Dexter 5.01 “My Bad” Recap

Season five of Dexter picks up right where the stunning conclusion to Emmy-nominated season four left us.

For our review of “My Bad,” click here. Now, onto my recap of the great season premiere.

Dexter is on his knees in his front yard, clinging to a crying Harrison. The police arrive and ask him what happened. He doesn’t respond. The officer asks Dexter to hand Harrison over, but Debra arrives just at that moment and takes Harrison from Dex. “Rita’s inside. It was me,” he tells his sister.

Masuka and Quinn are inside the house, examining Rita’s lifeless body. “We’re looking at Trinity’s M.O. here,” says Masuka. Quinn points out that Trinity never killed a married woman in a bathtub before. “First time for everything,” retorts Masuka. Just then, Lt. LaGuerta and her husband Sergeant Angel Batista come into the room and see Rita, and immediately turn and leave. LaGuerta states to the crew that they need to support Dexter, but should leave the case to the FBI. Batista disagrees, saying that “Rita’s one of ours; she’s family.” They move out and the FBI moves in.

Outside, Dexter is standing in his front yard, stunned as he watches his wife is carried out in a bodybag. He points out that his neighbor Elliot is crying and he is not. An FBI officer comes up behind him and says that he’s ready for him, asking him why he said “it was me” when the responders got there. Dexter says he doesn’t remember what he said. Deb is inside the FBI truck already with Harrison, tells Dexter it’s time for them to go home. LaGuerta comes in and tells the officer off, telling him that if he wants to talk to Dexter, he can schedule an appointment. Dexter, his sister and his child go back to Deb’s apartment (formerly Dexter’s) and she asks him what he meant by “it was me.” He doesn’t respond.

The next day, Quinn and Masuka are listening to the 911 call that Dexter placed when he found Rita’s body. Quinn seems very suspicious, and points out that Dexter was very exact about the cut on Rita that caused her to bleed out and die. “His wife just died…he’s submitting a lab report,” says Quinn, who also points out that the neighbor was more broken up than Dexter was at the scene. LaGuerta comes over and reminds everyone that “the case is with the FBI now.” Masuka tells Quinn about how he told Dexter that he had seen that neighbor kissing Rita, which caused Dexter to punch him out.

Dexter wakes up to a phone call from Astor and Cody, who are at Disneyland with their grandparents. The kids ask to speak to their mother, but Dexter tells them that she’s in the shower. Deb comes in and says that she spoke to a funeral director who is willing to see them right away. They take Harrison and go and speak with him. When asked about the obituary, he excuses himself and walks into another room and observes a wake takign place. ‘So this is how normal people do it,’ he thinks. ‘This is what she would have wanted.’

We are then taken back to the first meeting between Rita and Dexter. Rita walks into a restaurant where Dex is waiting for her. Rita apologizes for being late, and says that she had gone to a restaurant in the city by mistake, not realizing he had invited her to a place that was quite a bit out of the way. She says “there must be something special to bring you all the way out this far,” thinking it was something on the menu. Just then, Dexter looks past her and observes a man, sitting alone, talking on his phone. That’s right, Dexter was hunting someone down even on his first meeting with Rita. He really had lied to her right from the very beginning.

At the wake, he watches the family grieve over the open casket. Deb comes up behind him with Harrison, and he thinks about how much he lied to Rita. She’s scheduled the funeral for the day after the next, chose an oak casket and white roses, and asks him if there’s a particular dress he’d like her to be buried in. “Not really,” he says. She says she’ll find something.

Deb and Quinn both go to Dexter’s house and scrub the bathroom clean of all the blood. After they complete the task, he asks her how she’s holding up. She begins to cry and he embraces her. Before they realize it, the two are kissing, and they pull each others shirts off and end up on the ground, frantically removing the rest of each others clothes.

Back at the apartment, Astor and Cody return from Disneyland. They give him mouse ears with his name on it, and show him the one they had made for Rita as well. He tells them to sit down because he needs to tell them something. “Something happened to your mom, ” he says. Cody asks if it was something bad. “Yeah, something bad.” Astor asks if she’s okay. “A man came into our house, and your mother came home and he killed her.” The kids are incredulous, as are their grandparents. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he tells them. (Interesting choice of word, Dexter.) Astor takes his mouse ear hat off and storms outside. He follows her outside. He tells her it will be okay, but she says “it won’t be. She’s dead…and it doesn’t even matter to you!…I can tell just by looking you don’t even care…you should have been there to protect her! That was your job.” He says he wishes that none of it ever happened, and she says that the family would have been better off if her mom never met him, and that she wishes he was dead.

Deb gets up off the floor of Dexter’s house and gets dressed. She takes some of Rita’s dresses out of the closet and leaves. Quinn asks her if she wants to talk about it as she leaves, but she says there’s nothing to talk about. She drives off, and then Quinn notices Dexter’s neighbor Elliot outside in his front yard. He talks to Elliot and finds out the story about how he kissed Rita and received a knockout punch from Dexter for it.

Deb arrives at the apartment to find Dexter watching Harrison sleep. She puts down the dresses and asks him where the other kids are. They’re a hotel with their grandparents. He explains to her that the kids took the news very hard. He blames himself again for Rita’s murder, and Deb reminds him that it isn’t his fault. He thinks it was because ‘I could have killed Arthur Mitchell the first chance I got.’

We return to the flashback of Dexter and Rita’s first date. The waitress makes a comment about how she understands now why he’d been sitting there alone for so long. If only she knew. The man Dexter was stalking gets up and leaves, so Dexter excuses himself. He puts on gloves and goes out to the parking lot, where his car is parked so close to that man’s car that the man can not open his door. Dexter opens his truck remotely, drugs the man and puts him in the trunk. He comes back inside to Rita, puts some money on the table and says he has to go because of a stomach bug. He apologizes and leaves. “It was nice meeting you,” she calls after him.

The next morning, Dexter is deleting files from his laptop. Deb reminds him of all the things he needs to do in preparation for the funeral, and he thinks about all the other things he needs to do, like gas up his boat. He asks Deb to be the person in Harrison’s life who is always there for him (“something decent in his life”) since his mother is now gone. “Love him as if he were your own,” he tells her. “He is my own” is her response. She reminds him how important he is to his son, and tells him he is decent and good too.

At the station, LaGuerta reminds Quinn that the case is not theirs, but he has something to tell her anyway. He says he went to clean up at Dexter’s house and talked to Elliot. He explains the kiss and punch to her. “Why are you telling me this? What are you implying?” she asks. He reminds her “when the wife is dead, 90% of the time the husband did it.” She receives a call and asks him to leave her office. LaGuerta then calls Deb to tell her that Dexter didn’t show up to his interview with the FBI. She goes back to the apartment to find the woman who lives downstairs feeding Harrison, not Dexter. She tries calling him, but gets his voicemail.

Dexter stands over Rita in her casket, and tells her he won’t be at the funeral because he doesn’t deserve to be. “I hope you don’t mind I chose that dress you were wearing when we first met,” he tells her. “I was never really honest with you. I’m a serial killer; that’s what I am. I led you to believe I’m a human being, but I’m not. That’s a lie.” He touches her hands briefly and leaves.

He goes to his storage unit, grabs some clothes, his tools and his blood slides. He sets everything else ablaze and leaves, while wondering where Harry is. He gets on his boat (the appropriately titled Slice of Life) and heads out of Miami. ‘I’ve disappeared so many people. My turn now, to disappear myself.’

Deb is at the funeral getting everything set up. The FBI watches from the distance, as they still haven’t heard from Dexter. She calls him, but he ignores it as he continues out of Miami. Then, looking at his phone, he has another flashback. This time, he’s on his boat disposing of a body he’d wrapped in his plastic bags. Rita calls him to check in and see if he’s feeling better. She tells him that she wasn’t completely honest with him; she has two kids. He tells her that he likes kids and that he knew already because Deb had told him about that, as well as the problems she had going on with her ex-husband. “So you know all about me,” she says. “I’d like to know more…so maybe we should get together again sometime.” She says she’d like that “a lot a lot” and she tells him that he makes her feel good. He says she makes him feel that way too. Then say goodbye. Back to the present, Dexter has his eyes closed and says “goodbye. I’m sorry.” Then, his boat begins to sputter and he realizes that he needs to get gas. He pulls over to gas up, and walks into a little store, where a man is angrily ringing the bell on the counter, needing the key to the bathroom. He calls Dexter a “retard” and tells him to leave, but instead Dex follows him into the bathroom. The two exchange some unpleasant words and Dexter explains to him that he had a tough week before picking up a sharp instrument and using it to bludgeon the man’s head. Dexter gets up and looks at himself in a dirty mirror, where he sees Harry standing behind him. “That’s the first human thing I’ve seen you do since she died, Dexter,” Harry tells him. “It’s okay son, to show what you’re feeling.” Dexter gets down on the ground, where he lets out multiple screams of anguish. “You need to go back,” Harry instructs him. Dexter falls over on his side and thinks about it.

The episode concludes with his eulogy: “She had a big heart. Big enough for both of us. Had to be. I wasn’t even human. When we first met, I never expected that to change. She reached out and found something I didn’t even know was there. She never hurt anybody. She was innocent and she died a brutal death and I can’t…fix it…but I know I have to try here in Miami with the people who knew her, who cared about her, who loved her.”

‘Like I did,’ he says to himself.