‘Dexter: New Blood’ Episode 3: Smoke Signals

Warming up after an onset consisting of two relatively warm and whiny episodes, Dexter: new blood Chips the ice on the fun of the original series in episode three. Not hammering a nail in the coffin in terms of Dexter Morgan / Jim Lindsay murder puns and bashing, but it’s worth noting that the best episode in this first set of three is the one that least introduces its main character. . I’m just saying.

Where the first two episodes were almost entirely about Dexter / Jim moping in the small town of Iron Lake, New York, screaming into his sandwich wanting to be a better man and a better dad, then almost immediately killing someone and dissolving in complaints of having to drive his child somewhere – this episode, “Smoke Signals” spends a good chunk of the running time following Harrison who, as far as we can tell, has grown into a solid man and respectable in no time, while also containing a thick trail of darkness, inherited from his father. But while Dexter tasted like blood, he was prowling around Miami and now New York, just waiting for the chance to apply his strained form of justice by killing. Harrison seems like a carefree guy, happy to chat with girls, hang out with different social circles at school, and laugh at drones until he has to right a wrong by stepping up, in broad daylight, to take a tyrant by the throat. Those elements of character, those flashes of light and dark, are what we lacked in Dexter. Looks like we don’t need Dexter to provide them to us when we have her kid.

When Harrison learns that his new classmate, Zach, is fishing for a loner named Ethan, he wastes no time in letting her know. Walking past the popular children’s table occupied by his crush Audrey (Johnny Sequoyah), Harrison walks over to Ethan, sitting alone, and joins him. He tells her clearly and honestly that he’s getting caught chatting and that the text exchange he thought he was having with a boobtacular blonde is actually with Zach, who has been tormenting him since elementary school, then calmly eats his lunch. which impressively includes a hot dog AND a burger.

To help Ethan get revenge on his bully, Harrison makes a GIF of Zach making passionate love to a goat that Ethan triggers in his text thread. When Zach bursts in, his chest swelling under his man of letters jacket, to smash his face like a bully against a nerd, Harrison steps in and grabs Zach by the throat, immobilizing him while threatening with him. do this every day if he doesn’t leave Ethan alone. Watching this happen was like watching a black and white movie turn into color. Now * that * gives the impression Dexter. This is what we missed.

As Harrison annihilates his school placement exams, joins the wrestling team, helps Audrey organize a proper funeral for the White Dollar Matt Caldwell shot, and battles the bullies, Dexter / Jim battles ghost Deb over what to do. do with Matt’s leftovers. His girlfriend Angela, the police chief, brought in a crime scene investigator so he could shed light on Matt’s disappearance. After analyzing the blood, he determined that someone (Dexter / Jim) had attempted to throw the police off the trail by mixing deer blood with human blood. Now that it is known that the blood in the snow was, in fact, Matt’s police dogs are brought in to hunt him for him. Since it was most recently in small pieces wrapped in plastic under Dexter / Jim’s fireplace, it’s going to have to be moved. As Dexter / Jim discusses the options with the ghost Deb, who still clearly thinks he’s dirt, we review a fantastic scene of Deb putting Matt’s pieces into a wood chipper outside the high school, spraying powder. blood and blood on the heads of passing students. and on Dexter’s windshield. “A little Fargo, don’t you think ?! “Dexter / Jim screams like a ball of cheese.

Dexter / Jim concludes that the best way to stop the police dogs from finding Matt’s remains is to dig them up, take his hunting vest out of the bag, and dance in the snow with them. He rubs it in the blood of the crime scene, wipes it off the trees, then drops it for the dogs to find, regardless of the surveillance cameras he just learned were all around this. zoned. In his own words, he got rusty in his abstinence.

Having procured himself some time, he goes the next day to an abandoned mine with Matt’s body parts with the intention of throwing them into the depths, but is frightened by a bear as a scene of Scooby doo. In the end, he puts them in an industrial oven in the heart of town so Matt’s ashes can rain down on his own father’s head, drunk with beer and chanting whoo hoo on the sidewalk.

The most interesting element of this episode, which surprisingly and thankfully packed a lot of oomph, is the mystery behind the identity of the man trapping and chasing young women in this town. We track down Hamburger Girl, still trapped in the hotel / cabin, in which she’s been held for a short time after we met her in episode one, and get clues as to who might be behind it. As she is curled up in a corner of her bedroom, a man in camouflage is seen putting on a ski mask, gloves and lowering the needle of his record player on a 45 from Del Shannon’s “Runaway”. He presses a button that opens a door to the room and the girl, seeing an opportunity to escape, grabs it. She doesn’t go far, however. As soon as she hits the snow, he focuses his rifle’s laser sight on her and shoots her down like another deer. It’s the plight of young women in movies and TV shows, problematically. While men are killed for killing animals and other people, women are only killed for recreation.

Based on this nut’s eye color and build, it goes on to either Edward Olsen (Frederic Lehne) or Kurt Caldwell (Clancy Brown). They both exhibit shady demeanor in this episode that could point to one or the other. In one scene, where Audrey is stranded in the road with her broken down car, Edward stops and asks her if she wants to sit in his car with him where there is the television, the heater and the sodas. The antics typical of predators. She tells him to bow down, naturally, and he responds with the ominous statement, “One day you will understand how the world works.” Be careful. ”And in Kurt’s case, he later tells Dexter that he met his son Matt, who we all know is more than dead at this point. So what’s going on? It’ll be exciting to find out. And I’m excited that this show may end up being a worthy revival after all. Not because of Dexter / Jim, but despite him.

• Dexter / Jim can’t stop sighing at all this wilderness, snow and privacy he has, but anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows that this is not how small towns work.

• There’s something odd about the cop who keeps talking to Harrison about wrestling. It seems like this could be a possible pedo scenario, or maybe I’m reading too much into things. There is just something rude about it.

• Cute little Easter egg in the form of pocket novels next to the kidnapper / killer’s laptop. As he watches Hamburger Girl, a stack of Clyde Phillips books is shown around the room just before he kills her. Phillips is the producer of this show, many other shows, and also a novelist.