It’s fun how so many episodes of Dexter: Orignal Sin have picked up immediately after the events of the previous one. We saw that with Mad Dog’s death, and again this week as Dexter is found at a crime scene when all he wanted to do was feed the corpse of Levi Reed to the gators. Instead of making a lame excuse and leaving, Dex identifies himself as part of the squad and enters the crime scene as if he belongs there. The staged gator attack was a fun bonus.
Shoutout to 90s kids and their pager codes. (9922 is love, BTW) I never had a pager myself, but I didn’t get up to most of the crazy shenanigans Deb and her friends got up to. No hard drugs, auto theft, pawning mom’s jewelry, or even leaving pot brownies out where anybody’s cop father or brother could have found them. Yikes! Debra makes a flurry of bad decisions in episode 7. And if anybody was wondering why adult Deb and Sophia didn’t remain friends, we probably got our answer this week.
I learned something from episode 7. Florida has Denny’s restaurants—we know this because Masuka finds himself craving a Moons Over My Hammy breakfast. It seems greedy for Florida to even have Denny’s when they already have Whataburger and Waffle House. But I digress.
Nicky Spencer is a little badass. Go, kid! I’m not sure if he learned survival skills from his dad, from video games, or YouTube, but he knew how to make a weapon. He seemed to be well on his way to escape before the kidnapper showed up with spring-loaded sheers and a giant Lunchable. As for the “hesitation cuts” that led us to this week’s discovery? Shenanigans! It only looked like a hesitation cut because the kid was fighting so hard. I will be devastated if Nicky doesn’t get out alive. Since they let us spend a lot of time with Jimmy Powell before we had to stare directly at his corpse, the danger is real.
I realize that Sophia is a teenage girl and that teenagers are bad at romance and relationships. But jeez. Dexter is clueless, and giving him mouth-stuff in a bathroom doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a couple. Her freakout was totes inappropriate, but not nearly so wrongheaded as her treatment of Deb. Whether she agrees or not, Sophia shouldn’t expect Deb to take her side over her brothers—especially since Deb is sure Dex wasn’t banging “some skank.”
Rating Deb’s prank out to the mean girl (when Sophia was totally in on it) was messed up. While I understand that some faces are just irresistibly punchable, Debra appeared to blow up her future over it. It really is hard to watch her make such bad choices, and harder seeing Harry pretend he can’t do anything about it. The Morgan family curse is real.
Meanwhile, Laura Moser has been working for hardcore drug dealers for Harry for nearly a year. A year of risking her life to avoid jail. Does anybody think that’s reasonable? An addict strongarmed into betraying the kind of people known to torture traitors before they kill them? I can’t explain the visceral hatred I felt for Harry when little Dexter ran in and called him Daddy. Even having fewer mistresses than he did in TOS, Harry is a terribly selfish person. I love how hard Doris calls him out on it too. “No, that’s what YOU need!” Ha! Personally, if somebody has an affair, their punishment should be to live with the guilt and not devastate their partner with details so they can feel better. But maybe that’s just me.
What Clark Sanders is going through is so sad. Sanders is gay and “gets to be himself” there, except when he’s at work. He lost his brother, his parents disowned him, and he has to hide who he is from his peers. Dexter agrees not to out his co-worker, which I don’t imagine would have occurred to Dexter to do anyway. We like to think we’ve come a long way socially since the 90s, but is it any safer to come out as a cop today? I imagine there’s a wide variance, but mostly not. That kind of hate is like tar. It’s really hard to get all the way off.
Angel discovering that the hand in Alligator Alley was that of Handsome Tony Ferrer? Wow. This is why all your jewelry should be custom-made, kids! Dexter was pretty smooth in steering Batista away from Ferrer and toward Nicky Spencer’s case. Speaking of which...
I was right!!! I knew Spencer was involved in these kidnappings since Ep3. We know this because we see him buying giant Lunchables. Dexter ostensibly figures it out because he found a hesitation cut everyone else missed. Some of this writing, even aside from the retconning, is just sloppy. I don’t believe Nicky wouldn’t recognize his own dad even with his face covered. If you watch the kidnap scene again, the kidnapper speaks and we can hear that it’s Spencer. Again, in hindsight, it seems far too obvious for Nicky not to have noticed.
The most fun moment in Episode 7 comes in the form of three serial killers visiting Dexter as he tries to figure out the best ways to dump a body. We know Camilla already gave him an idea, but Dex hasn’t realized it yet. Ed Gein and his exaggerated lampshade were hilarious. Ditto Gacy and his clown suit, and Berkowitz.
Young Hector Estrada is a slice of cake. My goodness, what an attractive fellow. Alas, he’s a horrible man and the reason Laura dies. Which makes all of this so much harder to watch. Laura Moser from TOS made the mistake of being a small-time drug dealer. This Moser’s mistake is absolutely trusting Harry to the detriment of her and her sons. Might Brian have still been a psychopath had he had a mother growing up? We can’t know. But being bounced around from one orphanage to another (they’re called Group Homes now) couldn’t have helped.
The serial killer Harry and LaGuerta are chasing is still elusive. Spencer doesn’t even believe it’s real. When Maria and Morgan question the father who bought the car, he misstates everything they ask. ‘Are you gonna arrest my daughter for buying a car?’ he says, after already saying he and his wife bought the car. His many obfuscations make it clear that he knows more than he’s saying. We’ve certainly not heard the last of that.
Is Dexter going to kill Captain Spencer? That seems excessively risky. But then, Spencer took such pains to blame everything on “the cartel,” it would be pretty easy to deduce that if Spencer himself turned up dead it was also “the cartel.” I’m pretty stoked to see how all that turns out. Three more episodes remain with no official word on a second season. Anything could happen.