Season Six of ‘Dexter’ seems like it’s still setting the stage for the rest of the year. Not much has happened. We’ve essentially been reintroduced to the characters and met a few new ones. The question now is when the show will find its stride.

It was easy to call Deb being promoted to Lieutenant after that shoot-out. That plot twist wasn’t really hidden, although I don’t think it was meant to be. All I can think is that this change in the Miami PD sets the stage for Deb eventually leading a task force that hunts down her brother. Unlike LaGuerta, Deb thinks like a cop and not like a politician. It’ll definitely be a different dynamic now in the station. All this is happening at the exact same time that Quinn is trying his hardest to get Deb to say yes to his awkward marriage proposals.

Dexter is dealing with his own problems, though. He suspects a new character, Brother Sam (Mos Def), to be a murderer that needs to be on his table. Sam runs a car shop where he employs ex-cons hoping to get them back on the straight and narrow. Dexter soon realizes that Sam has turned his ways to God and no longer poses a threat to anyone else. There is the religion aspect again. This season is steeped in how God will affect Dexter’s life for the good or bad. We don’t know yet how Dexter will react to having a belief in a higher power, but it’ll be interesting to find out.

Meanwhile, creepy Colin Hanks inches ever closer to becoming one of the show’s weirdest villains. The best villain will always belong to John Lithgow as Trinity. That performance cannot be topped. However, seeing Hanks creep around killing people for apparent religious reasons is really damn creepy. Hanks is such a wholesome actor that seeing him in this role is really jarring to me. In a good way. What he and his mentor are up to is anybody’s guess. There have been subtle hints that maybe they think they’re bringing about some divine plan, like Armageddon or something. In reality, I have no idea what they’re concocting.

Dexter finds that keeping his secrets from Harrison is getting to be increasingly difficult. Kids pick up on things faster than we give them credit for, and now Harrison understands that his father has a special box. He calls it “Daddy’s box.” This freaks Dexter out because he knows that it won’t be long before Harrison begins to put all the pieces together.

I assume that the next few episodes will really start moving the plot forward for this season. They’d better, because while it’s nice to have one of my favorite shows back, it needs some suspenseful conflict – and fast. With last season’s resetting of the status quo, the show needs some drama injected soon so that this season doesn’t seem like it’s coasting.