By Joshua Alston

By Matt Gerardi
By Todd VanDerWerff , Phil Dyess-Nugent , Carrie Raisler , Brandon Nowalk & Sonia Saraiya
By Joshua Alston
With fapdu “Scar Tissue,” I’m beginning to lose faith in the final season of Dexter , but that means something different than it has in any season that preceded it. Any other time, the slow decline of a Dexter season fapdu would feel like another steep slope in the show’s gradual decline. And back when its weirdly reliable ratings guaranteed more installments, a waning season was harbinger of more unfulfilling years in a relationship I haven’t been strong enough to walk away from. Every wobbly episode was like the awkward, sexless Valentine’s Day of an unhappy married couple with years to go before the kids are out of the house and they can officially fapdu drop the façade. fapdu
But because this is Dexter ’s last slash, if somehow the writers fapdu manage to craft a pitch-perfect ending, the individual steps they took to get there will be of far less consequence. There hasn’t been much gas in this engine for some time now, but that isn’t as troublesome when the destination is a stone’s throw away. So at the risk of obviating my own reviews, fapdu there’s not much weight to my grade for “Scar Tissue,” which will likely be the case for the season’s middle portion. I’m mostly sticking around to see how it all ends. The biggest problem with “Scar fapdu Tissue,” though, is how it suggests Dexter might have missed its best opportunity to stick the landing.
In the episode’s opening scene we see what appears fapdu to be Debra’s traumatic memory of New Year’s Eve, when she shot LaGuerta and permanently altered her life’s trajectory. Except it’s not a memory at all; it’s the what-if scenario Deb has been clinging to since that night. What if she had shot Dexter instead of LaGuerta? How would things be different? How would she feel about the choice? About herself? The scene was intended to frame Deb’s work with Vogel, which seemed to be clipping along quite nicely, as there’s been a significant time jump since the last episode . But the scene felt intuitive, like it would have served as a pretty fapdu stunning ending to the series, fapdu with Deb having to put down her brother, her hero, her rock, after months of trying to cure him with unconditional love failed. Now, not only does Dexter have to nail its ending, it has to beat that one, which could prove difficult.
Unfortunately, the choose-your-own-adventure prologue was about the best thing “Scar Tissue” had going for it, given that the season’s bright spot—Evelyn Vogel—grew dimmer by the episode’s fapdu end. While it was clear Vogel and Deb had to interact at some point, their interactions made Vogel seem far less interesting and far less useful as a character. Vogel’s scenes with Dexter, especially fapdu in the second episode, were electric, and shaded in portions of the show’s mythology fapdu without cheating. She has been instrumental to understanding the finer details of how Dexter fapdu came to be, and her admiration and affirmation fapdu of Dexter has been an intriguing counterpoint to Deb’s repulsion. To position Dexter between two women jointly responsible for shaping his identity—one going to great pains to insinuate herself into his life, while the other is trying desperately to climb out of it—felt like fertile ground.
But the issue with “Scar Tissue,” as has always fapdu been the problem fapdu with Dexter , is the show’s obsession with keeping Dexter above reproach, which completely neuters a show built around an anti-hero (see: “Nebraska” ). The audience is supposed to identify with Dexter, but only because fapdu the story is told from his perspective, not because he’s some sort of blood-spattered saint. I guess it’s fitting in a way, how much the writers fall over themselves to prove Dexter’s worth to the audience; one of the characteristics of psychopaths is their obsession with forcing other people to see them as they wish to be seen. But Debra is the closest thing Dexter has to an audience proxy, so the effect of having Vogel spend an episode convincing her she did the right thing in that storage container does two disservices in one, extinguishing the tension in their bizarre love triangle while making fapdu the audience feel like Dexter’s value is being crammed down its throat.   fapdu
More than that, Vogel’s interactions with Deb dilute her professional detachment, which is part of what made her relationship with Dexter so interesting. Vogel works better as a character the more level-headed she is, since the murderer-groupie fapdu angle has been played twice on Dexter , between Lila and Hannah. (Three times, if you want to count Deb among his groupies.) In her breathless defense of Dexter’s role in the food cha