Seeing Red

"Seeing Red" is the tenth episode of the first season of the American television drama series Dexter, which first aired on December 3, 2006 on Showtime in the United States. The episode was written by Kevin R. Maynard and was directed by Michael Cuesta. In the episode, the Miami Metro Homicide Department team investigate a blood-soaked crime scene, where blood spatter analyst Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) is confronted by a repressed memory of a traumatic incident from his childhood. Meanwhile, Dexter's girlfriend Rita Bennett (Julie Benz) is charged with assaulting her ex-husband Paul Bennett (Mark Pellegrino) and risks losing custody of their children, while Det. Angel Batista (David Zayas) investigates a hunch that the Ice Truck Killer has an amputee fetish. Scenes for "Seeing Red" were shot at several locations around Long Beach, California. Particular attention was paid to the cinematography and filming of the sequence of Dexter's flashbacks to make them feel like "fragments of memory". The episode received positive reviews from critics, with particular mention made to the scene in which Dexter hits Rita's ex-husband, Paul, in the head with a frying pan because of his threats about the lengths he will go to in order to protect his children. Plot When a key to a hotel room is delivered to Miami police inside a jar of blood, Debra and Doakes visit the hotel and find a room completely covered in blood. Dexter is sent in first to investigate, but seeing the blood-covered room brings back a repressed memory from his childhood—sitting in a pool of blood at the age of three—causing him to run from the scene. The forensics team surmises that the blood came from at least five different bodies, although none are in the room. Since there were only one set of footprints in the room, they assume that the victims were killed elsewhere and their blood spread around the room by the killer. Debra suggests that the Ice Truck Killer, who has had five bloodless victims, may have been responsible. While dating a woman in a bar, Batista sees a prostitute with a prosthetic hand and fingernails painted in the same way as the Ice Truck Killer's first victim. Working on a hunch that the killer is an acrotomophiliac, he speaks to Debra's boyfriend Rudy, who he doesn't realize is the actual Ice Truck Killer. Rudy cooperates upon realizing that Batista does not know his identity.