By nature of his extracurricular activities, Dexter is a loner. But that doesn’t mean he wants to be. He’s always been desperate to share his secret with somebody who might understand, which is why he tends to monologue a bit before killing a new victim. His father, of course, knew him better than anyone, but he couldn’t bear to watch the monster that he created (or at least refined). His brother suffered the same psychosis, but didn’t share the same code. Lila seemed pretty sympathetic—they were both addicts, after all—but she was the wrong kind of batshit crazy. But now, with Miguel, an impassioned justice-seeker and score-settler, Dexter may have found himself a true friend and confidante.
“Easy As Pie” opens with a darkly funny dream sequence in which Dexter is cutting up a body and Miguel strolls into the room with his golf clubs. “We’ll play a quick nine, when you’re finished,” he says nonchalantly, as if his friend was performing a more socially acceptable form of butchery. Dexter has nightmares all the time, but this was a dream; of course, we don’t know yet how Miguel might react to his sick rituals, but Dexter has reason to believe that he won’t wilt in horror. We can see that he’s made of sterner stuff than that—the Prados as a family are at the very least hot-blooded—and his bloodlust certainly exceeds that of even the most crusading prosecutor.
Tonight’s episode presented Dexter with two sets of circumstances where carrying out a perhaps righteous kill would violate his code. Camilla, still suffering horribly from terminal cancer, has been given another month to live, but she’s in so much pain that she wants to go sooner. She properly senses that Dexter might be the right man to put her out of her misery: For one, he seems to be the only guy visiting her at the hospital, but also, she knows more about his personal history than most. She knows, for one, that Dexter had a brother and that his brother was also the Ice Truck Killer. So when she requests that he play her Kervorkian, she knows that he’s probably capable of pulling it off.
The other matter is much more complicated. Thrilled to have his own private attack dog to unleash against his enemies, Miguel tests Dexter by presenting him with an unconventional target: Not an actual murderer, but Ellen Wolf, a defense attorney who has made a career out of getting criminals exonerated. This makes her no different from other criminal defense attorneys, who are only doing their jobs, but Miguel has personal vendetta against Ms. Wolf, because she wants him to go down for prosecutorial misconduct. His case to Dexter conveniently elides his real reasons for wanting her dead, but it’s not a bad argument: If Dexter is frustrated by real murderers escaping the justice system on lawyerly technicalities, then shouldn’t he also be going after the people who help them slip the noose?