Dexter's First Season is Odd

It happened unexpectedly. I saw Dexter's devilish face peering from the Netflix carousel, and I thought: yeah. Now's the time. Let's get into Dexter, I guess. And so, I watched the first season in something of a trance. Every day, first thing in the morning - perhaps a rousing episode of Dexter. Before bed, nice and cosy - perhaps a soothing episode of Dexter. 

There's our boy.

What I loved about it immediately was its bold, wry sense of humour. We open with a voiceover monologue from Dexter himself, and the presence of this voiceover steers the show, and sets up a beautiful solid line between the functioning world of Miami and its utterly repulsive police department, and our cutely childlike fully grown serial killer.

LaGuerta + Dex 4eva

We only hear his perspective through this narration, and so there's a wonderfully insular feel to it. We, the audience, are the only ones with ears pressed right up to Dexter's heart. And he is, as it turns out, one of few sympathetic individuals in an ecosystem of malignant freaks.

There's the corrupt, rancid crew of officers and forensics boys - ranging from Masuka, a man who can't resist making lurid, pervy comments on every chopped up female body he swabs, to Doakes, the stern muscle-man who always has one eyebrow raised, easily the best of them. Arguably most important, though, is Deb - Dexter's chirpy cop sister. I despise her.

Every line she delivers, every thought she has, even, has the distinct energy of a delighted, scheming twelve-year-old who is about to be massively brought down to Earth. She seems to do zero police work, instead relying on her brother to feed her spontaneous crime-solving clues. I hate to see her happy, honestly. She's like an amoeba.

Dexter himself has an unshakeable appeal. He's a little sweetie. Michael C. Hall plays him with this wonderful, wide-eyed quality. He's always vaguely startled, yet he is also always smizing impishly. This guy is up to something, but in a cute way. This is bolstered by his relationship with his timid girlfriend, Rita, who is by far one of my favourite characters. I just love their dynamic together as two people with very different interpersonal fears that ultimately manifest in very similar, often complimentary ways.

Rita is a victim of rape and battery, and I find the scenes that deal with her hesitance surrounding sex in relation to that very sweet and touching. Unfortunately, later in the season the show starts to irritate me by bringing in her evil husband Paul and sort of making him a normal guy character that has to be in the episodes just to piss me off. His ongoing presence and the flippancy with which the show begins to treat him and his abusive behaviour ultimately undermines some of the more thoughtful writing that comes earlier on. And that's a big clanger.

She's just so cute.

At first, the show appeared to have a sort of complicated and interesting relationship with its cast of characters. Here are the corrupt and magnificently peurile police force, failing at everything and generally being unbelievably stinky. And then here's Dexter, the secret killer with a heart of gold. They are at odds with each other, and yet they fit perfectly together. Dexter defiles, harms, and kills people in the name of justice (à la Light Yagami), and so do the police. But the more I watch, the more simple it seems.

We're not supposed to consider Deb a whiny incompetent when she acts put upon when her superior asks her to hurry up and bring a bottle of water to a thirsty child who had been trapped in a car for days. We're not supposed to judge her when she solicits a prostitute for a misogynistic amputee and sends her into his hospital room with a grin. We're not supposed to judge Doakes when he shoots first at a fleeing suspect, because that suspect did really bad stuff and so it's simply justified for a police officer to execute him.

Sad Doakes :-(

We're not, obviously, supposed to judge Dexter for killing nasty guys either, but the show reveals through its moral consideration of the other characters that he is less a subversion of the justice system, less a warped, acerbic continuation of it, even, and more of an expression of the average person's vibes-based approach to justice - just get the bad guys. Everything else is window dressing.

Yes, Dexter is a killer, but the point is that his inhuman urge to do murders, his inability to feel, gives him an almost heightened humanity. He cares about his victims' victims in direct contrast with almost every other character's ceaselessly narcissistic view of the world. It works so beautifully, until the show unravels into gratuitous, weird, and reprehensible behaviour by the others thats treated as if its on par with Dexter's Dextering. Enough. I can't buy that.

By the end of the season, the Ice Truck Killer feels idiotic. The reveal that he's Dexter darksided older brother is, yes, very funny, but it's also like - who is this dweeb? Why on Earth did Deb accept a marriage proposal from this wiry little freak? There is a flattening that happens here. Yes, this man can use his one contraption to drain people of their blood, but beyond that, he really isn't so smart and special. The end of his plan feels like playground stuff. Then again, that's what they're doing. Playing.

Kiss <3

In any case, some of the electric lustre wears off by the finale. The misogyny running in a thick current through the show is not there to be explored as much as it is there to titillate, no matter how good and kind and murderous a man Dexter is, and how interesting that dichotomy is. But Dexter is there, nevertheless. And he's pretty great.