Like Michael C. Hall bursting from the shadows and sticking one of his unsuspecting victims with a syringe, each stunning twist in Showtime’s drama Dexter catches you off guard and leaves you paralyzed. When you sit down for each episode, you’re signing up for 40-some minutes of heart-pounding, blood pressure-raising, unadulterated entertainment.
The show is a delightful blend of three genres: film noir, crime drama and the darkest comedy imaginable. The title character, Dexter Morgan (Hall), is a blood-splatter analyst with the Miami Police Department. However, he spends his nights as a serial killer who only goes after the bad guys, murderers and drug dealers who have somehow evaded incarceration.
Yet Dexter’s carefully crafted mask of sanity earns him a handful of close friends within the department. His staunch ally and closest friend is his foster sister Deb, played by The Excorcism of Emily Rose’s Jennifer Carpenter. Then there’s the lovable tagteam of Angel Hernandez (David Zayas), the most endearing and pathetic of the bunch, and Victor Masuka (C.S. Lee), who provides the comic relief as a sex-obsessed forensic expert. Rounding out the cast of leads is Rita, Dexter’s girlfriend, played by Julie Benz.
In the first season, Dexter is intrigued by playful messages he receives from a fellow serial killer dubbed the ‘Ice Truck Killer’ due to his method of draining blood from his victims’ bodies before freezing them. A series of flashbacks reveal minute details about Dexter’s past. His foster father, Harry Morgan, a former officer with Miami Police, took in a young Dexter after finding him covered in a puddle of his murdered mother’s blood. But the most shocking twist comes when it’s revealed that Rudy, a prosthetic surgeon who has been dating Deb, is actually the Ice Truck Killer. What’s more, he’s Dexter’s biological brother. Keeping to what he calls ‘the code of Harry,’ Dexter dutifully dismisses his brother.
The second season saw the show travel down a far more different road. A scuba-diving team happens upon Dexter’s own body-deposit spot and soon the entire police force is searching for the serial killer they call ‘The Bay Harbor Butcher.’ Dexter is thrust into a constant state of paranoia at work, while he deals with a new love interest, the loathsome British bimbo-slash-arsonist, Lila, who is mercifully taken out by Dexter in the season finale after she murders one of the show’s most intriguing faces, Sgt. James Dokes (Erik King). The deaths of these two characters, coinciding with the earlier deaths of Harry Morgan and the Ice Truck Killer, means that every person who has known of Dexter’s identity as a serial killer has died.
The third season, which debuted last Sunday, followed up a dramatic close to the second season, which appeared to have left open very little room for lingering drama. But a fantastic new addition to the cast, Jimmy Smits, who plays all-star prosecutor Miguel Prado, promises to be the primary source of suspense in the new season.
Dexter, on his way to kill a crime-driven young man, Freebo, loses control in the heat of the moment and winds up killing another man, of whom he has no previous knowledge. This marks the first time that Dexter has broken the code of Harry, and his victim is Oscar Prado, the younger brother of Miguel.
Dexter, for self-therapeutic reasons, is convinced that Oscar Prado must be guilty of something, so to learn more about his victim he forges a close personal relationship with Miguel. The older brother admits that his brother did not ‘suffer from the tragedy of perfection.’
Meanwhile, Deb, seeking her shield, is removed from the Prado case because she runs her mouth at an inopportune time, calling Oscar a ‘junkie’ in front of Miguel. Angel, her new boss, is forced to personally relieve her of her duties. And the end of the episode brings with it a bombshell: Rita, Dexter’s girlfriend, is pregnant with his child.
The third season promises a new batch of high-octane, high-stakes, high-blood pressure thrillers as Dexter will once again run from the law and try to find self-fulfillment in all of his bloody endeavors.