Dexter Retrospective: How The Supporting Cast First Registered

 

 

The consensus of most fans of the series is that Dexter peaked after Season 4 and not coincidentally when Clyde Phillips, the man who’d been the showrunner and head writer, departed claiming creative exhaustion. I don’t hold that the subsequent four seasons were all as bad as the critical consensus argues – until the last one most of them had superb moments and performances all the way through – but I do concur with the majority opinion that after Trinity killed Rita in the fourth season finale, the series lost the power it once had.

I also agree that one of the bigger flaws of the last four seasons was that Dexter chose to complete erase the façade that Dexter had built to that point – husband, father, living in the suburbs – and essentially focus all of its time and energy on the killers that Dexter and Miami Metro were hunting down. By doing so much of what made Dexter fascinating in the first four seasons – his attempt to be both a member of society and the monster he was – and simply concentrate on the hunt. This made the series  far more formulaic and took away a lot of the zest and energy that we’d gotten from the first four seasons.

What isn’t talked about as much when it comes to rating Dexter’s decline is how the series also decided to fundamentally stop building up all the character growth we’d seen throughout the supporting cast over the first half of the show and essentially have them only there as in reaction to how they affected Dexter personally. This was a mistake for several reasons but perhaps the most frustrating one was that Philips – if he was the man responsible for it – had spent a significant amount of time during those four years trying his best to give all of the other characters more layers than just being foils for Dexter. This was as important to the show’s early success. Philips and his writers understood that for all of Miami Metro to miss the fact that there was a serial killer working for them, it couldn’t be because of their incompetence. Which as we saw so many times in the first four years none of detectives were. The show actually worked very well as a procedural during the first four seasons, mainly because it showed that the Squad was as good as Dexter when it came to catching the serial killers that he was.

 In truth that was a large part of the fun during those seasons. When Dexter was himself the target in Season 2 the task force managed to narrow the field slowly but patiently and managed to figure out that the man they were searching was right under their nose. Indeed Dexter was called before the FBI with his slides in front of him and was sure he was caught – before he was told they were chasing Doakes. Even then there’s a very good chance that Lundy might have realized that they were chasing the wrong man had Dexter and fate not intervened. None of these people were the kinds of fools who worked for the Daily Planet for years and couldn’t tell that Superman was really Clark Kent.

The reason that Dexter was also able to get away with what he did for so long was something that he commented on frequently but that most viewers might have ignored: while he had a life beyond being a killer everyone else on the show did have other attachments. And it’s clear that from the start of the series the show’s writers make it very obvious that part of the reason why so many people who work at Miami Metro appear blind is really the normal concentration of their everyday lives. And because Original Sin has made it clear that we will be seeing younger versions of many of these characters in it, I think we should look at the three characters who are the most prominent in Dexter’s life at work: Sgt. James Doakes (Erik King) Angel Batista (David Zayas) and Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Velez). Interestingly all three actors had worked together on the fourth and fifth seasons of OZ: King played Death Row inmate Moses Dayal, Zayas’s Latino gang leader Enrique Morales and Velez had played Dr. Gloria Nathan.

Before we begin a literary note. Anyone who’s read the Jeff Lindsay novels Dexter is based on knows that unlike with other series such as Game of thrones, the writers used the characters in the first book as a jumping off point and then went in a completely different direction even before Season 1 ended. In the biggest change in Darkly Dreaming Dexter the Ice Truck Killer (who I won’t reveal yet because he will come up later in this retrospective) survives his confrontation with Dexter and LaGuerta is killed off at the end of the novel instead. I only mention this because that means that almost every character in Dexter the series by necessity ends up in a different place then they do in the books which gave the showrunners creative license to expand them.

I’m going to start with Doakes. As is made clear in the pilot Doakes is the only person who works at Miami Metro who can see, even dimly, through the mask Dexter has put up for years. It takes him until the end of Season 1 to realize that there is something far darker to Dexter than meets the eye and by the time Season 2 is over he is fully aware of the monster Dexter is. In another series Doakes would be the hero of the show. In Dexter not only do we have to consider him the heavy, we’re supposed to breathe a sigh of relief, if not cheer, when Doakes is killed at the end of Season 2 and everyone believes that he is the Bay Harbor Butcher.

We don’t get a clear picture until the end of Season 7 as to how Doakes became suspicious of Dexter Morgan in the first place, perhaps because the writing forces him not to realize that. What is unsettling is that throughout the early episodes Doakes can tell far more than anyone else that there’s something creepy about this man who can’t pick up the normal cues that everyone else ignores, can tell there’s something off about him whenever he’s on a crime scene and notices the hesitations that Dexter takes before he says anything. In a sense Doakes is the most brilliant detective we’ll see on the show because he knows without even having to be privy to what we see Dexter do on a nightly basis that there’s something not right about this man. And everyone on the squad thinks that there’s something wrong with Doakes.

Why does everyone, even LaGuerta who was his first partner (and as we learn, also a lover), take everything he says about Dexter Morgan as just a sign that Doakes is jumping at shadows? The easy answer would be that Dexter is white and Doakes is African-American but the show never draws that conclusion and besides with the exception of Deb everyone else who works with Dexter is a minority themselves.

Another reason may be Doakes’s personality. Erik King was perhaps too good at making Doakes seem like a man who was mad at the world, both the criminals and the people he worked with. It’s worth noting this is a common attitude for most police given the situations they face and as we see throughout the series almost every law enforcement official during this period has their own ways of dealing with the horrors that they see on a daily basis. Doakes just can’t hide it as well as the rest of them and takes his frustration and rage out more vocally than anyone else.

What’s clear is that particularly in the first season the writers did a lot to show the humanity behind Doakes. In the second episode an undercover cop is thrown off a highway. Doakes and LaGuerta go to inform his wife and find her badly wounded on the floor, unable to breathe. She later dies of her wounds. Doakes is compassionate with her in a way we never see anywhere else and we learn at the end of the episode he was an affair with her. She was going to leave her husband before he went undercover and he didn’t know about it.

During the next two episodes Doakes is involved with the pursuit of Guerra, the Colombian drug lord who authorized Guerra’s murder and who had the man who did it killed on his orders. Doakes attends the funeral with her brother (Scott Winters, another OZ alum) who that night asks him to help unwind. Late that night they go to one of Guerra’s lieutenants’ house and beat him to a pulp over Doakes objections. He threatened Guerra earlier and he knows this will fall back on him. The brother knows this: “You f---ed her. You f---ed a cop’s wife. Now you’re just f---ed.” Doakes is tailed by the cartel for the next episode and is genuinely afraid for his life. Indeed Guerra abducts him and is about to kill him when he is busted by Miami Metro – this was an operation meant to get Guerra.

And while Doakes can be hostile to his colleagues he is not blind the way some of them are. After Deb is promoted to homicide he spends much of the first episodes degraded her and openly scorning her ideas, which include blindfolding the one survivor of the Ice Truck Killer to that point. But when Deb calls him on his bullshit – the first time she’s tried to do that – he not only backs down but agrees with her. Doakes’s is never as one dimensional as he appears; he’s just frustrated because of investigations and he takes it out on everybody.

Angel takes a little longer than some of the other characters to develop. It’s clear from the start of the show that he’s a savvy detective himself, capable of recognizing so much of what is wrong with the brass’s theories. But he’s also smart enough to know that nothing is gained by direct confrontation. When LaGuerta makes the assumption that Tony Tucci is the Ice Truck Killer, he realizes very quickly the evidence doesn’t support it. But he doesn’t confront LaGuerta directly the way Deb does and he doesn’t go over her head. Batista may not like the chain of command but he respects it.

Zayas’s gift over eight seasons (he’s one of the few regulars to make it from the pilot to the final episode) was to be the measure of restraint. He was capable of being angry and frustrated but he never showed it with the rage that Doakes does. He also believes he’s Dexter’s friend in a way that Dexter doesn’t understand at the start of the series (I’ll get to that) but as the series goes on it’s clear that Dexter does respect him and doesn’t want to see him harmed by his actions.

Angel also has the ability to be a diplomat, something that none of the other characters at Miami Metro have the capacity to be: LaGuerta’s too political, Doakes too angry, Deb (at least at the start of the series) too inexperienced. When LaGuerta is proven wrong about her mistake in misidentifying Tucci, he shows no need to rub salt in her wounds the way that Deb does. He’s also incredibly compassionate, something that is scarce among the detectives at Miami Metro when the series begins.

We get the clearest sense of Angel’s personal life during the first season then any other character. Throughout the fourth episode while everyone is pursuing the Ice Truck Killer, he keeps coming to Dexter asking whether the jewels he’s bought as an anniversary gift for his wife are appropriate. Dexter, who doesn’t understand these kinds of things, keeps showing his view of what’s objectively wrong with that rather than just saying how pretty they are. (This is very funny by the way.) Eventually Angel turns to Deb who tells him the right thing. But then he shows up on his wife’s doorstep – and we learn they’ve been separated for three months. That Angel can’t seem to get this is sad; when we see him give the diamonds to his young daughter, it’s genuinely depressing. In the next episode Angel gets drunk with Dexter (not Dexter’s idea) and Dexter has to bring Angel to his home – and is the first to learn that Angel doesn’t live there anymore. Something he is unequipped to deal with on any level he seems more concerned about Angel crashing on his couch and finding out what’s behind his air conditioner.

For reasons that escape me LaGuerta has never received the level of contempt on the internet the same way that the two other major female characters on the show have. Part of it may be her eventual fate but Rita suffers a far more tragic end and she’s still considered naïve fifteen years later.

There’s an argument, at least in the first season, that LaGuerta is far more deserving of contempt then any character on the show. LaGuerta is established at the start of the series as someone who gave up being a cop long ago and is only interested in climbing the political ladder. She makes it very clear, particularly in the later seasons, that she will double cross anyone she can in order to protect her agenda, including the people she loves. I think there’s an argument that LaGuerta was failed the most by the writers during the second half of the series. As the show moves through the second half of Season and to the end of Season 4, the writers do an exceptional job of painting LaGuerta as not only a very skilled detective but a good friend and even capable of love. After Season 4 she regresses more than any other regular other than Dexter and by the time she is tracking Dexter down in Season 7, we’re not as upset if something happens to her as if something would to Doakes.

The writers don’t do LaGuerta a lot of favors early on. In the Pilot she’s shown as openly dismissive of anything Deb suggests (even though she’s clearly right) refuses to use Deb even when she finds evidence and openly refuses to acknowledge her flaws when she chooses to launch a manhunt for Tony Tucci. When she learns that the real killer has cut off Tucci’s hand and left it to taunt them, you can see in the scene with Matthews she really doesn’t want to back down before he tells her what an idiot she is. The fact that she seems to have a crush on Dexter in the early episodes (she’s openly flirting with him when we meet her) does little to redeem her in our eyes: the head of Miami Metro is too busy making gooey eyes at her blood spatter specialist to realize what a killer he is.

To the writers credit they do their best to humanize her in the early episodes. After her screwup LaGuerta is forced by Matthews to apologize to Tucci’s mother, in order to try and offset whatever lawsuits they’re might be. She is clearly untethered to see not only that Mrs. Tucci doesn’t seem to blame her; all she wants is for them to bring her son home so she can bury him. When we learn it that episode that Tucci is clearly alive, it blindsides Maria as is the fact that she finds Mrs. Tucci and a candlelight vigil, thanking her for giving them hope. At the end of the episode when Tucci is found alive, the last shot of LaGuerta is her lighting a candle at a church. It’s the first effort to make her fully dimensional and while it doesn’t work as well as later efforts, it does make her more than an ice queen she appears to be.

All of these characters are part of what makes Dexter work as well as it does in the first half of its run. Because none of them interact with Dexter the same way that his family and loved ones do, we tend to view them from the outside more than everyone else in his orbit. The writers understood that it might be fun to watch Dexter stalk his prey week after week but it would quickly become boring if the other characters around him then to be stick figures that Dexter had to avoid to literally get away with murder. At least part of the problem with the second half of the show was that essentially that is what all of them became as the serial killers and just as important the guest stars became more central to the series then the people who’d started with it.

That would become particularly maddening because so many of the killers that the show dealt with in the first half were far more interesting because we were invested with the people hunting them. That will become very clear in Season 1 as Miami Metro, like Dexter himself, starts to hunt the Ice Truck Killer in earnest.