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‘Dexter’ recap: “This is all much easier with a partner”

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Tonight as Dexter told Deb that Harry had told him that some people deserve to die, I wondered, where has Harry been this season? It feels like we haven’t seen him around for several episodes, and I’m starting to miss him: someone needs to tell Dexter to dump Lumen already, because she’s probably bad news and god knows she’s no fun.

I said it last week and I feel the same this week: Lumen’s character isn’t doing a lot for me, I think because her character doesn’t give us much to sink our teeth into. What is she really like? What’s she going to do with herself once her romp with Dexter is over? Meeting Owen, her former fiancé, didn’t shed a lot of light on her either. All I know is that she presses her lips together in a perturbed sort of way, quite often. Moreover, as a sidekick, partner, whatever, so far she isn’t taking the show to a new place worthy of following last season.

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In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t find tonight’s episode to be one of the more edge-of-your-seat installments of the season. Dexter tracks Cole at one of Jordan’s seminars, and eventually he and Lumen kill him, as they had essentially planned to do in last week’s episode. I remember when Miguel Prado eventually joined Dexter in murdering there was something giddy and terrifying about the new addition, but I felt nothing with Lumen there, either from Dexter’s point of view or Lumen’s own catharsis. Sad to say, even if we knew what Dexter and Lumen mean to each other, I don’t think there are boatloads of chemistry between Michael C. Hall and Julia Stiles to enjoy just for fun’s sake.

Thankfully this season still has Stan Liddy and Jordan Chase, the two wild cards. As was suspected, it turns out that Jordan Chase was likely involved with Lumen’s rape and torture. More enticing of course is Jordan himself, a man so creepily self-assured it seems quite probable that he knows Dexter’s tracking him down and killing his colleagues yet still invites him up onstage with him and lets him know he knows everything about his life. The show’s writers are obviously having fun with the character, too: I especially liked the buttons for sale at the seminar featuring Jordan wearing his wireless mic.

Stan Liddy of course is the crooked cop Quinn’s employed to follow Dexter and Lumen on behalf of Quinn. It’s useful that he and Deb now have a common enemy: Laguerta, who’s thrown Deb under the bus for the fiasco at the night club. Liddy’s got Lumen and Dexter on film tossing something (IE, Cole) into the ocean from the boat. Potentially bad news for Dexter and Lumen, good news for us?

--Claire Zulkey

Julia Stiles as Lumen. Photo: Randy Tepper/Showtime

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