Dexter Season 3 Episode 2

If you’re not up to speed on Dexter, look away…or don’t go behind the cut.

One thing the show does very well is ramp up tension. Dexter needs to search a house tonight…but he’s got to go to dinner with the ADA. He knows where the victim’s house is, but he has to wait until the end of work day while his sister and her coworkers close in on the perps who might expose his secret.

Episode two was pretty much by-the-numbers Dexter up until the last five minutes or so, when it enters entirely new territory. Someone else, someone important, sees Dexter with blood on his hands. Literally. And the last shot, which showed blood spatter in a very dangerous place, was one of those “oof” moments when all the air goes out of your lungs.

The pregnancy sub-plot is a way for the show to explore what Jeff Lindsay is doing in the novels, with Dexter as the father of a potential sociopath. I hope they abandon that concept before it becomes a reality. For Dexter to dither over the possibility of creating someone like himself is natural. For his offspring—or worse, Rita’s, as in the books—to become sociopaths is a shark best left unjumped.

I like Jimmy Smits in this role. He’s strong and determined at times, and weak and unreliable at others. Perhaps moreso as the season elapses.

So now we know what happened to Freddy from Mad Men — he showed up on Criminal Minds tonight. Since when did Luke Perry become the criminal of the week? He was the bad guy on something else I saw recently.