S5 seemed like the show was chickening out. The ending with Lumen deciding she was okay after all, and returning to her regularly scheduled life - UGH! What a last-minute cop-out.
I really prefer when this show goes for the jugular and doesn't go all gooey eyed about the poor widdle victims. I was rooting for Lumen to turn out to be a worse psycho than the rapist gang, to decide that she was going to take it out on all men, and start surreptitiously attacking perfectly innocent men at random, doing unspeakable things to them, all under Dexter's oblivious nose, because he was blinded by equating Lumen with Rita and unable to see her for what she was. Of course, she'd be working her way up to Dex...
It was also a missed opportunity to see what happens when Dexter really spirals out of control, which is where I was hoping they'd go with Rita's death. If that's not the reason they killed her, then why do it? They've just returned to the status quo. That's an insult to the character, since her death amounted to zipola.
Another problem is that Dexter's three, arguably four,* kills that were off the Code have not been addressed, and I wonder if they will be. In S1 and S2, it was of supreme importance that Dexter adhere to the Code. He was willing to let Doakes go free, and rat him out, and cause terrible hurt to all of Dex's loved ones in the process, in order to adhere to the Code. Yet now, it's no big deal.
Granted, the only season when
Dexter was really go-for-the-jugular, was S1, when it was still conceivable that Brian might seduce Dexter into killing Deb. Ever since then, the show has had a tendency not to push the limits of what the audience might accept. The show is still very good, better than pretty much anything else on TV (its only competitors are
The Walking Dead and
Breaking Bad), but it could just blast through the barriers and become like nothing else on TV, and that tantalizing possibility is irksome.
*The pedophile who had never committed murder; the photographer who didn't commit any crime at all, that we know of; and the jerk that Dex killed in the men's room, just because he was angry are the three off-Code kills; and I'll count Miguel's brother who Dex killed when breaking into the drug dealers house as a "possible" because if Dex hadn't been breaking in, the brother wouldn't have died. Dex created that situation and should be held at least partly responsible for the outcome.
But really, my only hope for this season is that they finally move the Dex/Deb storyline forward in a big way.
Deb
HAS GOT TO find out this season. It's gone on too long. And next season needs to be the last. Have her find out as the cliffhanger this season, address the fallout next, and end the show. I don't want to see a great series turn into a joke just because Showtime is scared to let it go.
(Yes, I'm reading the novels, too.) But I should bow out of these threads. Can't hack the $20/month for Showtime, so it's back to DVDs for me...
