Very few things are more life-altering than the arrival of a new baby in the family. It’s not that they mean to, but newborns change every aspect of their parents’ lives—they disrupt daily routines, demand constant attention and cause the parents to reevaluate their own lives.

Dexter Morgan is a case in point. His bride Rita has two pre-adolescent kids from a previous marriage, and he’s managed to adjust to that lifestyle change, thanks to a rather lengthy, if sometimes rocky courtship. Neither Dexter nor Rita had expected a pregnancy, but it only served to hasten their inevitable marriage. Add into the equation that Daddy Dexter has a compulsion to kill bad guys in really horrific ways, and life gets . . . complicated.

Season Four of Dexter takes up about a year after Season Three’s conclusion. If the first three episodes of the new season are any indication, this may very well be the best arc of the entire Dexter chronicles. It’s certainly shaping up to be the darkest, what with John Lithgow joining the cast (for now) as Trinity, perhaps the creepiest foil (or rival) Dexter’s yet encountered. If Season One gave us a glimpse into the origins of Dexter’s origins, and Season Two showed us his need to explore his darker side, and Season Three exposed his need to bond, Season Four is poised to answer whether Dexter truly feels emotion as we know it.

The short answer is, of course, yes. The series would not be so wildly successful if the audience could not connect with the protagonist on at least some primal level. Dexter is the ultimate catharsis in that regard. It’s easy for us to overlook the fact that he’s a serial killer who disposes of his victims in little pieces—they were all evildoers who had slipped through a system woefully overloaded, and Dexter merely did what the system couldn’t. Now that he’s married into a ready-made family and has a newborn son of his own merely makes him that much more likeable.

That in itself is more than a little scary. That we can relate to a serial killer, regardless of his personal code of justice, speaks volumes about how we view ourselves as a society. Dexter isn’t so much about a vigilante killer as it is about the dirty little secrets that simmer in every pore of day to day life. Already in Season Four, Sgt. Batista and Lt. LaGuerta are engaged in a secret romantic tryst, in direct violation of police department policy. Dexter’s sister Deb is forced to reexamine her relationship with Anton now that her former lover, retired FBI agent Lundy is back on the scene, ostensibly to investigate the similarities between the string of killings plaguing Miami and those of the Trinity Killer. Deb’s partner, Quinn is revealed to be a dirty cop, pocketing drug bust money, with Dexter the only witness to his crime. Even Dexter’s suburban neighbors harbor secrets, posing as crimewatch patrollers while secretly performing acts of vandalism in the neighborhood.

There are secrets galore in this season of Dexter, and they mount up more and more with each episode. I won’t even attempt to recap all the developments in the first four episodes, but I will tell you that you can see them online or anytime at Showtime On Demand (for cable subscribers.) New episodes air at 9P EST every Sunday.

In the meantime, you’d be well advised to tune into tonight’s episode. Deb and Lundy were shot by an unknown assailant at the end of last week’s installment, and things did not look good for either of them. Meanwhile, Dexter is becoming more intrigued by the Trinity Killer, even while balancing a family life that’s becoming more precarious despite his best intentions. And there’s all those subplots that entwine everything else. Nothing is ever as it seems in Dexter.

And that’s what makes it so deliciously twisted and entertaining.