Showtime’s Dexter #805 “This Little Piggy”

by Catherine Giordano

It’s All About Family

Showtime’s Dexter #804 aired on July 26, 2013 was all about family. It begins with Dexter and Debra sitting with Dr. Vogel for some family therapy. Debra is remorseful about her attempt to kill Dexter and herself; Dexter is still angry. He plays the orphan card: “Who would have taken care of Harrison.”  He flings the words in Debra’s face. Vogel is not successful in healing this family, at least not yet.

Dexter left Vogel’s office without finishing the session, but events bring the three of them together once again. Dr. Vogel is kidnapped from her home by AJ Yates. Debra returns to Vogel’s house soon afterwards and sees the broken window and Vogel gone and realizes what has happened. She immediately calls Dexter and they team up to find Yates and to rescue Vogel. 

Dr. Vogel sweet-talking AJ Yates on Showtime’s “Dexter”

 Dexter and Debra decide that Yates may have taken Vogel to a house he visited in his day job as a cable repairman. Some of those houses may now be vacant. They are able to narrow their search down to one or two dozen homes. It is still too many—searching them one by one is going to take too long. 

Fortunately, Vogel is able to make a phone call to Dexter from the home where she has been taken. Debra gets Elway, her boss at the private eye firm where she now works to trace the number.  (One small question:  These days with caller ID and reverse phone directories, why did Debra act like “tracing the number” was such a big deal.) 

Vogel doesn’t have time to talk to Dexter, but she leaves the line open so Dexter and Debra can hear everything that is going on. Before they can arrive, Yates notices that the phone is on and he becomes enraged.

Vogel is using all her wiles to save herself from Yates. She begins by reasoning with him and telling him that everything she did was too help him. She also tries to reach him emotionally describing to him (and us) his childhood abuse at the hands of his mother. How she beat him, and how he had to hide under the bed to escape her. While under the bed, all he could see were her shoes and this gave rise to his foot fetish.

And a very strange fetish it is. The woman Dexter rescued from Yates’ home has survived, and she was able to tell the police who was responsible for her injuries. Miami Metro arrives at Yates’ house and begins digging up the garden. They find the bodies of three women, each buried under a rose bush. They are buried wearing one shoe.  When the bodies are examined, they find that each of the toes has been broken. Further,  they can tell that the toes were broken over a period of time because some of the toes showed signs of healing prior to death.

It looks like Yates has the same fate in mind for Vogel. He has a pliers and is about to apply it to her “little piggy.” Desperate, Vogel tries a new tactic. “ Albert,” she yells out in a commanding voice. Albert stops and says, “My name is AJ. No one calls me Albert except my mother.” As if Vogel didn’t already know that—she was his therapist after all.  Now she goes into full Albert’s-mother mode, speaking to him sternly, and then slapping him hard, hard enough to make him bleed. He goes into the kitchen to get a towel to stop the bleeding, and this gives Vogel the chance to make the phone call to Dexter. When Yates’s returns to the room, Vogel is once again speaking to him soothingly. It looks like she is making progress with him, but then he discovers the open phone line and is enraged.

Fortunately for Vogel Debra and Dexter arrive at the house just then. When they enter the house, Vogel and Yates are nowhere to be seen. They go to an upstairs bedroom and find Vogel tied up in a closet with duct tape over her mouth. They don’t see Yates, but he is under the bed looking at their feet. Dexter says, “Forget Yates. The important thing now is to get Dr. Vogel out of here.”

It looks like they are all going to leave, but in a flash, we see Dexter on top of the bed.  He has a metal curtain rod in his hand, the kind with the pointed finial at the end.  He stabs if through the mattress killing Yates with this improvised javelin.

So Debra and Dexter are back together as a brother-sister vigilante team.  This is “the- “family-that-kills-together-stays-together” moment of the show.  At the end of the episode, we see Dexter Debra and Vogel on Dexter’s boat as Dexter dumps Dexter’s body into the bay. They talk about how beautiful it is out at night on the boat under the stars. Just one little happy family.

There are some other family matters during this this episode. A maid has been found dead and her wealthy and well-connected employer, Ed Hamilton, comes under suspicion. He eventually is forced to admit to having an affair with her (pesky DNA and evidence that the deceased had recently had sexual intercourse), but denies killing her. Quinn is investigating the case, but he is repeatedly warned by his superiors to back off on Hamilton. 

Since when does Quinn listen to orders--he is gung-ho to pursue this case. He’s off to the scene of the murder where he finds a street vendor who can ID the killer. The killer ID’s Hamilton’s 16-year old son. The vendor is supposed to come in and give a formal statement, but he recants his testimony. There are perks to be well-connected.

More family matters—this time it is all about Matsuka. It seems that Matsuka donated sperm when he was in college and a lovely young woman has shown up claiming to be his biological daughter. She tells him her mother was a single mother and she has recently passed away. Matsuka is delighted to learn he has a daughter and he takes her to a food truck to get some coffee. She proceeds to order a large meal and asks for more food to go. She asks Matsuka to pay for it because she has left her purse in the car. Matsuka is now concerned that she might see him as her meal-ticket and maybe more. He goes to Debra’s office and says he wants to hire her to investigate this woman.  

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” is the first line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenia. It seems we have some unhappy families here.  And I haven’t even spoken about Vogel, kinda sorta adopting Dexter and Debra as her children. I have some serious suspicions about Vogel. Is she the “Brain Surgeon?” Remember the brain-surgeon killings are done by a puppet master. Yates was not the brain surgeon—it is not his M.O. Is Dr. Vogel using some of her little family of psycho ex-patients to kill?  And why?

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