Dexter has become a Bonnie and Clyde story.
This isn’t so much a lonely tale any more. It’s a bizarre partnership of self-preservation that watchers of this series in its earliest years never could have seen coming.
SPOILER ALERT: This is a review of the Dexter episode titled “Surprise, Motherf—–!” – the 12th and final episode of the seventh season – which aired Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012 on Showtime in the United States and on The Movie Network and Movie Central in Canada. If you’d rather not know what occurred, now’s the time to avert your eyes.
As Dexter asked at the end of the episode, “Who is Deb now? Who am I? Is this a new beginning, or the beginning of the end?”
It feels weird even typing this, but here goes: Deb killed La Guerta. Shot and killed her. As La Guerta was begging Deb to shoot Dexter instead.
How the heck did they – and we – get to this point?
Well, the series took more than one important turn on Sunday night. The first one was that Dexter (Michael C. Hall) had wrapped his brain around the notion that he was willing to kill La Guerta (Lauren Velez), even though she didn’t meet his code. Dexter decided he could and would do it, if it meant saving not only himself but, more importantly, his foster sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter).
I guess that part shouldn’t have been completely surprising. After all, in the previous episode, Dexter had turned in to police the only woman he ever really has loved – Hannah McKay, played by Yvonne Strahovski – because he believed (rightly, as it turned out!) that Hannah was a threat to Deb.
And I’ll say this about La Guerta. She was damn tenacious in her efforts to prove that Sgt. James Doakes (Erik King) was not the Bay Harbor Butcher, but that Dexter was the rightful owner of that dubious title.
Even after Dexter had planted false evidence to make it seem as if La Guerta was trying to frame him, and La Guerta’s career was in shambles, she didn’t drop it, wouldn’t drop it, couldn’t drop it.
Why? Because she knew she was right.
And now she’s dead right.
It was La Guerta’s ability to link Deb to the torching of the church in which Dexter had killed Travis Marshall (Colin Hanks) at the end of the sixth season that put the wheels in motion for the final, important sequence of the seventh season.
Now, I’m not going to try to claim that I knew in any way PRIOR to the crucial scene that Deb was going to wind up killing La Guerta.
BUT, once Deb showed up, with La Guerta there, and Dexter there, and when Deb first pointed the gun, I think at that point they kind of telegraphed where it was going to go. The scene went on for almost two minutes, and it was great, don’t get me wrong. But you just knew Deb was going to shoot La Guerta, not Dexter. At least that’s how I saw it, anyway.
So what does this mean for season eight, which supposedly, allegedly, will be the last for Dexter? The mind whirls and swirls. This is almost too much to take in so quickly.
But we have to understand one super-important thing that has changed, and it’s something from which this series can’t back off:
There is absolutely nothing heroic about Dexter and Deb now.
They’re in it for themselves, and for each other. And for Dexter’s toddler son Harrison, I suppose.
They’re Bonnie and Clyde.
So it can be both a new beginning and the beginning of the end. In this twisted case, they’re kind of the same thing.
bill.harris@sunmedia.ca
@billharris_tv
