'Dexter' Season 7, Episode 2 - 'Sunshine and Frosty Swirl' Recap

When we last left our murderous hero, he was staring straight at Deb, sitting in his living room with his knives and blood slides out on the table. "Are you a serial killer?" she asked. "Yes," he responded.

So, now what?

Well, for starters, Deb is a tad upset. The first thing she does is run out of the apartment and across the lawn and puke in the street, which honestly is probably what a lot of us would do if we found out our own siblings were serial killers. Dexter manages to calm her down enough to not have the conversation outside, but not enough to keep her from punching him in the  face and storming out. She's understandably upset: "I am the worst fucking detective in the world," she says.

Lucky for Dexter, Deb now considers herself an accomplice because of the Travis thing, so she doesn't arrest Dexter. Plus, that would be a PR nightmare. So she comes up with another solution: since killing can be like an addiction for people like Dexter, Deb will serve as his rehab. She'll stick with him 24/7 and make sure he doesn't kill again, making him quit cold turkey. Dexter, as you can imagine, is not pleased.

But he goes with it: he stays at Deb's house and the two of them drive to work together, eat together, go on the same assignments... they're like conjoined twins now.

It works for a while, but eventually Dexter has a problem: he finds out about the hand from Masuka, and learns that Louis is behind it. He desperately wants to get Louis out of his way, but can't break away from Deb long enough. He manages to break into Louis' place and interrogate him, and learns that it's all because Louis was miffed about Dexter dissing his game.

That's a bit weak. Are we really supposed to believe that Louis would value Dexter's opinion so much that he would have a meltdown and go on this elaborate revenge spree just because Dexter thought his game was a bad idea? If Louis really spent five years making the game, you would think he would get some feedback from a game developer or something.

In any case, Dexter's intimidation doesn't work, and Louis goes right back to taunting Dex. This enrages him so much that he actually drugs Deb's food so that she'll stay asleep and he can sneak out and kill Louis... but when it comes time, he stops himself and doesn't go through with it. Instead, he calls Deb and she comes to his aid. Dexter doesn't reveal the body to her, and leaves Louis to wake up later on a park bench.

What's interesting in all of this, though, is how Dexter is revealing his "dark passenger" to Deb. He's really being honest about it, and we get an idea of what goes on in Dexter's head just as Deb does. Apparently it all starts with the image of blood with him. Interesting.

So, Dexter starts to really believe that he might be able to be cured, especially when he starts talking to a convicted murderer, Randall, who fessed up to more murders and lead the police to the bodies of more of his victims. Dexter asks him why he had a change of conscience, and Randall says that he just "surrendered."

But any hope that Dexter has is dashed by the end of the episode: Randall commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a semi truck. As it turns out, he wasn't trying to clear his conscience: he just wanted to spend his last few days out in the sunshine, eating ice cream from the Frosty Swirl.

In the midst of all this, we have the crawling advances of Laguerta, who has recovered the evidence from the Bay Harbor Butcher case with Doakes and compared those blood slides to the one she found in the church. I highly doubt she needed to go through all that to see that they're the same, but whatever. She's on the case.

Quinn and Batista make some progress on Mike's shooting, as they find a bouncer at the strip club who dated the dead stripper. He coughs up Viktor's name, but obviously that won't get them very far. We do also see more of these mobsters, known as The Brotherhood, of which Viktor was a member. It's all terribly boring.

Is there hope for Dexter's rehabilitation? What will be Louis' next move? Tune in next week.