Dexter Season 4 Review: A Most Unholy Trinity

After an unspectacular season 3 marred by muddled plotting, pointless B-stories, and Jimmy Smits redefining the art of scenery chewing, Showtime’s venerable “Serial Killer With a Heart of Gold” drama Dexter returned a changed show brimming with suspense, character evolution, and the most horrifying villain ever to menace the small screen. Those B-stories though? Still hecka pointless.

Season 4 found Dexter uncomfortably adjusting to life in the suburbs with a wife & baby. Dating sweet single mom Rita may have started out as just a cover story to mask Dex’s nighttime hobby, but family life started to feel right for the self proclaimed soulless monster. Campouts and extra-nosy neighborhood watch folk made for some amusing stealth scenarios, but the heart of Dexter’s study in family life would come from a surprising and sinister mentor.

Enter John Lithgow as the Trinity Killer, a terrifyingly prolific murderer whose expertly crafted backstory was made even better in a series of tantalizing one piece at a time reveals. The season took delight in building, peaking, and unraveling a dynamic portrait of a man sick and damaged enough to constantly reenact his childhood through the death of strangers yet self aware and canny enough to build a near perfect social artifice. And the depictions of his ritualistic cycle of kills would be enough to haunt and sicken even a jaded veteran of Creative Serial Killer Theater (that means you, Silence of the Lambs and CSI).

Dexter and Trinity crossed paths thanks to the welcome return of Keith Carradine as FBI vet Frank Lundy, last seen in season 2 as an age inappropriate boyfriend for Dexter’s sister Deb. Frank may have retired, but he won’t hang up his gun without locking up the one killer smart enough to make most agents think he doesn’t exist. The season also makes room for some time suck rambling about a handful of illicit affairs among Miami’s finest, but that’s been an unfortunate par for the course through the entire series. Makes a good case for the viability of commercials, because Dexter would be even better at the lean 40-45 minutes the average network drama actually clocks in at. The lone standout side story revolves around Deb’s quest for intel on the seedy private life of Harry, the late father she once considered heroic. Fans know that too much digging will lead her straight into Dexter’s own tragic origin story– Harry was a cop who adopted Dexter after the bloody murder of Dex’s biological mom, Harry’s stool pigeon mistress.

I won’t ruin any more story details for those loyal fans who wait for DVD, but suffice it to say that Dexter season 4 represents 12 of 2009’s finest hours of television and features an ending so shocking that I simultaneously felt like I’d never want to watch again, yet somehow needed season 5 to start right away. That’s just the kind of power it holds.

Dexter, Season 4, Showtime

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Photographs courtesy of Showtime and Randy Tepper.