It’s really hard to separate what I think of the show on my own and what I gleam from here. For sure a huge part of me thinking about Gellar being a delusion came from here and other sites. But at least a part of the suspicion came from Travis and Gellars lunch where the waitress seemed to ignore him.
I have a similar deal going on American Horror Story about (censored).
In a sense, Travis is still innocent, if only by insanity. He doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. Dex has kind of screwed up here. He has to kill Travis because he’s seen his face. But he’s not truly a killer, he has some kind if delusion. Dex killing him is not really righteous. And his mucking about has led to more deaths. And when he does kill him, in addition to killing someone that should be a mental patient, he’s also screwing up Miami Homicide and Debra’s case resolution rates.
What’s needed is for Dexter to arrange to somehow have Travis eliminated while also allowing the case to be closed. Maybe have him killed resisting arrest somehow, preferably during the rescue of his next victim.
Either that or Travis could be captured live and his rantings about Dexter could be blamed on his obvious mental illness.
Next season spoiler, Dexter: Deb, I have a terrible secret to tell you . . . I’m a serial killer. Deb: Fucking fuck me . . . fucking cool, could you fucking kill fucking LaGuerta for fucking me and shit?
This episode at least had some amusing moments. Dexter’s imitation of a meathead college student on the phone was kind of funny, as was Quinns Wafflehouse caper.
But yea, the main plot seems to be unfolding much as everyone guessed it would five episodes ago. Which is too bad, I think it would’ve been a cool reveal if they hadn’t been so obvious about it.
Also Dexter seems kind of unperturbed by the fact that he was complicit in the murder of the atheist college professor (and I wonder if anyones told Dawkins he was murdered by proxy on Showtime).
I was thinking the same thing… knowing it was Travis all along, I was wondering how he could stop the elevator, grab the Professor, kill and stash him, free Dexter, then somehow place him in the classroom…
Yea, that whole scene was weird. Dexter’s only in the elevator for a few minutes. Aside from that giving Travis just a pretty short window to get upstairs, kill a man, hide a body and then open the elevator shaft, Dexter doesn’t really seem to put a lot of effort into finding Geller afterwords, despite the fact that he can’t be more then a minute or two away and is presumably carrying a largish adult corpse with him.
The elevator in my building does have a box in the basement that allows you to control it though (I think for use by the fire dept.). So that part was somewhat plausible.
One thing that’s been bugging me this season is that Dexter is going after Gellar at all. I mean back in season 1 wasn’t his whole thing that he killed the killers who had “slipped through the cracks” of the justice system? So why go after someone there is an active investigation for and high likelihood of conviction and justice being served? When did Dexter start pursuing actively investigated subjects instead of the vigilante stuff?
As for the reveal… I have no idea if the average viewer saw it coming or not. I’ve said before that I was 50/50 on Gellar being real vs Gellar being in Travis’s head, and that I was OK with either direction. I had no preference, so I’m not upset by this, nor would I have been disappointed had Gellar turned out to be alive… but I’m not in a good place to judge if the reveal was a good one or not, since it’s something that’s already been in my head (all of our heads) for weeks.
Yea, that bothers me as well. They sort of touched on it this episode, saying that Dexter is going after Gellar because he feels a kinship with Travis and wants to help him. But of course, when he started looking for DDK, and started messing with Miami Metros investigation, he didn’t know anything about Travis.
Actually I believe he said “Internet protocol address”— is it we the audience or the other cops who are supposed to have never heard of an IP address before?
At least he didn’t offer to “reverse the polarity.”
I think it’s always been more than just vigilante stuff. He has a need to kill and, because of Harry’s training, he tries to meet that need in a way that causes as little harm to society as possible (at least in his mind).
Maybe he’s cleared up the backlog of those who slipped through the cracks?
I think the real reason is because the writers wanted Deb to be stuck with the number of open murder cases. That leads to the tension with the dead hooker case.
It may also lead to Dexter being conflicted between meeting his “needs” and the harm he’s doing to Deb’s career.
One way this could go is that Laguerta may start pressuring Deb to call cases suicides or accidents, when they actually should be investigated further. This would give Dexter a new crop of “slipped through the cracks” victims.
I’m not sure what they could have done differently. Put Gellar solely in the church never to venture out to the public? Then it would be a surprising reveal because we’d never have guessed. But we’d never have guessed because there wouldn’t have been any clues at all to guess at.
So you put him in the public, doing public things. But how many people really notice when there’s no coffee cup in front of Gellar? Maybe he’s not thirsty. Would you blame a girl for not looking in the eye the stranger who violently tied her up and is now hovering to the side of her?
They’re clues. They’re subtle clues and the point of clues is that some people are going to put the clues together, or else they’re not clues!
So I guess I should go back to the begining. What would you use as clues that would be more subtle?
I would’ve dropped the episode with Dexter’s brother, or at least put it at the beginning of the season before we see much of Gellar. It seemed too obviously stuck in as a way to establish how real “dark passanger” type hallucinations could get. If they wanted to do that, then needed to establish it more organically.
They also used a weird device where Gellar would suddenly pop out of nowhere when Travis needed some sort of evil pep-talk. I think it was that more then his not interacting with anything that made it obvious to me he wasn’t a real person. They should’ve ditched that (or at least used it less) and had Gellar just enter the room via the door like a normal person.
The last thing was the scene at the bar where Gellar is hanging out with Travis and no one notices despite the fact that his face is plastered on the front of the newspaper.
If they’d taken those out, I think they could’ve kept his not interacting with anyone without being too obvoius. After all, Gellar is a wanted man, it makes sense for hiim not to interact with anyone but his accomplice, even if he was a real person.
Okay, if you were talking with someone in the lobby who got into the elevator, could you sprint down to the basement, find the box, and disable the elevator before that person could reach the fifth floor (or sixth, or wherever the prof’s office was - the building certainly wasn’t a skyscraper).
And Dex spends, what, a minute opening the elevator door, then another minute opening the trapdoor and climbing out… Travis must be an olympic-class runner and weightlifter to dash up to the fifth, kill the professor, carry the body to a hiding place etc. before using an axe (!) to free Dexter, all without being out of breath…
At this point, I could more easily buy that the Geller we’ve been seeing is indeed real - he’s Professor Gellar’s evil twin brother, Garth Gellar!
These were the most credible evidence for him being not real for me, too. Travis is taking out the trash and Poof! Gellar happens to be standing right there. What are the chances? Those kind of things happened enough to make a good case for “head Gellar” over “real Gellar”… but they did enough other things to balance it out and make it ambiguous. Until last night’s episode I was 50/50.
They’ve done this before. Dexter gets it into his head that a certain killer is “his” and wants to get at him before the police. I think he’s even gone so far as to try to subvert the police investigation (giving them false leads) so that he’ll get the real killer all to himself. I can’t remember the specifics, but I’m pretty sure he did this with Trinity.
Maybe we’ll find that there really isn’t a Travis either. Dexter is imagining him.
Then there will be a major breakthrough in Deb’s therapy when the psychiatrist says “Who is this Dexter you mention? Nobody in the precinct has heard of him or remembers you even mentioning you had a brother, and there was no mention of him in your father’s obituary…” and we’ll find out it’s been Deb all along.
Psychologist: Who is this Dexter you mention? Nobody in the precinct has heard of him or remembers you even mentioning you had a brother, and there was no mention of him in your father’s obituary… Deb: Fucking fuck me . . . fucking cool, I’m a fucking killer. I could fucking kill you for fucking with my brain and shit!