PremiereWatch: 'Dexter'

Sunday (Sept. 28) night's third season premiere of Dexter piled up the body count and set us up for another morally twisted season, but much of the watercooler conversation will surround the final revelation.

[Obviously we've got some spoilers a-comin'. Duck, or they might hit you.]

Thanks to the wonders of Showtime screeners, I watched the fourth season finale of Weeds and the new premiere of Dexter on the same night, yielding an interesting sort of synchronicity.

On the finale of Weeds, you had Nancy Botwin's alleged and unplanned pregnancy basically saving her life. In the long-term, the Baby Botwin will probably cause complications, but for the purposes of preventing execution, the proto-kid was quite useful. Plus, for Nancy, the hypothetical baby offers the hope of maternal redemption, after her well-established parental miscues.

On the premiere of Dexter, we discovered that Rita (Julie Benz) is pregnant, setting up the possibility of Daddy Dexter down the road. The idea that Dexter, a man prone to taking lives, might also be able to produce life himself will be central to the rest of the season.

When Dexter premiered and delivered a remarkably strong first season, many critics (yeah, myself included) wondered at the resilience of the formula. Dexter works for the cops, but he also kills people. How many episodes can you get out of that? How many seasons? While some people were less appreciative of last season's Lila arc and while even I wish that Doakes' ending had been handled a bit differently, the second season of Dexter spun the story off in a new direction and now, based on the four episodes sent out for review, the show's creative team appears to have done it again.

Dexter is and always has been a show about rebirth, about the war between nature and nurture, between biological destiny and free will. How fitting, then, is it for Dexter to have to face the possibility of his own biological legacy? And how fitting for Dexter, so perpetually tied up in knots by the teachings of his father, to have to deal with the possibilities of his own fatherhood?

The groundwork was all set in last season's finale. After a year in which Rita transitioned from a convenient cloak of normalcy into an important emotional part of Dexter's life, our hero's defining action was saving Rita's children from a fire set by Lila. The act both cemented their position in his life, but also gave him the opening to travel to Paris to off her in the show's closing minutes, ending any chance that Jamie Murray would ever flesh her breasts on Showtime again.

Of the increasingly unhinged Lila, Dexter had said, "It's strange to have a creation out there, a deeply mutated version of yourself running lose and screwing everything up. I wonder if this is how parents feel."

Now he may get to experience the truth of that statement.

Or, as he also said in the finale after the inferno rescue, "I passed through the flames and rose from the ashes."

This season could probably be subtitled Dexter: Phoenix.

The first season of Dexter had our hero stalking a serial killer with ties to his past. In the second season, Dexter became the hunted. It appears that there will be a certain aspect of repetition this season, as it looks as if Dexter's latest victim is going to stir up a major investigation and darned if it won't eventually have to focus on our favorite spatter expert. In this case, he killed the brother of Miguel Prado (Jimmy Smits), one of the state's top prosecutors and an aspiring politico. Naturally, Miguel has a past with Lauren Velez's Laguerta, which means that for the second straight season, Laguerta will be too emotionally involved with the main case, which has always caused problems in the past.

At least last season Dexter was under siege because of murders he committed as part of Harry's set of rules to kill by. It looks like this season's key distinction is that the problematic murder was outside of Harry's Code, not premeditated in that endearing way that usually involves duct tape, Saran Wrap and fresh slides. Did Dexter kill an innocent man? Will Dexter actual experience guilt? How will having to face the family of his victim impact Dexter's conscience (or lack thereof)?

I'm on-board.

It's also good to see Jimmy Smits bounce back so fast from last fall's short-lived Cane. And even if his career may be settling into a "Cuban-Americans in Miami" mold, he's added a bit more accent to this character, plus a moustache. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that the relationship between Dexter and Miguel becomes wicked interesting in the episodes to come and that the back-and-forth between Smits and Michael C. Hall is as good as TV acting gets.

Other thoughts from the premiere:

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