‘Dexter’ review: Season 7’s finest hour … or its worst?

After watching Sunday night’s episode of “Dexter,” we have a feeling already that it may very well be looked at as one of the most polarizing for the entire Showtime series four episodes into the new season. After all, this was probably the most slow-moving hour of the season when it comes to some of what actually happened: Isaac still has not confronted Dexter about what he found out with Louis and the boat, there was no mention of LaGuerta or the blood slides (even though we know that they are coming up next week), and we only had a few brief minutes of Yvonne Strahovski’s character of Hannah McKay.

Instead, this episode was more of what we like to call a psychological slow burn in that there was some pretty important events that happened over the course of the hour, and they contribute more to character development rather than key plot points. Sure, we all know that Dexter managed to kill Ray, but we also knew that this was never a man destined to be around on the for a long period of time. The real significance here came in seeing Deb’s face when Dexter told her that the smoke coming out of the chimney was his ashes; she didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but was happy she was dead.

While the relationship this week did not get to the full-on creepy level of the end of last season, there were some moments here that still may have made some people who hated that story uncomfortable and rather angry. With that, this is probably the most polarizing episode of the season since almost everything was about Dexter and Deb, including his decision to ship Harrison off to his grandparents’ for a few weeks. The only element of the story that was not about these two was seeing Isaac try and pin the killing of Mike on a bartender, which was something that Batista was not so willing to buy given the evidence that was before him.

What did you think about this episode, and were you at all concerned that the main story may not be moving along fast enough?