Dexter (S1 and S2)
May. 20th, 2008 12:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catI heard good things about Dexter, but they didn't seem enough to cancel out the twin ick-potential qualities of making the serial killer protagonist only kill bad guys and casting Michael C. Hall in that role. Which is not to insult Michael C. Hall, who's a great actor - it's just that casting someone that good-looking in a show that already seems to be framing Dexter himself as a sympathetic character? Hmm. So I didn't watch it, and now I'm sort of glad, because when I finally caught the pilot by accident and thought "hey, this is a lot better than I thought," I could watch two whole seasons just as fast as I could get my hands on the episodes.
The things I love about this show are numerous. How well it uses its setting, for one thing, and how well it uses its secondary characters, for another - the background is fully three-dimensional here. There isn't much I dislike, apart from some patchy treatment with some of the female characters in S2; the annoyingness of the LaGuerta-Pascal storyline was amplified even more by how great LaGuerta's line to the Captain was about such criticisms usually being code for 'being female', and Lila's storyline flopped, a little. Although it wasn't too intriguing from the start, that storyline. I think the thing that bugged me most about that was that I wanted to throw something at Lila right from the start, and I knew I was supposed to want to. But, at least the good girl/bad girl storyline with Lila and Rita didn't come at the cost of how Rita was written.
Actually, Rita's character, and how that developed, is a great example of one of my favourite things about the show: that it has great faith in people's ability to grow and heal. After watching the end of S2, I went back and watched the first few episodes again, and it's amazing how much the traumatised, terrified Rita of back then has changed over two seasons into the quietly confident Rita of later on. And I especially love that this is presented as Rita just being a pretty tough character, rather than as a result of her relationship with Dexter. Ditto, Deb's storyline - what she wants most is to be a good cop (and the kind of cop her father would have approved of), and although she's a long way off it when she first gets moved to Homicide and can't speak to LaGuerta without faltering, she's not only there by the end of S2 (despite her experiences with Rudy) but there securely enough to provide a neat reversal of the S1 finale by saving Dexter from a homicidal lover.
I don't have time to get into all the other characters, or the did-Harry-help-or-hurt? debate, but I did also want to mention that I liked what they did with Doakes and LaGuerta, as well. They seemed like flat background decorations to start with, just foils for the main character to act around - the mean boss and the bad-tempered cop who Suspects Something - but they got their own personalities, and their own storylines, and their own history, and LaGuerta refusing to give up on Doakes at the end of S2 was heartbreaking.
This show is great at showing you something in a way that lets you assume it's flat and untextured, and then gradually teasing it out into a textured, three-dimensional world. The Miami setting, to start with. Doakes and LaGuerta, and Rita, too. And Dexter's psyche, which turns out not to be as void of emotion and uncertainty as he believes himself to start with. In the pilot, Dexter says of Rita that in her own way, "she's just as broken as I am." For Rita, though, broken isn't a permanent state - for Dexter, who seems to have frozen with the emotional age of a very young child (which from what I've read is usually taken as corresponding to his age at his mother's death, but I wonder if it would also work as corresponding to the moment when Harry took him in (although obviously those aren't different ages) - when you've found somewhere mentally and emotionally safe, for you if not for everyone else around you, why rock the boat?
Anyway, I hope S3 is the last one, and that it ends with something conclusive about Dexter's own storyline. My guess would be that S3's main story arc is going to involve Dexter deciding upon his own moral code, and one actually based on morals rather than convenience ('if you want to kill people, only kill the following kind of people...'), but, well. This could go very well, or very, very badly. We'll see.
The things I love about this show are numerous. How well it uses its setting, for one thing, and how well it uses its secondary characters, for another - the background is fully three-dimensional here. There isn't much I dislike, apart from some patchy treatment with some of the female characters in S2; the annoyingness of the LaGuerta-Pascal storyline was amplified even more by how great LaGuerta's line to the Captain was about such criticisms usually being code for 'being female', and Lila's storyline flopped, a little. Although it wasn't too intriguing from the start, that storyline. I think the thing that bugged me most about that was that I wanted to throw something at Lila right from the start, and I knew I was supposed to want to. But, at least the good girl/bad girl storyline with Lila and Rita didn't come at the cost of how Rita was written.
Actually, Rita's character, and how that developed, is a great example of one of my favourite things about the show: that it has great faith in people's ability to grow and heal. After watching the end of S2, I went back and watched the first few episodes again, and it's amazing how much the traumatised, terrified Rita of back then has changed over two seasons into the quietly confident Rita of later on. And I especially love that this is presented as Rita just being a pretty tough character, rather than as a result of her relationship with Dexter. Ditto, Deb's storyline - what she wants most is to be a good cop (and the kind of cop her father would have approved of), and although she's a long way off it when she first gets moved to Homicide and can't speak to LaGuerta without faltering, she's not only there by the end of S2 (despite her experiences with Rudy) but there securely enough to provide a neat reversal of the S1 finale by saving Dexter from a homicidal lover.
I don't have time to get into all the other characters, or the did-Harry-help-or-hurt? debate, but I did also want to mention that I liked what they did with Doakes and LaGuerta, as well. They seemed like flat background decorations to start with, just foils for the main character to act around - the mean boss and the bad-tempered cop who Suspects Something - but they got their own personalities, and their own storylines, and their own history, and LaGuerta refusing to give up on Doakes at the end of S2 was heartbreaking.
This show is great at showing you something in a way that lets you assume it's flat and untextured, and then gradually teasing it out into a textured, three-dimensional world. The Miami setting, to start with. Doakes and LaGuerta, and Rita, too. And Dexter's psyche, which turns out not to be as void of emotion and uncertainty as he believes himself to start with. In the pilot, Dexter says of Rita that in her own way, "she's just as broken as I am." For Rita, though, broken isn't a permanent state - for Dexter, who seems to have frozen with the emotional age of a very young child (which from what I've read is usually taken as corresponding to his age at his mother's death, but I wonder if it would also work as corresponding to the moment when Harry took him in (although obviously those aren't different ages) - when you've found somewhere mentally and emotionally safe, for you if not for everyone else around you, why rock the boat?
Anyway, I hope S3 is the last one, and that it ends with something conclusive about Dexter's own storyline. My guess would be that S3's main story arc is going to involve Dexter deciding upon his own moral code, and one actually based on morals rather than convenience ('if you want to kill people, only kill the following kind of people...'), but, well. This could go very well, or very, very badly. We'll see.
