Since “Dexter” began its final season this week, it got me thinking about the best episode ever of the series. I actually thought the season premiere might be a contender. Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) as a coke fiend, Dexter (Michael C. Hall) attacking a driver for cutting him off, this is awesome! But it’s probably not fair, certainly not very interesting, to call the most recent episode to air the best. At least, I’m going to save that until the time when a series does unleash its quantifiably pinnacle work in mid-run. I’m sure it’s going to happen. Spoilers for an older “Dexter” episode follow.
The best episode of “Dexter” is obviously going to come from season four. Season four was rightfully a fan favorite season, because it had the strongest storyline, due to the best villain and a superior actor playing the villain. It was so good that I think subsequent seasons were unfairly criticized in its wake. You don’t have to keep having Trinity seasons to tell interesting stories and I was still interested in Lumen (Julia Stiles) and Travis (Colin Hanks) too. Although I am very much against the season six subplot where Deb was encouraged by a licensed therapist to explore romantic feelings for her adopted brother. That’s unacceptable. Even if you’re adopted, you don’t date your sibling. But that’s not what we’re here to discuss today.
Season four introduced the Trinity killer, Arthur Miller, played by John Lithgow. Trinity commits a three part cycle of killings: a woman in a bathtub, a mother forced off a building, and a father beaten to death. Yet it seemed at home, Arthur Miller was the perfect husband and father. Trinity offered a possibility for Dexter, a family man who maintained his murdering habit, as Dexter was already spread too thin with the newborn Harrison, his day job and his night job. Season four saw him assume the identity of Kyle Butler to get close to Trinity. As Kyle, he saw that Miller was not a very nice father or husband at all. He was an abusive monster, all the more reason he had to be stopped.
My pick for the best episode ever of “Dexter” is episode 10 of season four, “Lost Boys.” This is the one where Trinity kidnaps a boy from an arcade and Dexter has to find him, without letting anyone in Miami PD know he’s looking for him because he still wants to kill Trinity himself. I remember when I first saw this episode the night it aired, I thought, “That’s a damn good hour of television.”
Trinity nabs Scott Smith (Jake Short) by impersonating a cop and takes him to a basement where he wants the boy to wear his pajamas and play with his trains. He calls the boy Arthur, because of course this was his own childhood. Dexter figures out that Trinity was always a four-parter, a Quadrilogy if you will. The young boys in his cycle were never attributed to the killer, because they were missing persons, not confirmed murders.
Because “Dexter” is a continuing narrative, where “Lost Boys” falls in the season makes a difference. It is using nine episodes to build this momentum. Since they’ve established Trinity’s three modes of killing, this kidnapping seems unsettlingly off pattern, if you can say we were comfortable with his three recurring murders as it were. When we learn that this isn’t a one-off, that there’s always been four, it compounds his character in a way that remains totally consistent with what we’ve seen up to this point.
Trinity’s scenes with the boy are truly chilling, a perfect vehicle for Lithgow to display his range as a scary killer and a sympathetic open wound of a man. His threats to starve the boy, eating hamburgers in front of Scott, are just cruel and frighteningly manipulative to get the boy to re-enact the scene Trinity is creating. When Trinity starts to cry, he actually gets Scott’s sympathy.
By now Dexter regrets letting Trinity live this long. Anyone Trinity hurts at this point is on Dexter. Of course he’ll pay the ultimate price in the shocking season finale, but we don’t know that yet. We just want him to save this kid, and this episode at least relieves our tension in a positive way at the end. At this point, it’s also been revealed that reporter Christine Hill (Courtney Ford) is Trinity’s daughter. In “Lost Boys,” Arthur is particularly cold to Christine which is even more poignant contrast to his methodical and emotionally motivated killings.
However, “Lost Boys” is the best episode ever because it works so well as a standalone thriller while moving the season long plot forward. Any given episode of “Dexter” will create suspense as Dexter has to do good police work, but also keep important clues from his colleagues so that he can pursue the killer as a vigilante. “Lost Boys” adds a ticking clock of finding Scott, and the suspense of Dexter’s hunt for Scott is expertly crafted. Covering his own tracks is one thing. Saving a kid makes Dexter an active hero.
Dexter figures out that Trinity is using a vacant house for his misdeeds with Scott, so he gets a list of houses on the market and searches them one by one. Of course we know that Scott’s not going to be in the first house he searches, and really we know that he’s going to be in the last house. That’s just common sense for filling an hour of cable TV time. It’s the other arm of the ticking clock though. One of these houses has to be Trinity’s site and thank God Dexter is smart enough to figure it out, because the cops officially on the Scott Smith case are not. Of course, that suits Dexter just fine. He can save Scott and keep Trinity for himself.
Trinity and Lithgow may have been too tough an act to follow, but I’ve remained happily on board ever since (well, I wasn’t happy about the adoption incest angle from Deb, but other than that…) Usually “Dexter” is an ongoing interest without standout episodes per se. I want to know what happens next, and I keep up to date, but it’s not about each individual hour, even when certain hours contain big surprises. “Lost Boys” was the one episode of “Dexter” that made me fully invested in the current drama. I didn’t care how the Trinity case would resolve in the finale, or what Dexter would do about that neighbor guy hitting on Rita (Julie Benz). It was all about finding Scott right now, but the events of “Lost Boys” would indeed pay off, maintaining its place in the series as the best episode ever.
