DEXTER: The Series

This was recently brought to my attention by an operative whose transformation really started to pick up speed around the same time she got her TV privileges back from her parents, and she started renting season after season of a show called Dexter.  The show is entertaining, but absolutely ridiculous even by human standards -- it's about a serial killer who works for the police, spending his off hours killing the murderers the police aren't able to catch.  (Much as in real life.)

The reason for this is even more ridiculous.  Once upon a time Dexter, the beloved second child in a supportive family, was locked in a room with his mother and brother by drug dealers, who came in with a chainsaw and used it to kill mom.  Dexter, age 3, after sitting screaming in a pool of blood for who knows how long, was rescued by a kindly police officer who understood immediately that this was going to make the little boy into a recreational murderer.  He raised him, therefore, to be a GOOD serial killer who only dusted people who had it coming.  The brother, by the way, was sent straight to some sort of children's mental hospital.  For life.  The kindly police officer took one look at him, decided he was too damaged to save, and packed him off to the laughing academy.  Dexter, raised by a second loving and supportive family, comes out exactly the same as his brother -- a compulsive killer.

Wow.  Even I know human psychology doesn't work that way, AND I'M A CATFISH.  I'm also pretty sure you can't adopt a child you found at a crime scene like that, just off the cuff.  It even appears the adoptive dad knew who and where the father was all along.  I'm pretty sure the biological dad has some sort of rights in the matter, doesn't he?

...But I digress.  Here's what strikes me about this show.  Dexter is a remarkably piscatorial serial killer.  He lives on the water and gets his head together by going out on the ocean alone.  He suffers when he has to be away from the ocean too long, and sneaks away from the wife and kids to get close to the saltwater, coming home refreshed.  After a killing he invariably takes the remains of his victims out on his boat and drops them over the side, in pieces, to get rid of them.  When someone stumbles across his victims, he changes his tactics only so far as to take them to a better spot offshore, where they'll wash farther away and be harder to trace. 


Having been made by a bunch of humans, the show gets even this wrong.  Dexter packages the victims in tightly-wrapped plastic bags that make it impossible for the little lively things in the sand to EAT the body parts.  I love that when the human authorities start bringing them ashore, the pieces (which date back years) are not only still tidily wrapped, but fresh as daisies, with no decomposition, let alone nibbling by our Crab or Shark sisters.  Did he package them so well that even the bacteria couldn't get in?  That makes no scientific sense, but it does make piscatorial sense.  There are some people even WE don't want to recruit.  No fish is THAT weak on right and wrong.  The killers Dexter seeks are not our sort at all.   So Dexter wants them dead; he instinctively leaves them in the ocean; but the body parts are SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.

And here's another thing:  When Dexter does deviate from his ridiculously tidy murder ritual (like nothing any real serial killer would do; he clearly gets no sexual charge from the murders at all), he kills the guy like this:

Yeah, he drowns him!  And that was right after he sat in on his first full-immersion baptism.  What did he comment to himself as this was going on?

"Go in for a swim!  Come out a new man!"

Who did he drown in the scene above?  The guy who got baptized.  INTERESTING, NO?

Oh, and the brother?  The brother who's also a serial killer?

Dexter calls him "Briny."

Sometimes life really is good...For a laugh.