'Dexter' Season 7, Episode 3 - 'Buck the System' Recap

Could it be that Dexter is finally starting to chip away at Deb's moral shell? Will he get her to see that his way of doing things is, as she puts it, a "necessary evil?"

Dexter starts off the episode in a bad way: he's getting really antsy under Deb's watchful eye, having not killed anyone since Viktor. It's getting so bad that he's having serious urges to stab Masuka or slice up the lady at the Post Office. Then again, who hasn't had the urge to murder someone at the Post Office at some point?

He's so caged in (as symbolically represented by that scene in the claustrophobic alley) that he finally snaps and strangles an unwilling suspect who won't give him a swab. When Deb sees this, she finally agrees to give Dexter a little more space.

She doesn't really, though. She just follows him around in secret now. But being as skilled as Dexter is, he catches on to that pretty quickly and lures her to a bar where his new target, Ray Speltzer, is stalking his prey. He tries to state his case that he could save this girl before Speltzer kills her, but Deb doesn't want to hear it.

So the two are left to do their pas de deux with Dexter arguing his way, and Deb arguing the lawful way. When she fails to get a search warrant (it turns out that a hunch from your "lizard brain" doesn't work in the legal system), her conscience leads her to Speltzer's house.

Speltzer's modus operandi puts Dexter's to shame: he constructs a full-on labyrinth out of junk in abandoned houses, lures girls there, then dons a minotaur helmet and chases them through the maze. Yeah. This dude gets all mythological with his victims.

Deb, as it turns out, makes a pretty crappy Theseus, as she shows up too late to save the girl and almost gets herself killed, until Dexter comes in and saves her. Speltzer gets away, and Deb is left to wonder if Dexter really has things right, in a backwards kind of way.

But the girl's death wasn't the big one of the episode. Dexter ruins Louis' life quickly and easily by mailing the ITK hand back to Masuka from a fake buyer, which gets Louis fired on the spot. After that, Dexter sends Louis' little video with his hooker to Jamie, who dumps him in spectacular fashion. Dexter wins.

Louis, in a pretty poor effort to get back at Dexter, goes to the marina to sink his boat. Unfortunately for Louis, a GPS bracelet that Viktor had on him lead the Brotherhood to the same boat, where they found and killed Louis... but not before getting Dexter's name out of him. So, I guess Louis did just one more thing to screw up Dexter's like before taking a bullet to the head. Also, haven't we established that there are security cameras at this marina?

On the Quinn front, he cozies up with Nadia, who has been asked by the Brotherhood to spy on him. He's clearly about to get in some trouble. Meanwhile, Batista goes with Dexter to see recent roadkill Wayne Randall's old accomplice, Hannah McKay, who now runs a nursery (the plant kind, thank god) and is played by "Chuck" hottie Yvonne Strahovski. Sparks fly between her and Dexter. Former murderer love interest? Those always seem to end well for Dex.