… tonight we root for Dexter.
Or, ya know. We can just start now while it’s still sunny.
Mmmyes. The creators of Dexter got this so very right – and they did an epic job of laying the emotional groundwork from the outset. Season one, episode one shoots an empathy arrow straight into the cardiac cavity of the audience watching with bated breath. It would be quite an undertaking to try and throw “the code” Dexter came to live by (and what Harry taught him and why and blah blah blah) in right away without seeming contrived. The only way to do that was with the slow-peel onion reveal they do, offering flashbacks of a shaggy haired Morgan and what motivated him.
Much in the way my mom pointed out Cormac’s Lester Ballard being the way he is because of physical trauma (see: future RFTV article), we can see how Dexter’s become a blood fan from his formative years. When you see a kid bathed in his mom’s death juice and get gradual information about it through the season, it kinda helps keep the empathy embers burning and remember how he was baptized into carnage addiction.
In that way, it’s almost like the fact that he’s confined himself to a code when he should be chasing after chicks with chainsaws is admirable – not monstrous. We like that he “loves” (though I don’t think he uses that word) kids, loves his sister even more, that he only eliminates people we think don’t matter, and has that “gee, golly, gosh” quality during his day job that can so easily be overcast by sociopathic storm clouds should circumstances permit. And the circumstances def permit in the pilot episode, when the writers make his first vicccctuuum (that’s my Dexter voice, which I sadly can only half remember now that the show itself has gotten the saran wrap-up) be what else – but a man who diddles little boys.
No one wants to relate to a pedophile (unless Seth MacFarlane animates it). We’d rather follow Gaston through the streets as he waves his scalpel torch and starts table slaying the beast priest. (Wait – was he a priest? Or is that just the altar boy image association I have stuck in my head after seeing Mea Maxima Culpa?) Either way, this was a genius way for the creators to envelope us in Dexter’s mentality – just like he envelops oxgyen thieves in sheets of plastic – and it offered a way for us to keep on liking him as they add on more human, admirable qualities all series long. Loving father, protective husband, good brother, boat owner, water lover, diligent worker, introspective philosopher, all around all American dude… who just moonlights with murder.
Plus, I’m not mad at whoever in wardrobe chose his kill outfit.
Not.mad.at.all.
I dunno about you, but I didn’t lament the end of this show – and that’s not just because the last episode sucked. For me, personally, I just wanna remember him holding that sexy asphyxiation rope out at me with his boobies bulging out of his American Apparel tee. Not the way he ended up in the finale, looking like Rainn Wilson’s body double who quit his job, moved to the country, and became Paul Bunyan. It was like watching Brando’s downward spiral in jumpcut (which if you’re from my generation, is exactly how you saw it).
So that’s why we love Dexter…
… but don’t mind stowing his memory in the blood slide boxes of our brains.