Thursday, October 27, 2022

Series on Serial Killers, Part 4B: Dexter, The Decline and Why The Ending (s) Didn't Work

 

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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