Deviously Devoted to Dexter

I admit it. I am hooked on both the Dexter novels and the Showtime TV series of the same name. I'm not so hooked that I would buy a DEXTER t-shirt or one of the DEXTER two-faced watches, which are available among many other promotional items, but I did buy the Season 2 & 3 DVD's because we don't subscribe to Showtime. Being devoted to Dexter is the definition of a guilty pleasure. In case you don't know, the character Dexter Morgan is a serial killer with something of a moral code. Dexter only kills people who deserve to be killed. I mean really deserve to be killed, as far as Dexter is concerned. But he's not some avenging angel sort like the vigilantes that Charles Bronson and even John Wayne occasionally played. The twist, you see, is that Dexter not only practices his vengeance to serve justice but because he enjoys it, too.

I first got hooked on DEXTER, during the TV writer's strike. NBC showed a cleaned and censored version of Season One. If I remember correctly, that series led me to read the three novels, which are very different and considerably gorier than the cable tales that use them for a basis. Dexter Morgan is a C.SI., a blood spatter specialist, and it is through his police work that he researches and avenges his victims, who have cheated justice in some way. His adoptive father Harry, a now deceased police officer, recognized when Dexter was young, that his son was a badly broken boy without a moral center. In anticipation of what he was sure Dexter would become, he taught him Harry's Code, which says if you kill, you must kill someone who is evil and has taken at least one life. As a result, Dexter is a well-balanced wacko, who knows exactly what he is--a very bad guy.

The great irony of DEXTER is that normal people who watch him or read about him, root for him as well. We don't want Dexter to get caught. The people he dispatches tend to be such awful human beings that the viewers want Dexter to get away with his crimes. They also pull for his foul-mouthed but effective sister Deb, who is a Miami police officer, and hope that crazy Dexter will settle down in the suburbs and marry his girlfriend, who has two children.

An example of how the books are farther out than the series is the treatment of the two children. On TV, Astor and Cody are sweet little kids. In the books, Dexter has recognized that Astrid and Cody, (different name for the little girl, who knows why) having survived a father who abused their mother, are potential serial killers, themselves. He plans to watch out for them and provide a moral(?) code.

Warning: if you decide to watch an episode of DEXTER,, close your eyes when he does in the bad guys. It ain't pretty, and I admit that I occasionally look away, even though they show a lot more blood at the crime scenes on CBS's CSI or CSI NEW YORK than they do in Dexter's vengeance murders.

I ask myself why do I like this show. I never rubberneck while passing auto accidents or listen to scanners about horrible things happening to real people. Maybe it comes back to my love for horror movies. For Dexter Morgan is certainly a monster, and he readily would admit to that fact.