The wife and I finished watching Dexter (IMDB)(Amazon). An interesting, if not enjoyable, series.
Spoiler alert! I’m assuming just about everybody who would have wanted to watch this series has already seen it, but if you’re like me and you haven’t gotten around to it, consider this fair warning.
This series just goes to show you, everyone, even serial killers, have problems in life. The draw, as with most series, is seeing how the characters extract themselves from their problems, and what new complications arise because of the actions they took.
Dexter works as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department. He basically goes to crime scenes and observes the blood, then in Sherlock Holmes style, pontificates to all the other officers standing around, exactly how the crime occurred. When he isn’t busy doing that he is searching through the police database for people he can kill. Dexter lies by a ‘code’, sort of a serial killer code of conduct, instilled into him by his father, Harry Morgan, who was a police detective.
It seems young Dexter was two or three years-old when his mother, who was a confidential informant for Dexter’s father, got eviscerated by a chainsaw wielded by Columbian drug dealers inside a shipping container, while Dexter watched. This irrevocably warped the impressionable lad’s psyche, leading him to grow up to be a serial killer. Harry, who adopted Dexter after the horrible incident, saw what his son was becoming and developed the code as a way for Dexter to deal with his killing urges.
The two most important pieces of Dexter’s code are first, don’t get caught, and second, only kill ‘bad guys’, no innocents. The cynical side of me says there are no innocents which gives Dexter plenty of leeway, but that doesn’t make him any better than all the other serial killers out there. No, he only goes after the killers that are mean, have killed multiple people, and gotten away with it.
Dexter ‘vets’ his kills, making sure that they are truly guilty, then hunts them down and uses horse tranquilizer to put them out. While the bad guy (or gal, he’s a gender equal killer vigilante) is out, he strips them, puts them in a ‘kill room’ where absolutely everything has been covered in plastic sheeting (so he doesn’t leave ay evidence behind), wraps them in plastic (so they can’t move and the blood doesn’t spray everywhere), and waits for them to wake up. Once they do, Dexter shows them pictures of people they’ve killed and has a little chat. Usually he learns something that helps him to better understand himself and see he isn’t really a bad guy himself. Then he cuts their cheek, gets a drop of blood, puts it on a microscope slide and adds it to his collection of ‘trophies’. Then he plunges a knife into them and kills them, cuts them up into manageable sized pieces, and takes them in his boat off the Florida coast and dumps them in the ocean.
He also seems to have an inordinate amount of time to spend on his killing vocation. He is always taking time off from work to stalk his victim, learning about them and their routines, the better to be able to kill them later in the episode. Doesn’t he have actual work to do, like testing blood samples, or figuring out what weapon killed the mother of two? Yes, they show him doing these things sometimes but most of the time he sees to be out of the office.
And another thing – do police officers ever get down time? It seems like on every police show the characters are getting called 24 / 7, morning, noon and night. Don’t they have set times they work like everybody else?
Throughout the series he usually has to deal with one major serial killer on par with his own level of skill, and multiple lesser killers, each season. He gets married, has two step-kids, one biological kid (a son), and goes through a string of other female killers / love interests after his wife gets killed by a serial killer. His sister, Debra, is also on the police force, goes through her own series of bad romantic partners and never figures out her brother kills people. Well, at least not util the end of the sixth season.
The interesting thing is that they made Dexter likeable. Had they focused on modeling him after more real-life serial killers like Ed Gein or Jeffrey Dahmer this would be a much more disturbing series. For being a lot about blood, there isn’t nearly as much as you’d expect, and the gore is usually kept to a minimum. Criminal Minds (IMDB)(Amazon) has nastier content of people being tortured and killed than Dexter. But he has his ‘code’, he only kills really bad guys, he’s almost like the pulp vigilantes of the 1930s. They would kill their villains as well, but they were villains, irredeemable and evil through and through.
Is part of the appeal of watching because it is a cathartic experience, as my old college professor, Jib Fowles, used to say? Dexter gets away with doing what we the viewer might do in his place. We sublimate our own urges for revenge and vengeance through watching Dexter do it, thus keeping us from having to do it. He follows the eleventh commandment – thou shall not get away with it! When we have to put up with guff from bad bosses or crappy cow-orkers, or watch some fool speeding all over the highway, cutting people off, nearly causing wrecks, we want the Universe to do something about it. We want something to happen to these people so our sense of fairness is satisfied. Yet, we don’t go on a killing spree because we would get caught, sent to prison and punished. So, instead we watch Dexter and say “good for him!” and feel that somehow, somewhere the Universe actually is fair, even if we don’t get to experience it first hand ourselves.
The ending of the series is not happy but I guess makes sense. Dexter looks like he might finally get to have a ‘normal’ family lifestyle with his son and one of his killer / love interests. One thing happens after another before Dexter has to make one final kill before he can ride off into the sunset, be happy, and leave all the killing behind. His girlfriend and son have gone to a safe haven and await Dexter. Dexter, in the meantime, makes his final kill, but realizes he can never be ‘normal’ and leave the killings behind, and his best move is to let his son and girlfriend lead their lives without him. He takes his boat into the sea while a category three hurricane approaches Miami. Pieces of his boat are later found floating i the water with ‘no signs of life’. I the final scene we see a man driving a lumber truck into a lumber camp. He gets out, goes to his sparsely furnished cabin and sits down, and the viewer sees it is Dexter, with a beard.
I guess that leads to the next series – Dexter: New Blood (IMDB).
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