By Couch Baron
Having left off last season with the prospect of some actual interesting character development, we of course do not pick up there. Instead, Dexter is frantically driving to the airport; when he has to stop for gas, all his cards are declined, so he fishes some cash out from the handy-dandy Escape The Country Travel-Pak he's had warming up in the wall since he moved into his current place. At the airport, Dexter buys a ticket to Budapest…
…and then we're back in the church, with Dexter literally being caught red-handed. Dexter tells Deb in his earnest-yet-creepy voice that he encountered Colin Hanks on that last forensics sweep, fought off his sword attack, and then snapped, keeping the serial nature of his killing to himself. Her world shattered, Deb succumbs to Dexter's emotional manipulation and conspires with him to make Colin Hanks' death look like a fiery suicidal tableau, and it says something about the state of mind Deb is in that she doesn't really bat an eye at destroying a house of worship.
Eventually, they of course get called back to the scene of the crime, and after Deb gives Dexter an assist in covering up a bit of evidence, she gives a statement to the press, and she lies quite a bit better than I would have expected. But there's a loose end – LaGuerta finds Dexter's broken blood slide, and as much as I've complained about Dexter's sloppiness, given what happened I suppose I can forgive him this one time. At home, Dexter realizes his error, while Anderson wonders how Colin Hanks got to the church, given that his car wasn't found at the scene, but this latter problem is solved when Dollhouse's Enver Gjokaj murders Anderson by the side of the road. The department discovers that his other victim is a Ukrainian stripper, but Dexter is the only one who actually finds the murderer's fingerprint and IDs Gjokaj, or "Viktor Baskov."
Dexter breaks into his place and discovers he's going to be on an imminent flight back to the Ukraine, so the race to the airport was a big fake-out, which was actually rather well done. The fact that Dexter is planning to commit a murder while surrounded by TSA agents is pretty hilarious, but sure enough, when Baskov goes to the can, Dexter's right in there to drug him, even bringing along a handy wheelchair so he can get Baskov to a more private place. You'd think Dexter would have learned his lesson and ditched the whole table setup, but he does off Baskov, unbeknownst at this point to his apparent boss, Ray Stevenson (Titus Pullo from Rome).
While all this is going on, Deb keeps trying to unpack Dexter's lies, and even though he has a ready answer to everything, she's starting to see him for what he is, given his lack of affect and her willingness to do some actual investigation – and by the end, Dexter walks into his place to find that Deb has laid bare all his killing equipment, even his blood slides. She calmly asks him if he's a serial killer – and he admits it. I'm not going to get my hopes up, but this was undoubtedly the best episode they've done in a long time -- not only is Deb's moral dilemma actually shaping up to be interesting, it seems to have burned any creepy attraction she had to Dexter right out of her. Win-win!