Channel Surfing: \'Dexter\' in Uncharted Waters

October 7, 2012, 10:00 pm

By MIKE HALE

This season, the critics Mike Hale and Neil Genzlinger are checking out favorite shows and seeing how they hold up. Previous entries in this series include posts on “New Girl,” “NCIS,” “Scandal,” “The Good Wife” and “30 Rock.”

There's been a case of “Moonlighting” going around television the last few seasons. In the spirit of Maddie and David, crime-fighting couples like Bones and Booth on “Bones” and Castle and Beckett on “Castle” have given up the just-friends dance and hopped into bed. (Bones and Booth have even had a child.) Now a more macabre version of that scenario is playing out in Season 7 of Showtime's “Dexter,” where the foster siblings and officers of the law D ebra and Dexter Morgan, played by Jennifer Carpenter and Michael C. Hall, have achieved a new level of intimacy.

It doesn't involve sex â€" not yet, anyway, though that remains on the table following Deb's therapy-induced revelation in last season's finale that she's in love with her brother. No, it involves a different kind of knowledge: Deb's discovery, at the end of that episode, that her brother is a killer.

The premiere picked up last week with Deb, the police lieutenant, and Dexter, the forensics guy, still facing off over the body of Dexter's latest victim. (It was a bad guy, of course, the religiously crazed serial killer who served as what the show calls its “big bad” during Season 6.) Dexter claimed it was his first time â€" he just got carried away â€" and talked Deb into helping him cover it up, but in the course of the episode she went from 0 to 100 in terms of knowing her brother. The details of the murder scene matched up with her own experien ce as a near-victim of Dexter's copycat half-brother in Season 1, and she finally asked him: Are you a serial killer? He closed his eyes and said yes, and “Dexter” entered totally uncharted waters.

In the second episode, “Sunshine and Frosty Swirl” on Sunday night, Deb and Dexter tried to find a workable compromise between her commitment to the law and his commitment to killing people. She forced him to move into her beach shack and tried to keep him with her at work, but he still managed to slip away. In what looks like the set-up for the central plot of the season, Det. Mike Anderson (Billy Brown) is shot by a Ukrainian gangster; Dexter identifies the killer before the rest of the Miami-Dade homicide division and manages to dispatch him at the airport (improvising with baggage straps and a fire extinguisher).

In a subplot whose importance is hard to judge at the moment, Dexter also figures out that it's the creepy lab tech Louis (Josh Cooke) who sent h im the prosthetic hand and has been canceling his credit cards. Dexter manages to elude Deb once again (he doses her steak with a sedative) and takes Louis on what appears to be his final ride, but has a change of heart, leaving Louis on a park bench. We'll see whether Louis has learned his lesson (an executive producer has said that he won't be this season's big bad) and whether Dexter is really able to control himself, or whether Louis just wasn't worth killing.

Indications are that the evil nemesis will be the Ukrainian gang boss Isaac (Ray Stevenson), who has come to America to look for the missing gangster Dexter has already killed. Isaac proved his mettle on Sunday night by plunging a screwdriver into the eye of an untrustworthy underling.

Surface plausibility has never been a big issue on this show â€" Dexter would have to have superpowers and a limitless budget to keep getting away with the things he's gotten away with all these years. The series succeeds by being a credible and entertainingly complicated psychological thriller with good characters, a sense of humor and especially a languid rhythm and sun-kissed look that belie the darkness and bloodiness of the stories. (This despite the fact that most of the Miami settings are shot on a Hollywood soundstage.)

But emotional credibility will be important this year â€" we have to believe that the by-the-book Deb would not only keep Dexter's secret but would also break the rules herself to shield him. So far it's worked for me, which is a testament to the skill and resourcefulness of Ms. Carpenter's performance as Deb, a character whose combination of insecurity and utter certitude, of awkwardness and competence, isn't quite like anyone else on TV.

Please let us know in the comments how well you think “Dexter” has handled its new direction, and your thoughts about where it might head going into its eighth and final season. Will Dexter live? I don't think they can kill him at this point â€" he's just too darn likable.