Dexter Retrospective: The Hunt for the Ice Truck Killer

 

 

As I mentioned in my previous article Dexter the show is based on Jeff Lindsay’s novels but  the only one the series followed directly was the first Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Even then it differentiated from the source material in a huge way. While much of the hunt for the Ice Truck Killer and the revelation of who he eventually is very much covers the same groundwork as Lindsay’s book the end result is very different: not only does the killer survive and in fact end up being part of all the novels that follow but Maria LaGuerta learns the truth about Dexter’s identity and ends up becoming his victim in order to protect his secret.

Anyone who knows the original series is well aware that Philips and his writers decided to deviate from that ending severely; much as fans of the show may have rooted for LaGuerta to die from the start, she doesn’t end up doing so until the end of Season 7. And I’m inclined to think that for the series this was probably the right call. It was tough enough to root for a serial killer as your protagonist even on a cable drama in 2006.

 Television would eventually have series where characters would do far worse things – Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones were just a few years down the road and both series would be ranked among the greatest of all time. But the narrative of Dexter Morgan was that he had a code and that he would not break it. If he were to do so and murder a colleague at the end of the first season, I doubt the show would have had as long a lifespan as it did. The writers would start to test the boundaries of how much we could root for Dexter as early as Season 2 and even then it continued to hedge its bets. The show always worked better when Dexter was trying to realize his human aspects of himself; to turn him into a man who would violate his code to protect himself and his loved ones would have been too much for the first season of any show, even by the standards of the rapidly changing world of television in the 2000s.

But that doesn’t make what happened in the first season one of the more sublime acts of TV during that period. I remember watching the show vividly during its first year as Dexter tried to deal with the reality that the Ice Truck Killer was clearly committing his murders to impress and learn about Dexter more than anything else. And in order for its revelation about how not only the Ice Truck Killer was but how he was hiding in plain sight, the show played a very delicate game with us during the first eight episodes which I’m going to focus on here.

One of the subtler reasons that the first four seasons of Dexter are considered the best of the entire series may be that in all four the monster of the series has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.(I’ll try to avoid spoilers in case I cover future seasons.) In Season 2  The ‘Bay Harbor Butcher’ has been under the nose of Miami Metro the whole time, in Season 4 Trinity has been a pillar of the community for 30 years and might very well not have been caught if not for outside events and while the eventual killer of Season 3 is one of the more disappointing ones of the entire series, it’s far less significant then the fact that during the same period Dexter has essentially become friends with the real monster of the show – and is so fooled by him that he doesn’t realize it until the season is almost over.  But in Season 1, perhaps because it is closer to the book the show plays its subtlest trick and reveals who the Ice Truck Killer is well before Dexter himself figures it out. In a sense the killer is the equal of Dexter Morgan because he knows him better than Dexter knows himself – and is essentially committing the murders to lead Dexter to him.

We meet the killer right around the time Dexter is beginning to think he might exposed, though we’re not aware of it for a while. Tony Tucci is the process of being put back together by a prosthetic specialist who we know as Rudy Cooper (Christian Camargo). It is essential the viewer not become suspicious of Rudy as late as possible so the writers go out of their way to make Rudy seem like a basically good guy.

It becomes clear, eventually, that Rudy’s plan is to date Deb for the sole purpose of getting close to her brother. In hindsight it can be painful to watch Jennifer Carpenter throughout her relationship with Rudy: it’s clear very quickly that Deb is falling head over heels with Rudy and there’s a certain joyful innocence to her throughout the relationship that is forever taken from her in this relationship. She’ll experience happiness again in later seasons and her heart will slowly rebuild (only to be repeatedly shattered). But the scarring she takes from her relationship with Rudy only scabs over and never really heals. She’ll never trust as easily again for the rest of this series and the profanities that proliferate her speech will take on an edge with everyone we don’t see in Season 1.

And what makes it heartbreaking is that every emotion she feels towards Rudy and what follows is genuine, including her jealousy when Rudy begins to try and get closer to Dexter. It’s understandable considering what is implied in the flashbacks: Dexter took up all of Harry’s time as a child so Deb spent much of her life under the shadow of her adopted brother. Her relationship with Rudy, along with her new position in Miami Metro, is the first real thing she’s had to herself and in both cases Dexter seems to be hanging over it.  As Dexter has been by nature holding himself at a distance from everybody his whole life, he has a lot of trouble seeing this as things keep going.

The Ice Truck Killer is clearly testing Dexter: in one episode he leaves a corpse of someone Dexter killed the night before after Dexter disposed of the body. It’s interesting watching Hall during this episode as for the first time he can see the walls closing in and realizes he’s going to have to disappear.  He actually prepares to do so when he realizes he’s being toyed with and ends up covering up his crime. But it does make him aware that he has an expiration date.

This becomes clear in the following episode when the person who is suspected of being the Ice Truck Killer Neil Perry is brought in for questioning along with a younger killer Dexter stalked before sparing his life when he learned the truth. The young man had killed the man who raped him and he thought Dexter was there to the same. In this episode Dexter recognizes that his inaction led to another teenager’s death and is about to bring justice when the young man is caught. After Perry confesses (despite Dexter’s doubts) he goes to see the juvenile and learns the truth – the sexual assault he suffered gave him a permanent case of PTSD and he committed both murders in an effort to feel something, neither of which did anything. Dexter realizes that and decides to make an effort to reach out later on – only to find he killed himself.

The story of Neil Perry also shows that there is more to LaGuerta then meets the eye. Acting on a hunch she soon realizes that Perry is such a wannabe who hacked the Miami firewall to confess to crimes he didn’t commit. However when she goes to Matthews to warn him of this, he chooses to wave her off. Matthews bears a personal grudge to LaGuerta (she slept with him to get her initial promotion) and has an arrogance that comes with being in power. LaGuerta will try going to him before she goes over to the public – and she ends up paying the price.

By this point Dexter is convinced that the Ice Truck Killer is still out there and in act of desperation makes a post on Craig’s List. And in what is the first great twist the series will pay off at the end of the eighth episode we see Rudy Cooper answer the post with the words: “Don’t worry. Some day we’ll share a cold one” before walking into the freezer in his basement. I remember watching this back in 2006 and being absolutely stunned in a way I hadn’t been by any television show since the ‘Walkabout’ episode of Lost revealed that John Locke had been in a wheelchair before he came to the island.

The series then starts to peel back Rudy’s motives for everything. In the next episode Dexter receives a notice that his birth father has died. At first he thinks it’s a joke, especially because he’s never heard of the man. Eventually he and Rita (the two have just consummated their relationship) end up taking a trip out there to look at the man’s estate, if only to clean it up. Deb has learned about this as well, and when she confides in Rudy that night, he convinces her to drive out to help him. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet,” he tells the unusually clueless Dexter when they shake hands.

Eventually Dexter realizes that the man has been living under an assumed name and was an ex-con. He begins to suspect that the man, who supposedly died of a heart attack, may very well have been given a lethal overdose of insulin. While he’s there he runs bloodwork which confirms the man is his biological father – and when Deb learns about it she is hurt beyond words. But that betrayal becomes the least shocking thing Dexter learns that day. He has a flashback of a day as a child he had an accident and needed a blood transfusion. Dexter has a rare blood type and Harry went out of his way to find the donor. Afterwards Dexter is drawing a thank you card for the man and when Harry tries to fob him off Dexter says, ‘that’s normal right?” Harry says he’ll make sure the man gets the card – and we see in his belongings that the ex-con is still holding it. By this point we suspect that Rudy was the man who killed Dexter’s biological father and at the end of the episode we see him killing the neighbor who might be able to identify him.

In the next episode the Ice Truck Killer reveals why he’s been doing everything. Miami Metro is called to a room and they find it completely soaked in blood. Dexter goes into it, convinced that he’s going to get another friendly message – and he is completely unprepared for what happens. He is flooded with memories of himself as a young boy, a woman saying, “Close your eyes”, the sound of a chainsaw and himself crying, bathed in blood. He collapsed into it and manages to stagger out. He tries to convince everybody it’s just low blood sugar but he stays out of the room and lets Masuka and the lab boys do the work. For the first time Dexter is truly scared.

Eventually it becomes clear that all of this blood came from the victims of the Ice Truck killer and that he essentially painted the room with it. The room is 103 and there are two other references to it in the room. There’s clearly a message in it but no one knows what it is.

While this is going on Angel, still suffering from receiving divorce papers, has gone to a nightclub to drown his sorrows. While he’s there he meets a hooker with an amputee – who has her nails down in the way we saw fingertips set to Miami Metro. The hooker tells him she met a john who had a fetish like this several months ago. Acting on a hunch he asks Masuka about it and he leads him to Rudy Cooper. While his questions are vague enough to not stir the average man, Rudy can feel the noose the tightening. The episode ends with Angel being stabbed and nearly mortally wounded. That same night Dexter (thanks to the help of Rudy) goes back to the motel room and it is there he learns the truth about himself.

It’s fascinating to watch Hall in the last few episodes of Season 1. Dexter has apparently managed to carry himself with a mask that makes him seem detached from the rest of society but no one questions. When he learns the truth about his existence – that he saw his mother butchered by a chainsaw, that he spent days bathed in blood before he was rescue – it shakes him in a way he’s never been before. For the first time we hear the term ‘Dark Passenger’ – Dexter’s term for the force in him that has driven him towards violence and blood his whole life. The show will make references to it for much of the series (until in the post-Philips era, it ends up dismissing the idea) and for Dexter, it exclaims why he does what he does.

At this point he goes to Camilla, who we haven’t seen since the Pilot. This episode confirms what we’ve already suspected – Camilla knew Harry Morgan and has known both Dexter and Deb from childhood. (Now I do hope we end up seeing some version of her in Original Sin. And its clear she knows far more about Dexter’s circumstances than she’s telling. She deflects Dexter about where the files on him are and tries to get him to let it go. But  by this time the Ice Truck Killer has not only struck again (the prostitute Angel found in the previous episode) and Dexter knows this isn’t his problem any more.

So he goes to the microfiche and goes through almost every crime scene that happened in 1973. And eventually he finds what he’s looking for: a massacre that took place in a warehouse that left four dead. It took place on October 3 – 10/3. When Dexter goes to see Camilla he actually seems betrayed for the first time in the series. And its justifiable – not only did Harry lie to him his entire life about what happened to him and how he found him, but he went out of his way to make sure that there was no police report filed about a missing child being there. Camilla once again tries to paper over the cracks  and paint Harry in the best light but she knows more than she’s telling – though we won’t find out about the details until Season 2.

With all of these distractions going on Dexter is also trying to figure out who attacked Angel. It’s not until he realizes the connection between the bloody lip Angel gave him and the one Rudy has that he realizes there’s something darker about him. By this point Rudy has made it clear he’s going to propose to Deb and Dexter goes out of his way to make sure Deb’s safe – but even then he doesn’t know the darker truth.

Then Masuka, proving for the first time his incredible ability beneath the filthy mouth, tells Dexter he has figured out the victim was an amputee and the connection she has not just to Angel but to Rudy. But by this point it’s too late to do anything – Deb has succumbed to the lure to see Rudy on his yacht to accept his proposal. And when the two share a toast of champagne Rudy drops all the pretenses he’s had not only with her but for the entire series so far.

When the episode ends we see Dexter in a full-blown state of panic, knowing his sister is in the hands of Miami Metro’s most notorious serial killer. He doesn’t yet know why Rudy Cooper has done all of this to bring his past to light but it’s clear he has a dream for them – and it is does not involve Deb. It’s the first of a series of exceptional cliffhangers that will end the penultimate episode of almost every season from here until the ending, most of which are more significant not so much for the life in jeopardy but for what it will mean for Dexter’s continued freedom.

In the next article I will deal with the revelations of the Ice Truck Killer’s true identity and what its ramifications will be for the rest of the series going forward.