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Dexter

I've been watching some episodes of the HBO Showtime series, Dexter by way of HBO Showtime On Demand this morning.

The show is fascinating, but somehow not quite right.

It's a horrifying show.

The premise is that Dexter is both a crime scene blood specialist and a serial killer. It's important to note that he's a sociopath, too, because the show spends a lot of time exploring the psychology of this anti-hero.

Dexter's adopted father recognized that he was a sociopath and a would-be killer rather early on and tried to teach him to blend in with normal people. He also tells him to only kill bad people. So, Dexter finds people who kill other people and he kills them.

True to form, Dexter displays perfectly shallow affect. He's unable to relate to other people, although he does recognize that other people do have some sort of emotional reaction as they interact with other people. He spends some time trying to work out the intricacies of these reactions and interactions and tries to figure out how to imitate them.

Dexter is merely parroting the behavior of others according to arbitrary rules that he implements very heavy-handedly. It's an item of minor humor when he gets it wrong. For instance, he wanted to cheer up his girlfriend and strengthen their relationship. She had spent the day cheering up a friend whose fiance was killed and he said he would rent a DVD. "Something light," he said.

He came home with Terms of Endearment and when she was bawling her eyes out, he made inappropriate sexual advances thinking it would distract her from pressuring him to express emotions that he does not have and is unable to identify their... pathology.

The profile isn't quite complete, but I can't put my finger on why -- apart from the character's obsession with being a just killer and satisfying the memory of his dead father. Maybe that is what makes the portrait flawed.

Well, there's that and Dexter's perhaps unwitting sense of humor. His boat is named "Slice of Life."

The people who make the show seem to be testing our sense of justice.

Dexter kills killers. He does so out of a stated desire to give these people what they deserve. I've only seen him commit one murder and it was a man that the police had not been able to catch. He was bringing immigrants from Cuba and then killing them if their families wouldn't pay him a lot of money.

I suspect that the notion that vigilante justice is acceptable is rather common. Batman does it.

The show adds an extra level of conflict for the viewers in that Dexter isn't a mere vigilante. His motivation isn't really to bring justice. He kills because he's a killer. He's a sociopath. He is driven by a desire to kill that he only tempers and restrains with the excuse of justice. His true motive is simply bloodlust and that places the viewer in the uncomfortable position of actually siding with the closest thing to an actual devil.

This presents a lot of opportunity for stories along a single arc, but I don't see how this show could continue for very long. The theme is rather shallow.

I think I would be a lot more interested in the show, though, if the people who are (or would be) trying to catch him were smarter.

I have some other complaints about the show, but I find myself interested to see how things play out with this character. I don't sympathize with him and I don't feel any satisfaction when he kills his killers. But his brand of evil is so offensive because he does manage to pass among normal people and his own lack of extreme emotion breeds a rather clinical desire to have him shown to justice.

So far, he's managed to evade the police. We'll see.