That is about as much as I can say without giving away last season's surprise ending, so if you haven't watched it yet, do so before even thinking about starting up The Fifth Season.
Now that my little disclaimer is out of the way, Dexter: The Fifth Season picks up right were last season ended. Dexter (Michael C. Hall) has walked into his bathroom to find Rita (Julie Benz) dead as the Trinity Killer's (John Lithgow) last victim. Sitting in a pool of blood is Dexter's baby son, Harrison, and Dexter immediately starts to worry about his son turning out like him.
In a somewhat predictable manner, Dexter is seen by some, mainly Quinn (Desmond Harrington) as the prime suspect, and in this respect, there are many aspects of The Fifth Season that heark back to Season Two where Doakes (Erik King) was hunting Dexter and correctly pinned him as the Bay Harbor Butcher. When compared to Dokes though, Quinn just doesn't seem to have enough of a punch to really make this aspect of the season outshine the show's earlier attempts at this story arc.
Eventually, Quinn does drop his suspicions, but not before asking a suspended narcotics cop friend of his to look into it. Stan Liddy (Peter Weller, RoboCop) takes to the idea of keeping an eye on Dexter a little too well, and even when Quinn tells him to back off, the suspended officer sees this as his chance of getting back into the game.
Weller isn't the only star this season either. When Dexter goes after his first victim after Rita's death, a man who tortures and kills women only to leave them in barrels in a swamp, he doesn't realize that there is still one girl in the victim's clutches. When she, Lumen Pierce (Julia Stiles), sees what Dexter has done, she thinks she has gotten herself into even more trouble than before.
Fearful that the young Lumen will go to the cops if she is allowed to leave on her own, Dexter first keeps her as his own captive until, that is, he can gain her trust. When she tells Dexter than the man he killed wasn't the only one that raped and hurt her, she asks for his help in finding the remaining attackers and taking them out. Again, we see shades of a previous season in this one since this has a lot of familiar themes as seen with Jimmy's Smit's character, Miguel Prado, in Season Three.
Along with his new protoge and possible love interest, Dexter has to juggle work, where they are looking for the murders behind the "Barrel Girl Killings," and being a single father. A majority of this later issue is resolved when Astor (Christina Robinson) and Cody (Preston Bailey), Rita's kids, are all but written off of the show, and Dexter finds a nanny in Sonya (Maria Doyle Kennedy who played Queen Catherine in The Tudors). He still has to explain his late-night excursions, and when others start finding out about Lumen being a new girl in Dexter's life, many suspect a relationship far deeper than it actually is.
Showtime has a habit of not putting most of its special features on the disc itself. They have developed a system they call E-Bridge that tries to emulate BD-Live functionality on Blu-ray discs. Heck, they do the same thing on the BD versions of their shows, and while the box might list a lot of special features, they are pretty much all available only online. As I've stated before, this annoys me because those featurettes, interviews or whatevers might not be present later, and if I'm re-watching this season in a year or two, maybe before the next season releases, I want to know that those special features are still available. As it is, there isn't any kind of guarantee of that. This is a bit of a soapbox I've built up for myself over the years, but it's a point I feel is necessary to state. It would be one thing if these online-only features weren't listed on the box, but because they are, I feel like they should actually be on the disc. I don't have a problem, in general, with extra features being available online, just don't put them on the packaging.
What is on the disc are the first two episodes of two new Showtime series, The Borgias and episodes. The Borgias is essentially The Tudors but with Popes, while episodes is a half-hour sitcom about a couple trying to bring their hit British sitcom to an American audience.
The rest of the special features, accessed online with your PC, contain interviews with pretty much every member of the regular cast, as well as an interview with Stiles about the season. Also available are the first two episodes of Californication: Season 4.
While I enjoyed the season as a whole, it didn't live up to the ones that came before. It felt like the creators were trying to bring back old themes in order to show that the series could still work without Rita present, but she brought a good balancing force to the show that is noticeably missing. Where Dexter is always dark, brooding and internal, Rita's character brought a bit of light in that helped to ease the overall darkness. It's a shame to see the character go, and hopefully the next season will do a better job of filling in the missing pieces.
