Monday 28 November 2011

Dexter - S6 E9 - Get Gellar

Travis and Dexter join forces to take down Gellar. Deb finds she could use the help of her psychiatrist and Lewis disregards Batista's unfriendly advice.


Spoilers after the jump.

I was tempted to call this the stupidest episode yet but there have been some really stupid episodes this season. At times it felt more like a parody of Dexter than the real thing. This show used to be so good, how did it get to this state? I still can't believe there's gonna be another two seasons. Let's look at this mathematically; Seasons 1&2 were good, Season 3 wasn't so good. Seasons 4&5 were reasonably good, this season really hasn't been. Does that mean Seasons 7&8 have a chance to be respectable? I think we can agree at least that Season 9 would be really awful.

The worst kept secret in television came out; Gellar has been dead all along and Travis is imagining the whole thing, acting alone. Halfway through the season, it's like the writers suddenly realized that their twist wasn't as clever or awesome as they hoped so they started throwing in all these scenes like where Gellar walks past while Travis and Dexter are in the car on surveillance as if to say, "Aha! See, he IS really there!" But once Iden ruined it for me, it has been plainly obvious. That Dexter fell for it so completely is stupid. He's supposed to pick up on details, right? You can't tell me all the time he spent chasing a non-existent person around it didn't occur to him once that something was wrong with the picture he was given.

Top of the stupid storyline queue is Quinn. Watching him unravel and be an idiot was one thing. It's less about that now and more about setting him up as comic relief. The shenanigans with the stipper's mother who worked at the Waffle House across the street from the club didn't even have anything to do with the plot. It was completely dumb. Somehow it then gets turned around into Quinn, drunk Quinn who leaves his gun in the cars of strangers, delivering words of wisdom to Batista. Huh?? C'mon man!

Okay hold on, I stand corrected. The LaGuerta/Matthews side quest is by far the stupidest side quest of them all. Way to ruin a perfectly good character who could have been a standup guy for Dexter. Since when were he and LaGuerta friends? I think I said last week they noticed they didn't have a storyline for her and so made this one up on the spot to fill a few minutes. It feels even more like that now.

Then we get Lewis who has a certain conspicuous prosthetic hand in his possession. At this point, the show is juggling too many eggs. This is so peripheral it's almost a different show. There's the video clip of the guy offering his services to Gellar, is Lewis also a serial killer groupie? It can't be a coincidence that as he was in bed with Jamie and we saw the hand, the score suddenly went all Psycho.

To me, the only part of this episode that had any value was watching Deborah melt down. Even that however is tainted by the source of the current slump, the disastrous way Season 5 concluded. I'm a little irritated with this episode but I'm not feeling irrationally angry. More sad at what's become of this series. With that in mind, this probably deserves a worse grade than I'm giving.


"Dexter" airs Sundays on Showtime at 9:00pm EST.

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