Contributor: Gregg Wright
There’s a part of me that’s been struggling to remain interested in watching this show since somewhere around the second half of the season began. After Dexter’s brief trip to Nebraska, I was rather optimistic that the show would quickly get back on track. But things haven’t been the same since then. I’ve been putting most of the blame for this on the shoulders of that dreaded twist. So I had hoped that the season might start to get more interesting, now that the twist was behind us. And to a minor extent, it does.
“Ricochet Rabbit” could be said to mark the beginning of the season’s closing act. Must of it is dedicated to setting up the climax. Travis is on the loose and preparing for the final act of violence, which he believes will bring about the Apocalypse. And Dexter, more frustrated than ever, is focused on finding him and killing him. Dexter now sees his entire experiment with religion to be a complete mistake. Through helping Travis escape his Dark Passenger, Dexter had hoped to possibly find some peace with his own, but it didn’t work out that way.
It does help that the season now has a clear antagonist and a clear, impending threat in the form of the Wormwood chemical attack. Making Miami Metro the target is a good way of upping the stakes. All of the main characters are now at risk of not surviving the season. But this twist, which I originally thought might turn out to be a good idea, seems to have only damaged the season. Travis is no longer the conflicted, misguided soul who wants to do the right thing, but finds himself corrupted by religion and Gellar’s influence. Now he’s just insane, and apparently always has been.
For me anyway, this makes the character significantly less interesting than I thought he was. It might have helped if they could have found a way to keep Travis somewhat sympathetic, even as he deals with his Dark Passenger (then again, maybe that’s the route they’ll take in the end, considering all the comparisons being made between Travis and Dexter). But now it just feels like Head Gellar’s personality has been transplanted into Travis. Of course, this would make sense, given that this version of Gellar only ever existed in Travis’s own mind.
I think I would have preferred that Gellar have served a similar role for Travis that Harry does for Dexter: Gellar being the mentor who had such a strong grip on his protégé in life that his influence is felt even after death. This would have allowed them to keep their twist, but not have to simply discard all the development of Travis up to that point. It may be that the remaining two episodes will focus more on the aspects of Travis’s character that we’d come to know in the pre-twist part of the season. That’s what I’m hoping for anyway.
I do have another reason to be optimistic about the next two episodes, and the next two seasons, thanks to Showtime president David Nevins’ latest comments. Saying anything more specific might be considered a spoiler. But at the very least, I’d like to say that we now have reason to believe that the season finale actually might not suck this time. I want to analyze this episode further and make some predictions, but I would find it almost impossible to discuss any of these possibilities in a way that ignores the context added by David Nevin’s comments. If you’ve been following my reviews for this season and the last one, then you probably already have a pretty good idea of what I want to see in this season’s finale (and, to a certain extent, what I want to see in the final two seasons).
Rating: 7/10
