TV Review: DEXTER S7E03, BUCK THE SYSTEM (Or, Hurray! It Sucks Less This Week!)

Oh, Dexter. You had a lot to make up for after last week's phenomenal crapping of the bed, what with all the weepy eyes and twelve stepping and not killing people. After getting the season off to a strong start in episode one, last week's offering was one of the worst of the entire series and seemed to steer the show in a horrible direction. Consider this week's episode, then, something of a mumbled apology delivered with downcast eyes with toes scuffling away in the dirt. It doesn't fix all the damage of last week - not by a long shot - but it does offer some corrective measures.

The good: There are two major positives. First, the whole Deb and Dexter live together with Deb monitoring his every move phase proves to be mercifully brief. The way they get out of it is also unsatisfying but at least this wee diversion which should never have happened is now done and done quickly and we are hopefully not going to have to listen to Deb mope and whine about what's right and wrong for the rest of the season. Dexter is now accepted as - in her words - 'a necessary evil'. It's a bit of a pussy way around the situation with Deb now effectively adopting the same ethics as Harry rather than exploring something new but, hey, it's way better than the direction they were going in last week. And, second, while the whole Ukrainian hitman thing remains deeply silly it has at least yielded one new wrinkle to this season. Dexter, for the first time, is now the hunted. And he doesn't even know it yet. New is good, we'll take that.

The middling: Lewis' exit from the show means the most reliably entertaining side plot is now gone. And Joey's relationship with the Russian stripper promises much future eye rolling, though it does keep some eye candy around.

The promising: Yvonne Strahovski's introduction as Hannah McKay, former girlfriend to last week's suicidal serial killer. Strahovski brought immediate spark to the screen and her role will recur throughout the season so we're definitely going to see this relationship between Hannah and Dexter develop.

The bad: The killer of the week this week was, frankly, just plain stupid. And poorly acted. And while Dexter has never particularly been the best looking show on television, director Stefan Schwartz did a singularly horrible job of staging what was meant to be the climactic confrontation with the results looking like some sort of cheaply lit, shot on home video YouTube thing. And not even a good YouTube thing, this is like one of the ones still hovering around a thousand hits after being online for a year and a half. It's ugly and borderline incoherent and not helped at all by the fact that the killer is wearing a bull helmet. And, making it even worse, the preview for episode four makes it clear that bull headed killer man is also a recurring character, so - oh, joy - we get more of him.

Last week's episode of Dexter was bad enough that I was only willing to give the show one more week to convince me to keep watching. The episode bought the show one more crack, but no more. So get it right next week, Morgan.