Dexter Season 1 Retrospective

It’s been a few years now since the premiere of Dexter, and I’ve yet to rewatch any episodes. Given the popularity of my Dexter Season 3 posts, and with the fourth season on the horizon, I thought it would be a nice idea to revisit the first and second seasons and give my impressions of them in light of the overall Dexter experience.

This post will contain big spoilers of the first three seasons of Dexter — you have been warned.

“Tonight’s the night,” Dexter’s first words to us. The scene is a Miami street at night lit by the familiar electric warmth of busy bars and restaurants. But the darkness clings to Dexter as he slides by in his car, a sleek modern predator in a silver Ford Taurus.

A memorable opener — and one I remember feeling vaguely hostile to when I first saw it. I was on board for Dexter since its debut, but I had my doubts as I sat down to watch the first episode. I’m as sickly fascinated with serial killers as the next citizen of the modern world — after all they are our trolls and bogeymen, the monsters of our collective psyche. But, let’s not forget, they are also very real. My concern with Dexter, initially, was that in an effort to make a serial killer sympathetic, the heinousness of his occupation would be glossed-over or ignored. What I really didn’t want was to feel manipulated as a viewer.

So, when Dexter hunts, terrifies, and kills that vilest of all modern monsters — the child-killing pedophile — in the opening of the first episode, I rolled my eyes a bit. Of course no one could really object to Dexter killing the lowest form of life there is, how very manipulative of the writers. But how also very smart, I acknowledged, because let’s face it, if he’d gone after any one more sympathetic the average viewer might just decide the show wasn’t for them after ten minutes. And Dexter is a show that really, really needs more than just ten minutes to get across everything it’s brilliant at.

The first episode introduces Dex and his favorite pastime rather efficiently, and moves quickly to present us with the rest of the major players in the drama and the season’s overarching confrontation — namely, the quest for the Ice Truck Killer. Seasons 2 and 3 are likewise set-up in the same way and, watching these episodes a second time and often in large chunks, I am impressed at how well paced this show is. Every episode of Dexter advances the A and B plot threads, and generally does so in unexpected ways. Dexter is never, ever boring, nor is it predictable.

What’s more, this is a show that does not insult the reader’s intelligence. A perfect example would be in season 1, episode 8 when the Ice Truck Killer’s identity is finally revealed. Most attentive viewers will have guessed his identity at that point, or have been fairly certain, and a lesser show would have handled the whole thing badly by taking it past the point where it began to insult the viewer’s intelligence. But when we first see Rudy as Ice Truck, the scene isn’t played for surprise because it should no longer be a surprise, rather it is played for dramatic effect. Questions of the killer’s identity were the subject of earlier episodes, especially those with the red herring (what will become a Dexter staple) Neil Perry. What Dexter does is move from the whodunit stage to a higher level of drama and peril, and link that ultimate conflict intimately with the protagonist’s own motives, history, and inner turmoil.

It’s damn good writing on every level imaginable. Fast-paced, insightful, funny, dark, and absolutely compelling stuff. Whatever objections I entered season 1 with were blown away after the first episode and, like a lot of people, I was hooked hard. Dexter himself is a sympathetic demon, one could almost term him a vigilante if he wasn’t always and uppermost a predatory animal with a taste for blood. Blood is a primary image in season 1, and Dexter’s outsider status a theme brilliantly highlighted by the choices he has to make. It’s blood that Dexter knows better than anything else, as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami Police Department it’s the art and science of blood that link his daytime world of social responsibility to his nocturnal passions. It’s the lack of blood in the drained bodies of the Ice Truck Killer that set him up as a kind of anti-Dexter, a fellow traveler with his own eccentric orbit. It’s a room full of blood, left by the Ice Truck Killer, that triggers Dexter’s repressed memories of his own childhood, and eventually leads to the discovery of his buried past.

The friendly game of cat-and-mouse between Dexter and his counterpart reveals a great deal about Dexter’s past in a way that makes it of immediate concern to the present — again, that’s fine writing. The flashbacks to a young Dex and Harry that introduce Dexter’s code and expose us to his raw, unfinished self in a way that illuminates his psychology are an important feature of seasons 1 and 2, and in this season are used not only for characterization and ‘backstory,’ but to reinforce the current plot. Examples include young Dex’s need for a blood donor proving his connection to the man thought to be his biological father (and also, in point of fact, that Harry lied to him), and the Ice Truck Killer’s gruesome messages that correspond to Morgan family photographs.

All of this serves to erode Harry’s grip on Dexter. What seems a strong ethos of behavior early in the season –  after all in the series’ first murder Dexter disdainfully tells his pedophile victim that he has standards, and he even goes out of his way to help a young man he suspects of sharing his homicidal tendencies in a pair of earlier episodes — is undermined by the Ice Truck Killer’s machinations. When we get to the final confrontation, we perceive that Dexter does indeed have to make a real choice.

And choice is at the heart of drama. The Code of Harry seemed a bit of autopilot for Dex, the unvarying thing at the center of his worldview he didn’t have to question. His faith, in other words. The Ice Truck Killer works to unravel it, showing Harry as a liar, appealing to Dex’s ‘true’ nature. Offering him acceptance, brotherhood, and a relationship based on a unsentimental look at his life as a Morgan. The contrasting relationship is with Debra, someone he has lied to and hidden from his entire life, and throughout the season we see how poorly Dex understands her and fails to live up to her emotional expectations. This sets up the big question of the whole season nicely — can Dexter feel anything?

He doesn’t think he can, but he’s wrong. And that is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dexter’s characterization and Michael C. Hall’s performance. The “little wooden boy” who only felt alive when dismembering a deer or standing at the edge of a rooftop somehow internalized enough of those lessons in normal behavior that he gained some sort of humanity. Ultimately, he may not know if he is acting or really feeling when he makes his choice to save Deb from his brother — for one could perhaps argue that it’s the reassertion of the will of Harry that stops the Ice Truck Killer’s knife, and not Dexter’s own choice at all –  but I think most viewers will have to agree that in this case the acting and the feeling are indistinguishable. Dexter makes his choice at great sacrifice to his more selfish needs, and shows himself to be neither monster or hero, but human being.

The look of season 1 differs a bit from the others, especially the third season where the show unfortunately is no longer filmed in Miami. But the Miami of season 1 feels tropical and cloying in a way that doesn’t come across much in later seasons. Exterior scenes are often washed out by sun glare and have a grainy quality, and the actors sweat through their clothing. We see a larger variety of interiors as well, and everything conspires to create the illusion of realness. Perhaps understandably things have streamlined in later seasons to some extent, but the Miami of season 1 comes across as every bit as important a character as Dexter himself. I don’t really get that sense from later seasons.

In a finale that combines the poignant with the gruesome Dexter kills his own brother, and kills an idea of himself as he does so. It’s a reaffirmation of the Code of Harry, and of Dexter’s choice to remain fundamentally alone to protect those around him. In a season that wrestled with questions of identity throughout, Dexter chooses for himself how he will be defined.

The last image we are left with is Dexter walking away from the crime scene and the brother he has murdered. He imagines the gathered crowd cheering him, his sister and co-workers looking upon him with approval and adoration and all of Miami hailing him as a hero. A powerful and darkly humorous closing scene, where a smiling Dexter’s fantasy isn’t a longing for fame or glory, but for acceptance. That we the viewer inevitably smile back indicates he has gotten his wish.

• Dexter Season 1 at Amazon
• Official Dexter site