Dexter: That Night, a Forest Grew

 "Pardon my tits!"

Oh me. back to Dexter again (recovering well from my op) and what an episode.

Where to start? Well, there's the manifesto from the "Bay Harbour Butcher". Dexter thinks he's being clever by writing it, putting the FBI off the scent with distracting nonsense. But he's too clever be half, perhaps? Because Lundy sees clearly what the manifesto's purpose happens to be, and accurately concludes that the killer is linked to law enforcement. Meanwhile,his manipulation of Doakes gets his rival suspended. Again, though, too clever by half? Doakes won't be giving up, and he sort of has this habit of never actually being wrong about anything.

Worrying that he's going after that nice Camilla lady, mind. Her line about being scheduled to retire next year feels worryingly like a kind of dialogue Chekhov's Gun- if she was fated to retire, surely that line wouldn't be there?

Ultimately, this episode is all about relationships and change. Rita finally sees how controlling and abusive her mother is (perhaps explaining her choices of men?) and banishes her. Deb banishes her sexy but ordinary boyfriend and comes on to the urbane, cultured, wise and much older Agent Lundy... and it seems to go well. But is she thinking straight? She's very upset at Dexter leaving Rita and shacking up with the obviously dangerous Lila.

And... ah yes. Dexter and Lila's relationship blooms, on the surface. Really good sex. Excitement. Yet... as we see Dexter supporting Cody at his school assembly thing, Lila sets fire to her valuable artwork, the one she's actually sold, in order to manipulate Dexter into staying with her and away from Rita. Which is... deeply creepy and controlling. She's a paradox: genuinely the cause of keeping him away from his "addiction" to killing, but oh so very dangerous...

Dexter has just got even better. 

Dexter: Dex, Lies and Videotape

 "What step was that?"

"The naughty one!"

So... Dexter gets away with deleting the marina footage by the old fire alarm trick. Easy... and, perhaps, a bit of a cheat, given the weight put on this at the end of last episode. But not all problems are so easily solved. Doakes is getting very persistent in his suspicions now. Dexter can deal with this by partly confiding in LaGuerta, of course. And she has reasons to be concerned about Doakes' obsessiveness... and yes, it's confirmed: they're exes, with a past. Quite the conflict of interest in her being his boss, then.

I suspect Doakes will, in the long run, keep being persistent, and it won't end well for him. But, yet again, we ought to remember: he's right. And he may be the antagonist but he's not the bad guy. Dexter is.

And Dexter has another problem now: a vengeful ex-mother-in-law. Choosing the somewhat wild femme fatale Lila over decent, dependable Rita is certainly most unwise of him, to say nothing of the morality. He's been emotionally cheating on her for a while, confiding things to Lila and not to Rita. And now, after Rita gets the wrong end of the stick, he actually does literally cheat on her... and admit it. Wow.

Lila bonds with him much better. He can be a closer approximation of his true self with her. But... I'm full of foreboding.

We have more bonding between Deb and Lundy, who seems to be morphing into something of a father figure. And it's being made teasingly ambiguous that he may suspect Dexter. I suspect they'll string this out for quite a while.

Oh, and then there's the copycat killer, played by Monroe from Grimm. Dexter protests rather too much when he insists that his murders are "principled" and this man's are not. It's becoming increasingly emphasises that even Harry didn't actually have a "code", much less Dexter. But scenes like this are deliciously revealing.

Another excellent episode, with some cleverly nuanced scripting. And it's the perfect balance between having us accept Dexter as the protagonist while always reminding us that, if this show has a hero, it's certainly not him.

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.

Dexter: See-Through

 "Ok, this is the first time I regret not being a bigger nerd..."

Dexter, this season, just keeps getting better and better, and it was already pretty darn good. The characterisation is getting pretty deep, and there are so many cleverly done scenes with dialogue at cross purposes.

Dexter, surely, is on borrowed time. Not only is he surely certain to get caught by Lundy's team (because of algae along, I'm sure, with other things!) but his pretence at addiction can't last, surely. He has to keep up the pretence with too many non-stupid people. Not least of which is Rita's mother, (Diane from the Poltergeist films!) introduced here, who can see both that he's a good actor and he's hiding something.

Then there's Lila who, we discover here, is an artist, and bonkers. Not only that... but she reacts calmly to being shown corpses, so is she perhaps, well, a non-standard personality type on top of that? Certainly Rita is jealous of her, and rightly so. She and Dexter have such chemistry... how much does she know? And could she handle the truth? Dexter is... clearly intrigued.

Lundy is interesting, too. A sphinx, but perhaps opening up to Deb... encouraging her to ask out the bloke she fancies at the gym, Gabriel... rather successfully. He's even ok with the fact that she wants to handcuff him to the bed during sex... not in a kinky way, but because the last man she slept with, well... definitely issues there. But what's this between her and Lundy? A spark? Or is he using her, suspecting her brother...?

Doakes' subplot is interesting, too. It's emphasised yet again that yes, he's flawed, but he has morals and integrity and, while not the protagonist, he's the hero of this show. Unlike Maria, who... wow, what a bombshell. That's cold, LaGuerta, so damned cold. This is a dangerous woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants...

Taking a step back, it's amazing how far these characters have come, already, in the four episodes of this season. This could be a very special season if it keeps this up...

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

“They're baaaack!"

 And so we have the inevitable sequel, in a decade full of popular and now iconic horror film franchises.We don't have Tobe Hooper, so we don't have the atmosphere or the depth, but we do have some rather good shocks and rather effective set pieces. It's a pretty good film, as long as you don't expect it to be as good as its predecessor.

The first film ended with the revelation that the house had been built atop a Native American cemetery, and thus a trope was born. It's now a year later and, in a nice touch, the family has become penniless as a result of being unable to tell their house insurers exactly what happened. But further graves have been found under the old house, and the evil from the other side continues to haunt the family, although I'm not sure much of it is necessarily poltergeist activity. Still, no matter; it's an exciting watch.

It's interesting to see a pointedly positive (although inevitably inaccurate and probably patronising) portrayal of Native American cultural practices. This gives a sense of responding to criticism for the previous film perhaps, but it's always good to see Will Sampson in this sort of part. Also exceptional is Julian Beck as the sinister Henry Kane, an excellent principal baddie. Most exceptional of all, of course, is the tragic Heather O'Rourke.

This is a far more conventional film than its predecessor, far less ambitious in scope, but in terms of script, effects and performances it is nevertheless a commendable sequel. It probably won't be very long at all until I blog the next one...

Poltergeist (1982)

“They’re heeeere!”

It’s so weird to watch this film for the first time knowing what happened to Heather O’Rourke (she died at 12, seemingly of natural causes), especially given that this is a pretty damned eerie film in any case. It is, of course, a superb piece of cinema. I don’t consider this to be a Steven Spielberg film, on the grounds that he didn’t direct the thing, but he nevertheless co-wrote and produced it. And I have to say that this film exhibits all of Spielberg’s considerable strengths and absolutely none of his emotionally manipulative downside.

It would have been easy, in a film like this, for the main protagonists to be mere ciphers, but they’re not; they’re well-rounded individuals, particularly Steven and Diane, who convince as a baby boomer young couple (how old this makes the film sound!), smoking weed while at the same time being caring parents and natural suburbanites. Heather O’Rourke, of course, steals the show as the oddly creepy Carol Anne, but the whole family feels real.

This being a film set in suburbia, and interior décor being something that quickly dates, every scene is absolutely redolent of the early Eighties. Also, it’s an odd experience to see a film for the first time when that film has so permeated popular culture. The climax of the film, as the house is swallowed up, immediately made me recognise an obvious reference in an episode of Family Guy that I’d seen just a few days before. (Oh, and regarding dating of the film and popular culture, I’m rather afraid I actually recognised that particular issue of Captain America.)

The film, is far less based on the traditional narrative of poltergeists (a strong psychic link to an adolescent girl rather older to Carol Ann, not that I necessarily believe in all that), and is far closer to the more mainstream idea of a ghost. Certainly, the sheer number of poltergeists here, and the apparently demonic nature of the malevolent entity behind all this, does not reflect what I was expecting from the film. But this isn’t an investigation of the poltergeist trope, it’s a big budget Hollywood movie (in marked contrast to most of the other Eighties horrors that I’m blogging at the moment), and so this large amount of spectacle is appropriate.

The earlier part of the film is suffused with lots of small, scary moments. The level of scariness is quite mild to start with, but there are a hell of a lot of scary things, and for a lot of them you don’t quite k now why they’re scary. It’s not until that scene with the maggots that the gears change. One nice touch, though, is that Diane is not initially scared of the poltergeists, and tries to have fun with them. After all, that’s what I’d do.

The film sort of pre-empts Ghostbusters by having the family consult a bunch of paranormal professionals, led by the charismatic Dr Lesh. But it’s the diminutive Tangina Barrons who is the real star here.

The ending of the film is drawn-out but dramatic; I certainly didn’t feel any indication of “too many endings” syndrome. And, of course, the film just had to fit in a scary clown.