Since the third, or perhaps fourth, season, Dexter has created a pleasing formula: a ‘monster’ of the week, with an arc storyline often featuring a serial killer played by a notable actor. Usually, this actor is playing against type: Jimmy ‘The West Wing’ Smits, John ‘Third Rock from the Sun’ Lithgow and Jonny ‘Doctor Who: Kinda’ Lee Miller (I’m sure he’s in something more famous but I can’t think of it at the moment) have all let their hair down, hammed up their performances and gone bad. In season six we find Edward James Olmos and Colin Hanks, Olmos from Battlestar Galactica and Hanks from Tom Hanks’ loins, playing a pair of religious nutters, one a dominating academic the other a nervy, naive protégée, who spreads the word across sleazy, sweaty Miami with a sequence of inventively symbolic, but bloody, murders. The series is riddled with allusions to religion. Each season of Dexter has a recurrent theme like this that drives the arc storyline and feeds more subtly into the individual episode plots. In the past it has been Dexter’s role as a husband or as a father, his desire to lead a ‘normal’ life despite his propensity toward violent murder or revelations about his childhood. In season six, however, the theme of religion is, initially at least, plugged into the storylines a little heavy-handedly. The overall narrative of Olmos and Hanks’ cultish killings is well crafted but the sudden appearance of religion everywhere Dexter turns is a bit unlikely, even in the heightened Dexter universe. Having said that, as the season progresses the writers become more subtle interweaving the religious elements with a wider dissection of the main character’s struggles with his ‘dark passenger’. As always with Dexter, the acting is heightened but believable. Michael C Hall is the centre of the cast, but it is Jennifer Carpenter who really impresses with her mixture of innocence and potty-mouthed sensuality. The villains are also well played, Olmos is sinister and remote while Hanks somehow manages to be simultaneously nervy and ice-cold. The supporting cast are also excellent, their respective subplots all orbit these main characters but all have a part to play in shaping the arc storyline. Notably, Brother Sam, played believably by Mos Def, acts as an ‘anti-Dexter’, an ex-killer with a similar dark passenger, but one that is kept in check by his faith. Follow Den Of Geek on Twitter right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
