject of death, it appears the tension between Dexter and Deb has all but evaporated. That is, unless you count the sexual tension on Deb’s part. Deb has now accepted Dexter for who he is and all that’s left to come between them is Hannah. Like many others I’ve seen, I’m baffled by how fast she reconciled herself with Dexter being a serial killer. Here I was thinking it would be a season long arc, that the big-bads of seasons past would take a backseat in favor of the personal dramas that must come with such a revelation, and it only took about half the season before she began trying to use Dexter as her personal errand boy.
What happened to the Deb who looked like she was about to throw up once everything truly and finally hit her? Now it’s the thought of Deb doing it with Hannah that causes her stomach to turn instead. Which, now that I think about it, is even sadder than I originally thought. Deb was obviously a character originally meant to buck the stereotypes associated with her gender, yet she’s become no different from all the other female characters that populate television and film. She’s controlled primarily by those silly emotions of hers.
They’re supposedly what allowed for her to accept that Dexter kills people on the regular. They’re what made what I first thought was merely a reconnaissance mission into an utterly random fling with Price. And they’re what have made it seemingly impossible for her to go a season without getting with a guy that’s all sorts of wrong for her. That’s what it always seems to come back to. She apparently can’t stand to not have a warm body with which to share a bed and so she disregards potential warning signs in pursuit of that.
Honestly, I can’t remember the last time the writers played her up as a strong female role model. She’s spent the past couple seasons or so failing, in immensely frustrating fashion, to discover the killer right in front of her and saddled with storylines that actually make her look weak instead, such as her snafu with LaGuerta a little while back. This season looked as if it was ready to change that when Deb started calling Dexter on all of his shit, but that unfortunately didn’t last very long. On top of that, what I imagine were moments meant to relay to the viewers that she’s ill-equipped to reign Dexter in in any fashion end up coming off as moments of weakness on her part.
Earlier in the season she told him she was going to be on his ass all day and all night, though likely not quite in the way she’d envisioned since she realized she wanted to jump his bones, and what came of that was Dexter sneaking off with the utmost ease, as well as her not stopping him from jetting off when she had the chance. This, coupled with everything else I’ve mentioned, has taken a character I once loved and made me bemoan her appearances to a certain extent.
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Published: Nov 19, 2012 08:51 pm