TV Detail: Dexter Review. Season Premiere and Episode 3.02

The first two episodes of Dexter’s third season open with the kind of uncharacteristically contrived setups that brought the first two seasons to their hasty conclusions. In the premiere, Dexter (Michael C. Hall) is briefly at the cheeriest we’ve seen him in some time after he avoided detection late last season with the kind of dumb luck he’s been taught his whole life to avoid. His escape was liberating in that sense, with the mythology surrounding his father apparently settled and a new sense of possibility ahead of him.

That, alas, fades quickly as Dexter accidentally kills the brother of the powerful District Attorney Miguel Prado (Jimmy Smits, new to the series) during a botched attempt on a drug dealer’s life, a new plot that initially feels like it’s in search of a purpose. But by the end of the superior second episode, there’s a new sense that maybe the show's attempt to move in a new direction will pay off, even if it all falls into place a little too hurriedly.

As Dexter and Rita try to figure out her pregnancy, there’s finally a renewal of the anticipatory, week-to-week intensity that drove the series in the past. The early inconveniences of the pregnancy provide a different kind of existential question for Dexter as he begins to wonder if his child would pick up some of daddy’s less savory habits, and the final cliffhanger—when Prado stumbles in on Dexter’s bloody attempt to clean up the mess he created—is an ingenious spark for a new plotline that felt otherwise dead from the moment it was introduced.

Parting note: What about the Debra-Internal Affairs connection—what’s up with that?