‘Dexter’: Showdown!

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So it’s come to this. It’s unlikely that Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) and James Doakes (Erik King) are both going to come out of this little pickle alive. But do we really have to do without one of them?

Last night’s episode of “Dexter” forced audience members to suspend even more disbelief than usual. Frank Lundy (Keith Carradine) and his team informed Dexter that Doakes, his nemesis, was the prime suspect in the Bay Harbor Butcher case. Instead of taking him off the case due to a conflict of interest, the team hoped that Dexter’s antipathy towards Doakes would serve as “motivation” in analyzing the blood samples from his own trophy case.

Meanwhile, the FBI security detail on Dexter somehow failed to secure the one window that our protagonist was able to slip through, and both the FBI and Miami Police Department also let Doakes back into the country without being captured so that he finally confronted Dexter as he caught him disposing of his latest kill.

Doakes, after so much time suspecting Dexter of having a dark secret, gloated that his instinct was correct. “I never held it against you,” Dexter said, before regaining control of the situation, and Doakes.

The show can be forgiven for leaving reality, however, as it picked up again on the superhero aspect of Dexter’s life. Here, clearly, with Dexter and Doakes facing off, were the hero and villain, or perhaps hero and antihero. Neither one seemed particularly frightened in the situation, which resembled your typical “I knew one day this would come” showdown. Once more, the delight of the show is that in this case, the good guy is the bad guy. In any other scenario, viewers would be cheering for the tough, misunderstood cop finally taking down the murderer only he knew about — but instead, he ends up on the wrong side of a cell. While fans of the show certainly wouldn’t relish seeing Doakes, Dexter’s foil, be taken down for his dogged pursuit of the truth, of the two guys on the wrong side of the employ of the law, they’re obviously going to go with the serial killer.

-- Claire Zulkey