Best episode yet this season? If you, like me, are enjoying Julia Stiles as Lumen Pierce, then you probably thought it was. It was certainly the most suspenseful episode of season five. Dexter came dangerously close to seriously screwing up this week thanks to Lumen making her first, inexperienced and poorly thought out kill.
After dropping Lumen off at the airport Dexter thought he was free to enjoy things like hearing his adorable son’s first words – either “bye bye” or “die die” depending on what you want to hear. So he went back on the hunt, targeting a slimy Miami man who targeted men on the internet who were looking for a good time. It was easy for Dexter to catch his prey – all he had to do was post an ad online and the guy showed up, practically begging to be drugged and pulled into a kill room set up in a camper. The rest should have been easy as 1-2-3, but then Lumen called – she’d killed one of the guys who attacked her and didn’t know what to do.
Lumen is not an entirely likable character. In fact, she can be pretty darn hateful at times. She shot a guy but didn’t anticipate what a mess all that gushing blood would make. She didn’t check the dude’s pulse. She left the room without checking the dude’s pulse. And then when Dexter arrived to help and asked a few questions she gave him more ‘tude than Astor used to.
Oh, and that shrink-wrapped guy that Dexter had planned to kill? Yeah, he was just thrown in the trunk while Dex tried to clean up Lumen’s mess. The mess that got a whole lot messier when the victim disappeared. Dexter and Lumen started tracking the blood to find her not-so-dead victim, but the police were on their tails. To make matters worse, Lumen had based her kill on her senses, since she’d been blindfolded during her own horrific experiences. As Dexter put it, she based a murder on a feeling and an odor.
Meanwhile, I actually liked the subplot this week. It felt like for the first time this season everything tied together. LaGuerta and Batista were fighting again (what’s new?) but since Batista was on a stake-out at a club with Deb and Quinn, their storylines intertwined. Batista noticed that Deb felt jealous watching Quinn hit on girl after girl as they waited for the Santa Muerta gang members to show up at a nightclub they were known to frequent. Then Batista nabbed a girl wearing a Santa Muerta necklace who agreed to give up information on the gang in exchange for having drug charges against her dropped. That was Batista’s form of an apology gift – instead of getting LaGuerta flowers or a puppy, he gave her a major break in the investigation right when she needed it. Hopefully this means we can end the lovers’ quarrel and focus on the Santa Muerta stuff, which is actually pretty good. And now that Quinn and Deb have all but confessed their love for each other, I’m looking forward to that storyline getting complicated too. (Does anyone else feel bad that all of Deb’s relationships are doomed?)
So, back to Dexter. When he found Lumen’s victim he actually started to try and save the guy. Something tells me that saving other people’s murder victims does not really follow Harry’s code. But Dexter has a bit of a conscience now, and the guy was a family man and a dentist. Or at least he was until Dexter and Lumen overheard him on the phone calling one of his rapist buddies and saying “That last f***ing bitch is alive.” Looks like Lumen’s sense of smell is pretty good. After taking a call from the nanny and singing a song to his son, Dexter snapped the guy’s neck.
Dexter had Lumen start to clean up the room while he left to get his car before Deb and Masuka could see it. Then he sent Lumen back to his old house to clean up so he could dispose of the body before Homicide had a chance to discover it – and him. But there was a problem – the sicko wrapped in plastic in Dexter’s trunk awoke and escaped.
As if the suspense of Deb discovering Dexter, Lumen, or both wasn’t enough, the scene that followed was certainly the most nerve-wracking few minutes of the entire season. Dexter started to chase down his intended victim just as Deb and Masuka were nearing the area and would see them both – and the body inside. Dexter ran, ran, and ran until he finally grabbed the guy just seconds before he would have turned the corner and been spotted by Deb and Masuka. Dex strangled the guy and dragged him into the room with the other body, where he had just enough time to set it up as a fetishist sex romp gone wrong. He strolled out of the room, delivered a convincing “You won’t believe what I found in here” to Deb and Masuka, and let Masuka’s dirty mind take care of the rest.
I don’t know about you, but I was certainly holding my breath during that scene. And after everything this episode did to make me dislike Lumen, that last beautiful scene between her and Dexter reversed it – and then some. When Dexter returned to the house to find her sleeping in the bathtub, looking eerily like Rita, she calmed him when he became visibly distraught. She told him how she’d done everything right in her life, and had left town before her wedding to try and do things her own way. What happened to her in Miami had felt like a punishment. Lumen is so much like Dexter, and for the time being they’re in this together. Dexter’s final words, “How many more were there?”, certainly have my attention. Dexter has had friends before – Lyla, Manuel – but he’s never executed someone else’s revenge like he’s planning to do now.
What did you think of the episode? Do you love or hate Lumen?
