TV Review: Dexter 8.9, "Make Your Own Kind of Music"

rating: 1.5

"Make Your Own Kind of Music" isn't just the title of the Mama Cass song featured prominently in the episode of the same name, it appears to be an open challenge from the writers to the audience as if to say, "You think you can do better?" The answer is a resounding, "Yes." Even the Dexter viewers who eat up whatever the writers throw at them can agree that an episode this far into the series' final season being so boring is a real travesty. The entire episode was spent catching up to that which the audience already knew: Deb's coming back to Miami Metro, Cassie's boyfriend is The Brain Surgeon, and Vogel is connected to him. Plus Hannah's sticking around a bit longer for no other apparent reason than to retrieve money she was apparently going to leave behind at the end of the previous episode, presumably so she can either be captured or killed, which is the only real function any character on Dexter serves anymore. Plagued by what seemed like a more than usual amount of clunky, expositional dialogue (which is saying a lot for this show), "Music" was equally uninspired on every level. Maybe if the developments which did occur weren't seen coming so long ago they wouldn't have been so tedious to sit through. But even if we didn't know they were coming, nothing in this episode carried any weight or momentum. For example, watching Dex and Hannah retrieve money from Arlene was a complete waste of time. One might disagree by saying Dexter's accidental appearance in her home when Deputy U.S. Marshal Kenny Johnson stopped by Arlene's house helped throw the Marshal off Hannah's trail. But that forces the question of why Marshal Clayton was introduced at all. It's kind of funny how "Anything can happen on this show," might sound like an endorsement, but is actually a scathing cut-down. "Anything can happen," is only exciting when a series has consistency, reason, and meaning yet still works with those elements to surprise its audience. Dexter lacks all of those aspects. Anything can happen because there is no rhyme or reason to the plot, it simply unfolds as it needs to in order to either prolong the inevitable or get the writers out of a situation they couldn't actually, you know, write their way out of. The one thing this episode did which would be appreciated as something moving in the right direction, if I felt there was any actual forward momentum left in this series, was getting some information on Vogel's connection to The Brain Surgeon, Oliver Saxon, also known as Daniel Vogel, Evelyn's son. Turns out he was a psychopath (big surprise) who drowned his little brother, was sent to an institution, and used a deadly fire to escape and create a new identity which allowed him to learn how to dissect brain segments and wrap them like pieces of jewelry from Tiffany's to send to his mother decades later. I say this was almost a good move merely because the worst seasons of Dexter suffer from there being too great a distance between protagonist and antagonist, and after eight episodes there was nothing known about The Brain Surgeon or why Dexter would choose to involve himself with the Surgeon's shenanigans other than to protect his new mother figure. "Music" helped fill in some of those blanks, but only in the most basic, requisite fashion. Actually, it didn't even do that because now that Vogel knows the Surgeon is her estranged, psycho son she doesn't even want Dexter to protect her from him, and Dex wants to kill him simply because he invaded his home and killed innocents, and of course because we need to remember that Dexter isn't a morally questionable, narratively intriguing, mass murdering anti-hero who ever takes responsibility for the chaos he cultivates, he's an actual superhero who's just got to take out the bad guys before riding off into the sunset, except it's really boring. I guess we could say Vogel's delusions about helping her son reflect Dexter's delusions about living any kind of normal family life, something both Vogel and Deb each addressed in separate scenes with Dexter, perhaps the one thing this episode actually took effort to illustrate, but now that Vogel and her son are having tea together there's nothing keeping Dexter from running away to Argentina with Harrison and Hannah so I don't understand what it is we're supposed to care about on this show anymore, and this episode provided nothing €“ not one glimmer of hope €“ to suggest there is. In the case of Dexter, or any series, the audience is supposed to listen and the writers are supposed to make the music, not the other way around. But instead of listening to a dynamic and rich composition on the inevitable failure of a serial killer with "a depth of emotion," as Vogel puts it, we have to listen to (and internally compensate for lest our heads explode in frustration) the television equivalent of some crap pop album in the form of Deb and Hannah bonding over chicken salad, or Quinn being conflicted about his relationships with Jamie and Deb, or Elway yelling at Deb €“ none of which are reasonable or relevant! These are the scenes we have to endure in "Make Your Own Kind of Music" instead of anything actually happening which would bring us closer to some semblance of a satisfying resolution to a series which can hardly even be eulogized as having lost its way considering I'm no longer sure it ever knew it in the first place.