Dexter: The Dark Defender

 "Should we call the Super Friends for help?"

So... that was an actual armadillo. Wow! Very strange for this Brit to think of one of those as a creature that might find its way into one's home. A hedgehog it is not.

Anyway, basically another top episode, and as ever it's a fascinating one in terms of where this is all going.

Dexter likes a queue.... yeah, that fits. But we also have an interesting sibling chat: Deb really has it in for the "Bay Harbour Butcher". But others (naturally occurring overheard vox pops) approve of him, probably hangers and floggers and people who loved Chuck Dixon's run on The Punisher. But it's an interesting binary, the divided attitudes.

And then we get a murder in a comic shop, as Sophie Ellis-Bextor didn't quite sing. And this riffs on that very contrast- is Dexter the "Dark Defender", a kind of Shadow/Mr A figure straight from pulp fiction or the Objectivism-addled mind of Steve Ditko, or is he just the "Bay Harbour Butcher", a common or garden serial killer?

There are other sub-plots. LaGuerta and Doakes are having a bit of an arc, with her very much concerned about his developing habit of shooting people, and... is it implied that they used to be a couple? Then there's deb's trust issues with Gabriel, and her interesting dynamic with her eccentric widower of a boss.

But really, as was always going to happen, this is about Dexter, and his flashback to his mum's murder opens a couple of cans of squirming invertebrates. Firstly... Harry not only slept with his mum but used her as bait and got her killed! If even Harry is deeply flawed, can there be any stability in Dexter's world. And he confides not in Rita, but Lila, who understands him more... and is as abnormal as he is. And so she is involved in his need to confront the surviving killer and get "closure".

I'm sure there will be consequences in the aftermath of said confrontation... not least in him getting closer to Lila. Especially after her confession to, effectively, murder by arson, but of someone bad in the same way as Dexter's victims. So suddenly these two have even more in common... but Lila is dangerous. She's chaos. Calling it now: she's going to die. But not before she and Dexter break poor Rita's heart.

Poor Rita. All the loyalty she's showing, sticking up for Dexter with her mum... by the rules of television drama, she's going to end up sooo heartbroken.

And that ending... oh dear. Another utterly gripping episode.