THIS WEEK ON Dexter: Get Gellar

The finale to this week’s Dexter is going to be the raging chasm of debate that’ll spurn on the rest of the season. Either you’re digging the titty-twisting-tweak to the Doomsday Killer storyline or you’re throwing yellow flags and screaming foul on the play. Drunk with Turkey and Gravy and Commerce after this Thanksgiving weekend, you’re either giggling burping sloppy animal juice or you’re slathered in hate and carbohydrates condemning the writers as manipulative hacks.

Well, where do you land?

I spent the last few minutes of the episode bemoaning the concept of Dexter going Fight Club on our asses. Incredulous annoyance was my kneejerk response. A giant “Oh Really?” annoyed at the laziness of the writers. Then I cracked a sideways smile, moderately impressed at how I had been played out the entire season. Rewinding the episode it became clear that Eddie Olmos’ Great Ghost never interacted with Dexter directly. Motherfuckers. Duped! Duped!

As Dexter runs around coming to the conclusion that Schlumpy Sisterlover was the only man behind the Doomsday Machinations, the rest of Miami Metro carries on in their usual manner of dysfunction. There was a lot of movement this week on their plots, so let’s actually pretend we care about them for a bit. Shall we? Doff your Anti-Apathy Caps! It’s on.

LaGuerta is covering up for That Dude Who Runs The Station. Apparently the old wrinkled bastard has been crushing some creamy hooker flaps for a good amount of time, but is about to find himself on the losing end of an accidental overdose. How Things Will Play Out: LaGuerta is a beefy lady with beefy plans for herself. She’s going to eventually side with Deborah on this thing, leaking information about who was behind the cracked sternum. End result? She snags his position.

Deb seems to be stuck in a retarded amalgam of The Sopranos and Home Improvement. She keeps going to see her shrink who offers her fucking awful advice. She tells Deb to accept Dexter as a chair, and that he can’t be a table. Here’s a therapist telling someone that we shouldn’t expect people to change. Might as well get up out of that fucking chair, Deb. After these fucking odd sessions, Deb walks around like that fucking Douche Tim Allen mangling the advice of her own personal Dr. Melfi. How Things Will Play Out: She falls deeply in love with the decapitated Ice Truck Killer hand that Louis stole. They move away to Guatemala.

Louis, the creepy guy who has wanted to sniff Dexter’s underwear the entire season totally ended up banging Angel’s sister.  Pro-Tip: When a guy is creepy you’re not reading the show wrong. He’s going to end up eating someone’s rolled out sphincter like Bubble Tape.  Double Pro-Tip:  When that same creepy guy is given sixteen seasons in the “Last Week On”, he’s definitely going to end up eating that sphincter.  How Things Will Play Out:  I’m not really sure. Louis is goddamn crazy, and he’s holding onto Ice Truck Killer’s beautifully amputated hand. Methinks he knows the swerve behind Dexter’s leisure studies. Or he’s just a jock sniffer obsessed with the serial killers that seem to roll up every three months in Miami.

Then there’s Quinn. He continues to spiral to Ultimate Destruction and I’m somewhere between feeling sorry for the dude and wishing Angel grave him a fatal rug burn with his awesome facial hair. There’s three thousand moving parts in the season, we don’t need to see Angel and Quinn scuffle in some dog shit covered patch of shitty Miami grass. How Things Will Play Out: Quinn gets syphilis from a chimpanzee he bangs at a carnival.

All this shit is going on while Dexter acts like a fucking Emo Kid as usual. When he proclaims that “Grr! Whine, whine! Gellar doesn’t know Wrath until he knows mineeeeee!” on his LiveJournal in the middle of the episode I puked a little bit. It may have been the 9lbs of confetti cake I had shoveled guiltlessly into my gullet today, but it also could have been the overwrought dialogue. I mean, why is Dexter so fucking butthurt about Gellar? It didn’t make sense.

The glory of this turn is that now it doesn’t have to.

Up until this point, I wasn’t buying the Dexter raging against Gellar nonsense. They didn’t have any true animosity. He was just some dude in a cute little cardigan who liked carving ladies up and hooking them up to contraptions that flung their vaginal juices into faces and using dude’s dongs for spears in his spare time. He was just some dude who hired the saddest, saddest lackey ever. Now it makes sense. No one would ever have put up with the sort of shit that Travis put Gellar through during the season.  Now the kid is just Banana Cakes!

It also salvages the season from being a fucking redux of last season. Midway through this episode it dawned on me that Dexter was going through the same Dark Passenger Purging Proxy Time that he did last season with Lumen. Dex-Bro was going to purge Travis’ demons in order to get right of his own in a manner.  Again.

Now the guy is totally thirsting for the vengeance against a legitimate foe. Gellar is his Harry Analog, and they seem to get along more poorly that Harry and Dexter. No ethereal ice cream cones, no sword fights in the urinals the way Harry and Dexter spend some of their more fond moments. Still though, it’s a shame that they wasted so much fucking time getting to the reveal.

I know this shit is going to be divisive. As per my politics and preferred ice cream, I find myself in the middle of it. It feels a bit cheap, but it’s an electric shock to the season’s taint. It’s pumped up!, it’s awoken! I’ll choose the middle. Black? White? Slap both those flavors onto a fucking sugar cone and throw some sprinkles on it motherfucker!

There I lay.

How about you?