'Dexter' calm in series return

Dexter
3.5 stars

Sunday’s season five premiere of “Dexter” is a necessary decompression episode after last season’s intense finale. 

Spoiler alerts, of course. Dispatching the Trinity killer at the end of last season, Miami PD blood spatter-pattern analyst/serial killer Dexter (Michael C. Hall) returns home to discover that Trinity had been doing some dispatching of his own.

His wife Rita’s femoral artery had been cut, and she had bled out in the bathtub, while baby Harry sits in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.

Sunday’s episode picks up almost immediately where last December’s finale left off, with the arrival of the police, who witness Dexter’s own almost remorseless and inscrutable response. His sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) is also perplexed, though it is left to Dexter to sort out his own feelings. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” he muses in voice-over. “This is fate.”

My take: Appraising a full season of “Dexter” via the first episode is like looking at the sky through a straw. Much will happen that only the first hour hints at; but what this one hints at, exactly, is almost as unreadable as Dex himself.

The major story arcs are to come — Jonny Lee Miller and Peter Weller, for example, join later — while fans need to decompress and mourn Rita’s loss.
Verne Gay is a Newsday staff writer.