Okay, I’ll put my question in the second post of this thread. I’m doing this because I don’t want to completely ruin Dexter’s fourth season for any fan who’s not gotten that far yet and I think my question may do just that. I realize that the spoiler alert should be warning enough, but I also know that it’s possible to go into a thread with such warnings thinking that a relatively minor point will be discussed only to encounter major plot revelations that might ruin subsequent viewing (or reading or whatever).
Stealing your second post, so you can’t put the question here.
Rita Morgan died in the fourth season finale of Dexter. Is she a victim of the Trinity Killer, or is this something else? I didn’t get to give my undivided attention to episode in question, and it will be a while until I get to watch Season Five of this series. Because I’m so busy lately and because I don’t get Showtime at my house, I most likely won’t see the next season until the DVDs are available through Netflix and I just don’t want to wait that long. If somebody would sate my curiosity about the death of Rita Morgan–Trinity killing, bizarre accident, really messed up suicide, a non-Trinity murder, something else?–I would be most grateful. Thanks in advance, and have a great day!
Also, as I preview this thread before posting, we need to find a thematically appropriate way to deal with Todderbob. Again, thanks in advance for your assistance. 
Oh, yes, Trinity killed her. Trinity killed Rita before Dexter killed Trinity.
More detail: Rita is supposed to meet Dexter somewhere for a vacation. She leaves and Dexter goes about his business finding and killing Trinity. However, Rita has to come back to the house for something and Trinity kills her there. Leaving Harrison alone in a pool of blood, for Dexter to find when he comes home. Dexter is calling Rita on vacation and her cell phone rings in the house. That’s when Dexter goes looking for Rita and finds her and Harrison. Filled me with grr, it did. I liked Rita.
That’s what I thought. Thanks.
And now I’m curious about the baby. Just leaving little Harrison there seems somehow out of character for Trinity. I can’t really defend this view at the moment except to say that this seems somehow wrong. I imagine that the writers thought there would be something poetic or tragic in this–another little Morgan starting out in the blood of his mother, history repeating itself, etc.–but nonetheless, I would not have thought good Arthur Mitchell would have done something like that. Again, I don’t have a well-developed argument to support this; it’s just a feeling I have about how Arthur Mitchell was (or should have been, at least in my mind).
Anyway, thanks for the info! Now I can once again sleep at night.
I have mixed feelings about Rita myself. But then, I feel that way about several characters in this show, which is probably one of the reasons I like it. My own initial reaction to Rita’s demise consisted of “No they didn’t” and “Whoa!” I kind of liked it and disliked it, simultanously, probably because it was so graphic and so unexpected. I really expected Trinity to die, Dexter to come home, and credits to role, all this to be followed by a Season Five wherein we see the Morgans sailing around Florida and ironing out the latest wrinkles in their marriage.
I do think it’s fairly obviously a call-out to Dexter’s experience with his mother from the writers and that they probably didn’t think of it much beyond that.
However, we don’t really know what Arthur did or didn’t do. I agree that it seems unlikely that Arthur would have placed Harrison there where he was found. But it could be that he didn’t see the baby, went ahead with the murder, and only later did Harrison wake up and crawl to where he was. He may have been in a corner in the bathroom, or in another room nearby.
I suppose that’s true. But Trinity must have known Harrison was there; it wouldn’t be like him to not know who was in the house. So he definitely left the baby in the position to find his mom in a bloody bathroom.
What was out of character as Trinity killing Rita in that way rather than, like with all the other mothers approaching middle age that he killed, forcing her to commit suicide. That’s what I was expecting him to do and it would have made for great, if harrowing, television.