Desperately Dissecting “Dexter”

I didn’t want to re-watch the last season of Dexter. I loved the hell out of that show, but that last season fell apart, just seemed…ill conceived and executed.

But Tananarive insisted, so it got into our daily rotation. We watched season 7, and something interesting happened: I realized it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. Oh, it was flawed, certainly. But it was different this time: I began to believe that I understood what they were trying to do. And saw the connection between Dexter, 24, Breaking Bad, and Batman.

All are fantasies about people doing very Bad Things, that somehow making us love them anyway.

Jack Bauer is a man of action, totally convinced of the rightness of his cause. He is capable of doing ANYTHING to finish his job (“get me a hacksaw”).

Walter White is a mild-mannered school teacher who becomes a drug-dealing, murdering, corrupting monster.

Batman is a traumatized man-child who acts out his fantasies of vengeance on the underworld of a hellishly corrupt city.

Dexter is a serial killer who only kills other serial killers.

In all these cases, you have terrible things: murder, torture, drug dealing, vigilante violence, etc…being done for reasons we accept enough to empathize with.

The thing about Jack Bauer I loved is that he KNEW he was a monster, or had a monster inside him, one that in the fantasy context was valuable: he NEVER made a mistake. NEVER…