Dexter - Season 5: "All in the Family"

Hearty, bloody good dish

By Alex Dimitropoulos

A blood spatter analyst who doubles as a serial killer with an increasingly lax code, Dexter Morgan has an identity as disposable as his latex murder gloves, his winsome smile and his mock enthusiasm. “All in the Family,” the fourth episode from the third season, reinforces that notion with an emphasis on role playing and toying with the audience’s feelings for the character, played by the alternately steely and sensitive Michael C. Hall. “The only roles I had trouble with were good guys. Heroes. Knights in shining armor. It just never felt right,” Dexter says. The voiceover in Showtime’s Dexter, which shares his thoughts, rationalizations and confusions, implicates the viewer in the program, part of why the show is so addicting. The audience gets the confessions that Dexter himself will never deliver in a courtroom. He frames others, sidesteps suspicion and lives a relatively guilt-free life in his own mind and in the unsuspecting eyes of others.

It is not a life without stress, however. He learned last episode that his girlfriend Rita was pregnant, and Dexter botches the announcement to her two other children, offers them a puppy and then clumsily proposes. “People don’t get married because it makes sense,” Rita tells him. Dexter cannot grasp why his rational mimicry of affection fails—he lives according to evidence. While on the job in this episode, he tries to solve a murder by simulating it with a dummy in the police station. As a killer, he tries to avoid leaving clues so that others cannot do the same in their own offices.

His personality is his most critical construction of evidence, however, a collection of calculated presentations to his sister Deb, his coworkers and his “friends.” Dexter proposes (evidence of love) and tells a colleague he will attend his keynote address at a forensics conference, an event everyone else at the station avoids (evidence of friendship). He confesses that his mother was murdered (evidence of tragedy) to Ramón Prado, a vengeful cop searching for the man who killed his brother, Oscár.

Ramón believes this murderer to be a drug dealer named Freebo. Only Dexter and Miguel Prado, the other Prado brother and an assistant district attorney played by with verve by Jimmy Smits, know that Dexter killed Freebo. Dexter wants to keep it that way and attempts to prove to Miguel that Ramón is too unstable to guard this binding, vigilante justice secret. The show is a series of nested truths that Dexter must maintain and conceal, and its narrative complexity is a testament to what a group can accomplish outside of network programming and without advertisement constraints. Dexter plays people against one another so that they do not even know whom it is they are fighting, and they fall around him like dominoes, one way or another. “I take no pleasure in manipulating Miguel this way,” Dexter says, orchestrating a violent, barroom outburst from Ramón. “Still, I think he’d prefer it to my usual alternative.” He means gruesome, methodical killing and disposal of the body, all without a trace leading back to him.

“I have only one person I can trust anymore,” Miguel says, when his relationship with his remaining brother falls apart.

“Yourself,” Dexter says.

“I was thinking of you,” Miguel responds.

The genius of this third season is that Dexter no longer determines all of the roles for himself. Rita’s pregnancy was a surprise—Dexter will become a father. By the close of this episode, Miguel has also cast him as his brother. Dexter is much more sympathetic than American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, a yuppie who kills indiscriminately and still receives compliments, accolades and more and more money. The identity initially intended to distract people from the dark killing compulsion underneath is growing more appealing to Dexter’s new friends, his coworkers and himself. His capacity for surprise and growth is clear in his ever-widening eyes, his dismantling and destruction of some of his evil personae and his gradual leak of feeling to others. He’s becoming a much more sociable sociopath, and this character, episode and season of Dexter are not only worth overhearing or witnessing—they’re worth looking directly in the eye.

Check it out: Dexter on SHO

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