Can’t Put It Down…
As a gamer, I know when I have a great game on my hands when I find it hard to stop playing. Similarly, if I’m watching a TV show and find himself wanting to go from episode to episode with little to no break in between, I know I’ve found something special. That’s exactly what I went through several months back when I first reviewed Dexter on Blu-ray. The first season was tremendously entertaining and satisfying.
I’ve been able to restrain myself from watching the second season until now, when the Blu-ray version of it came in for review. And, not surprisingly, once I got to watching it this weekend, I could hardly keep from watching until it was all finished; the show is frankly just that good.
This second season of Dexter sees the further development of the show’s main characters: Dexter, his sister Debra, Detective Batista, Rita, LaGuerita, Doakes, and the rest of the crew are back for more suspense. Throughout this twelve episode season, we’ll see all of them cross paths with one another in many interesting ways, and this season also sees the introduction and development of two other very key characters, Special Agent Lundy and Lila.
There is so much content packed into each episode it’s hard to adequately breakdown each episode without giving spoilers. In fact, I’ve made it a point over the last few months to avoid reading or hearing anything about the show until I could watch this second season on Blu-ray for myself. Even then I had to make sure I didn’t read the included episode summaries printed on the inside cover of the packaging. That said, rather than doing an episode synopsis — which of course you can find on so many sites on the Net already — let me just cover some of the overall major things that happen in season two.
First, right from the outset of the season, Dexter’s underwater graveyard is discovered by some divers — so, the city of Miami is immediately inundated with its new serial killer – the Bay Harbor Butcher, who is of course Dexter but no one knows this but him. Meanwhile, Paul, Rita’s imprisoned husband, is killed in prison after getting into an ill advised fight after Rita refuses to help him get out of prison. This event triggers a major shift in the relationship of Dexter and Rita as she presses him about the Paul’s kidnapping story that she told him (this is from season one). Dexter lies to Rita, telling her that he is a heroin addict and he goes to a support group to fake a recovery which he doesn’t need.
At this support group, he meets Lila, who becomes his sponsor, lover, and eventually nemesis by season’s end. Meanwhile Doakes continues his obsessive investigation into Dexter’s life, but his actions on the police force lead him to suspension. Deb takes several episodes to recover from her relationship with the ice truck killer, but finds solace and love in the much older Special Agent Lundy.
There are many more subplots that I could get into, but my point is that this season has every bit as much going on as the first season. Interestingly enough, Dexter doesn’t kill as much nor are there as many Harry flashbacks, but otherwise you can expect the same very well written and acted show.
On Blu-ray
The second season of Dexter comes packaged just like the first — a standard sized Blu-ray case that contains three discs. The first two discs have four episodes each while disc three contains four episodes and a BDlive portal link which I will get into shortly. As far as presentation quality, Dexter doesn’t disappoint. The only scenes that didn’t look superb were two very brief scenes where the camera was situated on the dashboard of Dexter’s van — the images here were grainy, but these are two very brief scenes out of nearly eleven hours of content. Other than that nit-pick, the entire show looks superb, with rich colors and a crisp image. For audio, expect Paramount’s typical Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track, which performs great.
As far as the extra features, well, there aren’t all that many, and nearly everything is on BDLive. Being on BDLive saves space on the disc, but can make it a real inconvenience for some consumers. The BDLive features are all in SD and pretty typical stuff — included are primarily interviews with the cast. These interviews run about five minutes each and are all done while season two was in production, or at least while it was airing. The goal of these interviews was really just to act as promotional material for the show as each actor tends to compliment the show and the writers, etc., while staying vague about the details of season two. Besides that, there are a couple of other very brief features named “Blood Fountains” and “Dark Defender Series.” Blood Fountains is literally about a minute long and is yet another promotional piece where various cities inserted a red dye into their fountains as part of a Dexter promotion.
The problem I have with these extra features is that they are all BDLive-based, which means you need a BDLive enabled player (which most people will have), a live Net connection, and the server must be up, too. You will also have to deal with buffering issues too; I couldn’t watch a single video without there being at least four or five ten second pauses. The fact that you don’t really “own” these extra features is a hang-up for me, but that’s certainly something that will become more and more of an issue as we move forward with digital content and VOD services. Anyway, the only other extra feature is a very basic interactive feature called “Tools of the Trade” from which you use your remote to select various hand tools on the left side of the screen and you drop them into Dexter’s tool bag; when you have placed all of his tools in the bag, you get a very brief description of each tool; you might do this one time, otherwise it’s pretty useless.
The last point I would make about the show as I head to the summary is that it is very entertaining but that acts as a double edge sword really. On the one hand, you can easily use up your weekend watchiing this show from start to finish, but once you’ve done that, there really isn’t a whole lot of reason to watch again. All of the suspense and stress doesn’t have the same effect the second or third time around, so this really makes what I would consider a superb rental title for everyone but the most ardent Dexter fan.
Let’s get to the summary…