Dexter Episode 53: First Blood

Dexter tries to send Lumen away, but she refuses to abandon her hunt for the men who raped and tortured her, so he ends up trying to stop her from killing the wrong person. At the same time, Debra and Angel continue investigating the Fuentes murders, Quinn starts getting help watching Dexter, and Dexter worries about whether Harrison has inherited something dark from Rita’s death.

Dexter meets Lumen in a coffee shop and again urges her to leave Miami, but she is determined to keep going after the men connected to her attack. Debra and Angel follow the Santa Muerte/Fuentes case and identify more details about the killer, including a wrist tattoo that turns out to be tied to a nightclub stamp rather than a criminal mark. Debra later finds two corpses while checking a house with Cira, which convinces her that Fuentes and his brother were involved in the killings.

Dexter goes to Boyd’s house to investigate the other men involved in Lumen’s assault, but he finds signs that someone has already been there and discovers a fingerprint that leads him to realize Lumen was the intruder. He figures out that she is now targeting Robert Brunner, one of Boyd’s former cellmates, and tries to talk her out of it. When that fails, Dexter races to intercept Brunner at the Julia Tuttle Causeway sex offender colony, sedates him, and takes him to Boyd’s old killing room.

Dexter is ready to kill Brunner until he notices an ankle monitor, which shows that Lumen has mistaken him for someone else and that Brunner is not the man she is actually after. Dexter then stops Lumen as she prepares to dump Brunner in the Causeway, and she is horrified to realize how close she came to murdering an innocent man. After this, she agrees to leave Miami, and Dexter takes her to the airport.

Meanwhile, after Liddy is released, he meets Quinn at a bar; the two complain about LaGuerta, and Quinn helps Liddy with money for his upcoming hearing before asking him to follow Dexter, which Liddy agrees to do. Dexter also returns to parenting class and defends Harrison’s behavior while insisting he will protect his son, still worrying about whether Harrison has a darker side. The episode ends with Lumen having tricked Dexter, revealing that she is still in Miami.