Dexter – Smokey and the Bandit
Last week, plot progression and some fantastic acting made “Once Upon a Time…” a very strong episode in my eyes, perhaps one of, if not the best since the close to season four. I’m not sure then if it is a very short term case of nostalgia or simply the content itself that made “Smokey and the Bandit” not quite live up to its predecessor. The episode was good. Episodes of Dexter are always good, but it suffered somewhat from a lack of direction. The plot was a mixture of continued story progression along with a throwback to Dexter’s past that just didn’t quite work for me. While the season premiere had the blast from the past down cold, with Dexter getting to relive the awkwardness of high school, this time around the story was just a little too isolated to have any real impact. That being said, like with many of his victims, Dexter took something away that seemed to grow him as a person, somewhat redeeming what just did not work for me.
That which didn’t quite pull me in was a new case for Miami Metro that mirrored serial killings that Dexter had followed as a pre-murderous child. The main problem that I had with this particular round of hunt-the-killer was that it took too much of the episode’s screen time for too little investigation. More often than not, Dexter is just about certain that his target is the killer and has to break into a house or get DNA in some clever way, then run it, prove they’re the killer and devise some scheme to inject and ultimately do away with his victim. That is pretty much what happened here, but there was just too much extra. To get close to his target – an 80’s serial killer known as “The Tooth Fairy” – Dexter inserted himself into a retirement community and proceeded to play golf and go shopping with his target. Whilst the ends ordinarily justify the means, this time around I just didn’t buy it.
