by David Webb

Dexter. Created by James Manos, Jr. Directed by James Dahl, Steve Shill, Keith Gordon and many others. Written by Jeff Lindsay, James Manor, Jr, and others. Starring Michael C. Hall, Jennifer Carpenter, David Zayas, James Remar. Produced by the Colleton Company, John Goldwyn Productions, Clyde Phillips Productions, and others. Showtime (USA), 1 October 2006-22 September 2013. Available in the UK on Sky, NOW TV, Netflix and Paramount Plus. 8 seasons, 96 episodes, 47–58 minutes each.

I don’t have a TV—yes, I’m one of those people—and I select what I wish to view myself by browsing sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. The BBC most certainly does not get to colonize my brain! And I have to out myself as a huge Dexter fan. We have been blessed with eight seasons of the original series, which aired 2006-2013, plus the Dexter: New Blood series that aired from November 2021 to January 2022 and the Dexter: Original Sin series that aired from December 2024 to February 2025. I believe they were produced by a US company called Showtime.

These series are particularly interesting because the serial killer, Dexter Morgan, played by Michael C. Hall in the main series, is effectively the hero. Although I think we should regret the passing of the orderly society of the 1930s-1950s, we are in a different social reality, one of high crime, often ethnic, and a government, both here and in America, whose priorities do not include re-establishing a low-crime, high-trust society. Of course, murder is itself still illegal—thank the Lord for small mercies!—but the criminal justice system throughout the West operates as a kind of game, and murderers often get away with their crimes, or get inadequate punishment, for procedural reasons. It is not hard to see why a serial killer like Dexter Morgan, who focuses exclusively on killing the bad guys—taking the trash out—can become the hero of the series, and a kind of cultural icon.

Of course, being an American series, there is psychobabble throughout, and the main thesis of the series is that Dexter Morgan has developed a fascination with blood and an urge to kill from witnessing his mother being hacked into pieces with a chain-saw when he was only three years old. He was adopted by the policeman his mother had worked as a confidential informant for, but was young enough to not remember his mother’s murder, but still had an urge to kill. I think this is the left-wing “I’m a murderer because of my childhood” narrative. His adoptive policeman father develops a “code” for him, whereby he lets him kill, as long as he only kills other serial killers. He therefore ultimately performs a useful social function.

Dexter, while frequently stated in the series as not really capable of love or human connection, does seem to have a connection with his father and sister. In the end, however, the only person he properly loves is his young son, Harrison. To that extent, he is redeemable, and his decision to fake his own death at the end of season 8 was ultimately done to save Harrison and give him a normal life without a serial-killer father. Michael C. Hall is not a classically handsome man, not model-tier by any means, but grows on the viewer quite quickly, and in the end you are left seeing him as more and more handsome in a rugged, masculine way. His American accent doesn’t grate, as many American accents might, and his voiceovers (used to convey his innermost thoughts) seem to have a more gentle, vulnerable timbre to him, suggesting that he is, in the end, a boy who lost his mother in a terrible crime, and there is some good in him.

There are many interesting elements regarding the murder process. Dexter nabs his victims by injecting them with Etorphine M-99 straight into the neck, whereupon they instantly pass out. In real life, there is no chemical that would act instantly. A horse tranquilizer like this would normally take 10 minutes to work, or maybe just 1 minute as long as it was injected straight into the jugular vein. Nothing in real life works instantaneously. Dexter learns a lot about police technique by working as a forensic analyst with Miami Metro Homicide, where his father and sister work as homicide officers. A lot of information apparently useful to criminals is shown, like how to deck out a kill room in sheets of plastic to avoid any forensic traces. Ultimately, his victims are chopped up and put in black plastic bags and thrown in the Miami Bay harbour to become fish food.

What is interesting is how we are meant to react to this. The number of people in society who would secretly approve of a killer who targets only other killers would be surprisingly high. We are long past the days of Christian morality, and a “they had it coming” approach to serious criminals has a kind of populist vibe to it. When Deb, Dexter’s adoptive sister, walks into a church where Dexter has just killed a serial killer, she is thrown into a quandary. She should arrest her brother, but he has only killed a serial killer after all. Why sweat the small stuff, Deb? He’s your brother, and only focuses on the real trash in society. It is kind of overdone how distraught she is over this, but she ends up helping him conceal the crime. In the end Dexter’s pursuit of serial killers leads to his wife’s death (in front of his toddler son, Harrison) and also Deb’s death in the end, and so he decides to quit that life, fake his own death, and allow Harrison the chance of growing up normal without him (leaving him to be brought up by Hannah, another serial killer, but that’s a tangent in the story). He pilots his boat directly into a hurricane, and the viewer is expected to believe he is dead.

Note to Hollywood: never kill off the main character. That is lousy script-writing. The directors may have thought the series had reached its logical conclusion and there was not much more to be gained from spinning it out for another ten seasons, but the real fans wanted more. As far as the direction/writing is concerned there are a few other points. Being set in Miami, this is a multi-racial series, but nothing is made of the race angle. There is no woke preaching. All of the serial killers are white or white-looking Hispanics—this of course contradicts the reality that black people in America are twice as likely as white people to become serial killers, but that is a fact carefully airbrushed out of the newsreels (and the media regularly states the opposite as a kind of liberal factoid). The Deb character often becomes annoying, because she is shown as being extremely foul-mouthed at every turn. I personally cannot accept locker-room language from a woman. A Japanese forensic analyst, Masuka, adds a comedic aspect by regaling his Miami Metro colleagues with “titty” jokes at every turn, but I would argue that character could have been usefully dropped. The series has a kind of upbeat vibe to it, set in Miami with Latin salsa music throughout, and that forms part of its charm.

Dexter: New Blood

Dexter: New Blood. Developed by Clyde Phillips. Directed by Marcos Siega, Stanford Bookstaver. Written by Clyde Phillips, Alexandra Franklin, Jeff Lindsay, and others. Starring Michael C. Hall, Jack Alcott. Produced by Clyde Phillips, Michael C. Hall, and others. Showtime (USA), 7 November 2021-9 January 2022; Sky Atlantic (UK) 8 November 2021. 1 season, 10 episodes, 45–58 minutes each.

Ten years later, it turns out that Dexter is not dead. He survived the hurricane and ends up living in a cabin in a snow-bound part of northern America (Iron Lake, New York) selling guns. He has abstained from killing the whole time—until the day that Harrison, his son, turns up to find him and to find out if his Dad wants a relationship with him. Then the killing starts again.

It seems that Harrison, having witnessed his mother’s murder too as a young child—Harrison’s mother, Rita, was murdered by the Trinity Killer, a serial killer being pursued by Dexter—also has urges to hurt people. Dexter soon realizes his son is becoming like him, and ends up telling him everything. The best bit comes in episode 8 when Harrison now realizes he is accepted as he is by his father and hugs him in the car. A touching moment of father-son bonding comes when Dexter picks a lock while gathering information to confirm his next victim is a killer and therefore deserving of being murdered according to Dexter’s “code”. “Teach me how to do that, Dad?”, he says, as if showing your son how to pick a lock was a kind of paternal rite of passage. Dexter even takes Harrison on the kill and shows him how to prepare the kill room and chop the body up and dispose of it.

Disaster then strikes when Showtime’s lousy scriptwriters make the same mistake again: they kill Dexter off once again at the end of the series. Harrison now blames Dexter for how he has turned out, and decides to kill his father. This sort of thing is a big no-no for any scriptwriter and should have led to instant dismissal. It seemed to kill the franchise entirely. Revolt of the fans and the call for more mean that Dexter will survive the shooting however, and a new sequel Dexter: Resurrection, featuring both Dexter and Harrison, will be aired from June this year. Hopefully, it will run for many seasons. The snowy setting of Iron Lake didn’t really match the Dexter backstory, and maybe the action will move to a sunnier part of America, as Dexter before being shot by Harrison had expressed a desire to move with his son to Los Angeles, a large city where it’s easier to get away with murder.

Dexter: Original Sin

Dexter: Original Sin. Created by Clyde Phillips. Directed by Michael Lehmann, Monica Raymund. Written by Clyde Phillips, Scott Reynolds, and others. Starring Patrick Gibson, Christian Slater, Michael C. Hall (voice). Produced by Clyde Phillips Productions, Showtime Network, and others. Parasmount+ (USA/UK), 13 December 2024-14 February 2025. 1 season, 10 episodes, 46–58 minutes each.

Original Sin is a prequel series that takes place before the main series, showing how Dexter came to be a serial killer in the first place. It seemed at first that casting the Irish actor Patrick Gibson as the younger Dexter was going to be a bad choice, but in the end he played the role perfectly. Gibson is a happy-go-lucky, smiley person in real life, someone hard to envisage as a serial killer. But he manages to become a more introverted and serious person with a realistic American accent. His normal fair hair and blue eyes clash with Michael C. Hall’s colouring, and he dyes his hair auburn for the series and wears contact lenses in a way that makes him a really feasible younger Michael C. Hall. Gibson is acknowledged as a good-looking guy in any case, but one who appears to be a kind of sappy, pretty boy, but made-up in the role of Dexter he is given more “edge” and becomes more handsome than he has ever been in any show—it takes him from an 8/10 to an 11/10—and the fans will be wanting much more from him in this role.

More details are given here of the backstory. We see the three-year-old Dexter and his seven-year-old brother Brian sitting in a shipping container filled with blood and the body parts of their dead mother. This is the original trigger for their emergence as serial killers. It turns out the older Brian is seriously disturbed by the experience and is sent to mental hospital, while Harry, Dexter’s adoptive father, hopes to rescue Dexter and bring him up a normal boy, until he too develops the urge to kill. We see here that when Brian is released from mental hospital, he goes on to become a serial killer and attempts to find Dexter—who has forgotten that he had a brother—until he is convinced by Harry that if he loves Dexter he will stay way. (In the main series, Brian re-emerges as the Ice Truck Killer, Dexter now gets the full story that Harry hid from him, and Brian tries to convince Dexter to kill Deb, so Dexter has to kill his own brother and dump his body parts in the sea.)

The dialogue can be striking. Dexter’s very first kill, that of a nurse who was trying to kill Harry in hospital, sees her set up on his table in the kill room. She screams out, and he cries “scream again, and lose a tongue!” Later, when Dexter has police chief Captain Spencer on his table in the kill room for having killed a child and chopped off his (Spencer’s) own son’s finger, leaving a hesitation mark as presumably Spencer was hesitant to attack his own son, Dexter then chops off Spencer’s finger, saying “I guarantee you, absolutely zero hesitation marks when I do it!” These exclamations are quite macabre, but all the same humorous.

The viewer is left wanting more, and there will be a second season of Dexter:Original Sin in early 2026, and so we will have a prequel and a sequel running side by side. It seems there isn’t much space timewise for many seasons between Original Sin and the main series, as Dexter is already working as a forensic analyst for Miami Metro in this prequel. But at least Showtime cannot kill him off this time, as the prequel will have to merge seamlessly into the eight seasons of the main series.

So we are left admiring serial killers—this is where multi-culturalism and social liberalism, which have fostered the breakdown in the social fabric, have led us. If all cultures are equal, and our new society is just more vibrant, then what, pray, is wrong with killing and murder? This is the thing our new elite cannot tell us.