Dexter: What's the Deal with Travis and Gellar?

Warning: Full spoilers for everything we've seen so far in Dexter: Season 6 follow. Plus, a lot of speculating...

From the very first episode of Dexter this year, "Those Kinds of Things," it was clear that something was off about the characters of Travis (Colin Hanks) and Professor James Gellar (Edward James Olmos). And no, we don't mean the fact that they were brutally butchering innocent people and mutilating their bodies to create specific omens from the Book of Revelation. We mean on top of that. While it's clear that Travis takes his marching orders from Gellar, and seems to be endlessly devoted to him, we're just not sold on the fact that Gellar is a real person. Meaning, he might be a figment of Travis' warped mind.

Gellar remains hands off, often leaving the savage killings and hostage grabbing to Travis, while he sits and, you know, randomly paints full portraits of angels. No one ever acknowledges Gellar, including the kidnapped jogger used for parts or Travis' one night stand who wound up getting Jigsaw'd. Hell, that gal didn't even look at him, or set a place for him, when she waited on them at the restaurant.

Plus, when the time came to punish Travis, Gellar burned himself. Quite barbarically. With a white-hot rod. And he barely flinched. And he hasn't addressed the fact that he has a "burnt to s***" arm ever since.

Has this all been a really clumsy build up to a supposedly shocking twist that could have never fooled anyone who's ever seen movies like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club or Psycho? Or are we just making a big deal out of nothing? Or, finally, is this show double tricking us by making us think he's fake when in fact the two of them are both very real and Gellar just, like, didn't feel hungry that day at the diner?

This show has established now that Gellar at least was a real professor, who vanished from his post and went "underground" three years ago. But did he go underground, or did he go underground? As in six feet under?

While we usually hate spoilers and spoilery chat here at IGN TV, this seemed like an overly obvious future plot twist that was just too much to ignore. Mostly because of how disappointing it would be if the writers of Dexter thought they could get away with dragging this kind of twist out over seven or eight episodes when so many Dexter fans would be able to pick it out of the lineup after one or two episodes. So what do you guys think?

• More Television Features
• Latest Television News, Reviews, and Videos