Before I continue my
critique, I’d actually like to deal with an issue that was raised in a
critique. A reviewer of this article argued that ‘the kill method (Dexter used
in the books) was superior. I don’t normally answer critiques in my reviews,
but since Jeff Lindsay himself said that one of the reasons he didn’t like the
books was because in his books Dexter’s killings were more brutal, I’m going to
do something I almost never do and give what might be my best theory as to why
Philips changed the method in the series. (You have your right to your opinion about
the series in relation to the books, and I’m not going to try to change them as
they are two completely different animals.)
It is my theory that the
writers made much of Dexter’s rituals fundamentally more about the hunt –
tracking down the criminal, proving their guilt to himself, snatching him off the street and then confronting
him with their crimes – while making the actual murders so ‘banal’. It’s my
opinion that this was fundamentally done to make sure we could still relate to Dexter. The idea of having a show with a serial
killer as its ‘hero’ was radical enough for 2006. Had the writers made Dexter’s
actual killings as brutal as the monsters he tracked down - if he had skinned this victims or cut their
throats the same way the ones in Season 3 or 4, to use the most prominent
examples – it might have very well been a bridge too far that many viewers
would have been able to cross. I won’t deny it might very well have been a
more interesting series for the viewer’s sensibilities, raising fundamental questions
about ourselves. If Dexter truly was as monstrous as the killers he went after,
then the viewer would have to raise very deep questions about themselves. Is it
all right do kill these people in horrible ways because they deserve everything
they get? 24 had become a smash hit by asking these questions about this
approach to The War on Terror, and the longer Breaking Bad went on,
viewers increasingly found themselves having doubts about how much we were
willing to follow Walter White no matter how much of a monster he became.
That said, while that
might have made the series more interesting, I’m relatively certain that it
would never have enjoyed the critical or commercial success it ended up with if
that had been the case. Viewers might be willing to compromise their morals when
the man doing it was working with the government or was essentially an
everyman. If Dexter had started right out with his first murders being
as brutal as they are in the book, I seriously doubt as many viewers as the
series ended up having– and I certainly would have been one of them - would
have been willing to go on past the pilot. As I said at the beginning, I think Dexter was
created as a response to the monsters that were permeated the Golden Age of Television
at the time, and in almost all of those series we were either lured in
gradually or decided because of the characters being part of law enforcement
that we could justify it. If the first kill we saw in the opening minutes of
the Pilot had been as brutal as the murders Dexter commits in the books, I don’t
think a viewer in 2006 (and maybe not even today) would have willingly gone
along for the ride. It’s just a theory. Take it for what’s it worth.
(Now, back to the show.)
After Season 4 ended,
Clyde Philips the showrunner who had led the series to greatness, had become exhausted
from the demand and resigned. The consensus among fans and critics is that the
series never recovered from his leaving and that the quality dropped
immediately. I don’t quite hold with that theory, as I’ll explain below. More importantly,
the idea that had Philips stayed the series would have remained as good at is
had the first four seasons is something I just can’t buy into.
In the first four seasons,
what Philips and his writers had done brilliantly was make the threats that
Dexter was facing as important as the façade of his normal life. As his
relationship with Rita and her children became more genuine and as he finally
became a husband and father, the viewer was drawn in to see not so much to see
Dexter get away with murder, but to see if he really could have it all. The
murder of Rita at the end of Season 4 took out one of the key pillars of that
strategy. And when the writers basically ended up writing Astor and Cody out of
the series early in Season 5, they took out one of the others. For the second
half of the series, Dexter spent much of the time considering how badly damaged
his infant son Harrison would be because of being left in the pool of his
mother’s blood. And as we have learned from too many other series, making an
infant the center of a storyline just doesn’t work because there’s never anyway
to measure it. Dexter would spend the remainder of the series
essentially the same character he was when we first met him with no real ties.
It’s hard to imagine how even Philips could have rectified the situation.
That is one of the reason
I still consider Season 5 one of the show’s better ones. Dexter is trying to
find a way to work through his grief at the loss of Rita, and then Astor and
Cody. When he encounters Lumen (Julia Stiles in a role that earned an Emmy
nomination) the victim of a brutal series of rape who was going to be murdered,
he finds a way to work through his loss by trying to help Lumen work through
hers. She spends the seasons fundamentally damaged, sure that only vengeance
against her attackers will make her whole again. Because this is something that
Dexter understands far better - in a sense, he’s who he is because only
killing makes him feel whole – he uses
this as a way to work through his own grief.
When Lumen does not reject him as she sees him work, he actually says: “In
her eyes, I’m not a monster.” He was never able to reveal to Rita, so this is
the first time he feels like he can share his ’Dark Passenger’ with, and not
feel rejected.
It helps matters that the
man he is hunted is one of the most terrifying monsters the series ever did.
Jordan Chase is the king of a self-actualization brand whose behavior is so
frightening, in one of his group sessions Dexter says: “I’ve never felt more
normal before. (In the notes for the series the writers call him ‘the head of a
cult’ and that’s true twice over.) Jordan is the head of a group for four young
men who have been raping, murdering, and leaving girls in barrels for years: Lumen
was going to be their fourteenth victim. The level of devotion these young men
feel to him is similarly terrifying, as it is when we learn the origin story of
this and how one of his original victims still worships him. Johnny Lee Miller
is absolutely mesmerizing, particularly because he is the only ‘monster’ we meet
who has Dexter’s measure from the beginning, and even more frightening has been
the leader of these rituals without too
this point actually taking part in the murders. (When he kills someone in the
penultimate episode, he’s actually angry that he had to “do something himself.”)
Dexter and Lumen need infinitely more luck to finally pin his connection to the
crimes than anyone else Dexter has faced to this point, and even then he almost
narrowly gets away.
I truly think if Dexter
had ended at the end of Season 5, it would permanently rank as one of the
greatest series in history. The ending would have left many dissatisfied – it would
be too open – but seeing Dexter at the end of it, facing the real possibility
he will spend the rest of his life alone is a more fitting prison for him than
any real one. But by that point, Hall had been signed for three more seasons
and the show carried on. Then it truly dropped off the cliff.
The series spent the next
three seasons walking away from the idea of Dexter as a member of society and
focusing far too much on the killers he was chasing. The series would try
occasionally to venture into expanding his humanity – there was a storyline in
Season Six where he tried to form a friendship with an ex-con who found a God
that I found intriguing – but at the end of the day, the series became far too
focused on death. And in doing so, they spent the last three seasons utterly
destroying every aspect of the co-stars that had made the first five seasons so
good.
LaGuerta and Angel’s
romance and marriage, a storyline I had found myself enjoying during Seasons
Four and Five, ending in divorce when LaGuerta decided to pursue a promotion.
They’d spent the last three seasons giving LaGuerta humanity; in the next one
they turned her back to the career obsessed bitch she’d been in the first two
years. Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington)
an intriguing character introduced in Season 3, began an affair with Deb in
Season 5 that never made much sense, started trying to chase down whether
Dexter had killed Rita (which he gave up on because he was falling in love with
Deb) and then after Deb turned down his proposal, became a heavy drinker, fell
down on the job and spent the last two seasons hopping from bed to bed. Worst of all was what the series did to Deb.
In Season 6, she found herself falling in love with her brother (I knew he was
adopted but ew) and at the final moment of the season, walked in on him committing
a murder. The weight of his secrets caused her to psychologically and
emotionally deteriorating. When LaGuerta finally realized the truth about her
brother and tried to arrest him, Deb ended up killing LaGuerta. She then resigned
from the force, spent most of the final season in a state of drinking and sexual
collapse because of all the guilt she was feeling, and then almost miraculously
near the end of the series, seemed to be headed towards a happy ending – until she
caught a stray bullet from the last monster Dexter ever caught, ended up on
life support and Dexter ended up putting her body in the ocean.
You could make an
argument, I suppose, that there were times in the final two seasons that Dexter
was trying to reach towards his humanity. His relationship with Hannah McKay,
another female killer (Yvonne Strahovski’s performance was one of the few
highlights in the last few seasons) did show possibilities for a future. But it
was a trope that was increasingly becoming tired. In the final season when
Dexter met Evelyn Vogel (Charlotte Rampling) a writer on serial killers who I
guess was supposed to be ‘Dexter’s foster mother’ (she’d helped design the ’code’
he’d been following all this time, everybody knew what was coming before it happened.
She would help him try and track down the most recent murderer (the Brain Surgeon,
which really was a bridge too far), who she thought was one of her patients,
they thought they’d got him but it wasn’t him; it was her ‘actual son’ and… I
think you know how this ends even if you didn’t see the series. (There was a labor
dispute between Showtime and my cable company at the time, so I actually never
saw half the episodes. Based on what I ended up seeing, I still have no desire
too.)
In the end, Dexter decided he was too damaged to
be around people and rather than run away with Hannah, he faked his own death
and we met him in the last minutes of the series as a lumberjack, with nothing
left to say to us. The world was horribly disappointed with the final episode
(indeed most of Season 8 as a whole) and spent the next several years
expressing it.
Nearly eight years later, Dexter:
New Blood debuted on Showtime with Hall, the sole regular from the old
series (though Jennifer Carpenter showed up as the spirit of Deb and David
Zayas made a cameo as Angel.) I had very strong doubts in any kind of continuation
of a series at this point (the ninth day of 24 and far too many episodes
of both continuations of The X-Files had jaded me to these experiences)
so I fundamentally ignored the entire series. And honestly, I don’t think I missed
a great deal. Dexter was killing in the snow of New York rather than Miami,
there was another monstrous figure to be found, his now teenage son Harrison
had tracked him down and big surprise, there’s a monster growing in him too and
a lot more people die. And yet again, no one was happy with the ending – though
mostly for a different reason.
I don’t know why anyone
was truly shocked that Dexter ended up dead at the end of New Blood. The
final book in Lindsay’s original series was called Dexter is Dead, after
all. And Michael C. Hall had decided he was only going to one season anyway. I
think it’s the fact of a letter to TV Guide that sums up the other falsity of
those people who said they wanted Dexter to pay for his crimes at the end of
the show. “We all want to see Dexter get away with it,” that writer
said. The fact that in a sense that’s exactly what he managed to do at the end
of the original series doesn’t seemed to have gelled with that part of the fan
base. I guess like some humorous said, the viewers really did want Dexter
to have a happy ending. And in that sense, they seem to have to have missed
the point of Dexter, the killers he chased and basically every serial killer we’ve
seen to this point on television.
None of
them get to live happily ever after. Whether it’s being shot by police or
ending up Dexter’s table, nobody gets a happy ending. Dexter himself as much at
the end of the last great season: “Happy endings are just for children.”
Apparently the viewers weren’t listening to him, even though he of all people
should have known.
Next week, I will give a
summation of what the portrayal of serial killers on TV has shown us.
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