"Dexter" Season 4, Episode 10 Review: “Lost Boys”

By our guest blogger, Eva Medoff

With only two episodes left, “Dexter” managed to continue last week’s lukewarm winning streak (most of the season has been frigidly cold) with Sunday night’s episode, “Lost Boys.” In a return to the tried-and-true “Dexter” format, this episode finds Dexter racing against the clock to stop an imminent threat. Meanwhile, Deb is hot on reporter Christine’s trail, and Batista and Laguerta continue their hormonal teenage romance.

Spoilers will follow in this review, so if you haven't seen the episode and don't want to know what happened, stop reading now.

Last week, in the most explosive scene of the season, Dexter blew his cover with Arthur and let his “dark passenger” emerge. No longer posing as sweet, confused Kyle Butler, he tails Arthur and plans to take him out immediately. This is foiled, however, when Arthur abducts a 10-year-old boy from a carnival, and Dexter realizes his killing pattern has four victims--not three.

Dexter’s next stop is Arthur’s house, where he enlists Trinity’s abused teenage son, Jonah (Brandon Eaton), to help him locate his father’s whereabouts. Realizing that Arthur is supposedly on a two-day charity trip, he knows this is the time he has to stop him from murdering the young boy. In a threatening phone call, Arthur promises Dexter that he will leave the boy’s innocence intact--which in Trinity language can’t mean anything good.

Deb invites Christine Hill to the department to hold their interview. She ends up turning the tables on Christine, however, when she takes her into an interrogation room and has Batista listen in. When Deb takes out photos of Lundy’s dead body, Christine panics and abruptly calls off the interview. Even more incriminating?  She can’t explain how she got to the crime scene as fast as she did.

Batista now agrees with Deb that Christine must have been involved, especially since she’s the same height as Deb and Lundy’s shooter. Not willing to give up, Deb convinces Quinn to give her Christine’s tooth brush in order to get a DNA sample. And guess what they find? That Christine is related to Trinity, of course.

Realizing the cops are on her tail, Christine panics and calls Daddy. This is where the show needed to do some explaining. Apparently, she wasn’t doing her father’s dirty work, or he wasn’t the one ordering her to do it. She doesn’t even know the extent of her father’s homicidal past--only about the bathtub murders, which she pieced together off the basis of a childhood memory. For reasons not yet clear, Arthur keeps her away from his other family and only visits her a handful of days a year, and Christine is starved for his attention and crazed by daughterly devotion. This led her to help “protect” her father and murder Lundy.

She admits this much to Arthur, who acts touched and tells her they’ll figure out how to deal with the police. Once he drives away, however, it’s a different story, and his true evil side emerges. It’s clear he plans to do away with her later on, rather than comfort her. Now that his guard also is down with Dexter, it’s particular fun watching John Lithgow play the bad guy.

Arthur takes the young boy to a bomb shelter at a deserted house and forces him to wear pajamas, listen to music from the '60s and answer to the name of “Arthur.” It’s supremely creepy. In every “kill cycle,” he abducts a boy the same age he was when his sister died, and kills him five weeks before the time he had caused his sister’s death 30 years prior. Lastly, he doses him out with medication, zips him up in a duffle bag, and drops him alive into a block of wet cement. So this is what he means about “preserve his innocence.”

Luckily, Dexter is there to prevent this from happening, but Trinity still gets away. We cut to Christine’s house, where she’s pacing nervously when the doorbell rings. We’re to assume it’s Arthur, but in fact it’s Miami Metro coming to arrest her.

In essence, nothing too exciting happened on “Lost Boys.” It seemed to take its sweet time with Dexter tracking Arthur, and even a boring side story with (who else?) Rita and Cody. (Did I mention the insufferable downer that is James Remar as Dexter’s father, Harry Morgan?) It’s nice to see Jennifer Carpenter up to her usual hilarious brilliance as Deb, especially now that her mourning period for Lundy is over and she can return to her crass self. Despite the slow pace of “Lost Boys,” however, the tension is there. Now, there’s only two episodes for “Dexter” to show us it still knows how to use it.