Warning: if you’re reading this, you’re going to find out what happened in last night’s second episode in the final season of Dexter. If you don’t want to know, you probably shouldn’t be reading a episode review. Go check out something else on the site instead.

If last week’s premiere left us with a framework for the major plot points of this season, Sunday night’s episode “Every Silver Lining…” filled in some of the answers to the questions that lingered after the credits started to roll.

Early in Sunday’s episode, we learn that Dr. Vogel did indeed help Harry build form the code that eventually came to shape Dexter’s world. As she put it as she and Dexter sat watching only videos of Harry discussing his adolescent urges, “The Psychopath Whisperer” feels like our eponymous antihero’s spiritual mother.

She also doesn’t think anything is necessarily bad about Dexter or other psychopaths for that matter. To Dr. Vogel, they’re “alpha wolves” that serve a specific function within our ecosystem, and that’s not all.

Dr. Vogel is convinced this season’s serial killer, dubbed “The Brain Surgeon” by the giggles of forensic tech Vince Masuka when Joey Quinn used the description as the Miami Metro Homicide team came across the second victim of the season, is a former patient because he’s leaving the removed portions of brain on her front porch. She would go to the police with her information, except it turns out Dexter wasn’t the only psychopath she treated with unconventional methods.

Instead, she’s calling in a favour from Dexter, and though he doesn’t trust her, our title character agrees to work with the woman whose ideas helped shape him into the serial killer with a system of ethics and rules he is today.

Lost Girl

While the second episode brought some background information about Dr. Vogel and her connection to Dexter, it also showed Debra continuing to drift further and further into a hazy world of unchecked emotions, booze, and pills.

She has a meeting with her boss, Elway (Sean Patrick Flannery), discussing the awkward situation between her and Briggs that came to an end at Dexter’s hand last week. He knows she was sleeping with him, voices some slight concerns about her tactics, but moves on when she explains they may still be able to recover the missing jewelry.

After finding a bill for a storage locker at his apartment – which has been marked off as a crime scene by the way – Deb take the solo trip to the facility, where she tangles with the hitman, El Sapo, who followed her there from Briggs’ apartment. He gets the drop on her, taking her gun, but Deb fights back, catching a beating in the process, but giving a few good licks of her own.

The next day, El Sapo turns up dead, shot several times while he’s sitting in his car. Dex finds a shard of glass covered in blood, and knows it has to be the killer’s. When he runs it through the system, Debra’s picture pops up on his computer monitor. In the mean time, Deb has come in to talk to Quinn about the case — last week, he had run the name “El Sapo” for her remember? – and when he starts to show her the crime scene photos, Deb starts having fuzzy flashbacks of what transpired.

Dexter interrupts, citing a family emergency, and takes his sister outside to talk about what happened, only Deb can’t put it all together. When Dexter asks if the gun they found in El Sapo’s glove compartment is going to come back to her, Debra curses in the affirmative, and asks her brother to disappear the gun from evidence, leading to a nice “We have a problem with lying?” moment between the two estranged siblings.

As she walks away from Dexter, Deb says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that her life is spiraling out of control in the wake of what happened with LaGuerta in the storage container, and who knows how or when it’s going to get back on track. She’s now shot two people; who knows if she’ll shoot a third or a fourth?

NEXT: Suspects, Batista, Quin and Spencer’s two cents…