'Dexter' review: Did the season jump the shark in the kill room?

The current season Dexter was going along pretty well for a while. The whole Deb-finds-out-Dex-is-a-serial-killer was the shocker it was intended to be, and Deb’s reaction was well-calibrated. The announcement that Chuck‘s Yvonne Strahovski had been cast as some sort of maybe-criminal, maybe-romantic, maybe-both new character seemed like a good antidote to what turned out to be the dim Lumen of Julia Stiles. But this week — hoo, boy… SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS WEEK’S DEXTER.

The hour had Dexter cozying up to Strahovski’s Hannah, the better to confirm that she played a part in the killings committed by her late boyfriend Wayne Randall. They flirted, she gave him a plant for his apartment. Meanwhile, Deb’s mission to keep an eye on Dexter seemed to have subsided… why, exactly? Because now Dexter can be trusted? No, it was really because the series needs for Dexter to be free to kill to keep the show moving ahead. People tune in to see Dexter kill bad people. And so Deb’s revelation — which had conveniently put to rest the icky notion that she was feeling romantically attracted to Dexter — now also seems in the process of being pushed to the limbo land of discarded Dexter sub-plots.

By the end of this week’s hour, his suspicions about Hannah confirmed to his satisfaction, Dexter lured her into a dreamy amusement-park kill room. He had her bound securely on the table, had raised his knife, and then… passion overtook Dexter. Like something out of a Fifty Shades of Gray-influenced romance novel, he slashed his binding tape, beheld the glory of a naked Hannah, and it was Lust On The Kill Table.

I’ll tune in next week to see how this plays out, but unlike Dexter, my heart’s not really in it. How about you?

Twitter: @kentucker