DVD REVIEW

Dexter - The Complete Second Season

Paramount Home Entertainment || Not Rated || Aug 19, 2008

Synopsis

Although committed to carrying out his twisted brand of vigilante justice – Dexter begins to doubt his murderous capabilities and continues to be haunted by his tortured past.  His difficulties multiply when evidence of his deadly after-hours activities begin to surface and the FBI is brought in to investigate the city’s new serial killer dubbed the “Bay Harbor Butcher.”  Dexter can’t pause for breath as the noose tightens and the questions keep mounting.  Will he be able to continue his serial-killing ways?  Or will Dexter’s dark past finally be uncovered?


Critique

There seems to be a line through the major television shows of the last eight years or so: the guy next door is simultaneously nothing like us and everything like us.  We had the mobster next door, the funeral parlor next door, the super heroes next door and so on.  With Dexter we have the serial killer next door.  Dexter Morgan, for all his idiosyncrasies, is not all that different from the rest of us.  The show’s opening sequence pretty much spells this out for us.  In this sequence Dexter goes through the mundane motions of getting ready for another day at work: shaving, having breakfast, tying his shoes and heading out the door.  There is some great visual entendre at work in the sequence as well, enough to let anyone coming in for the first time know that this guy is not all he seems, but the point is clear: this guy could be any one of us.  I’m not sure how I feel about this moral relativism (as truthful as it might be), but it makes for great TV.

I live in the idyllic seaside hamlet of Long Beach, California, the home of Sublime, Snoop Dogg, Cameron Diaz, Billie Jean King, and Nicolas Cage just to name a few.  There are more TV shows, movies and commercials filmed right here in Long Beach – many of them less than a mile from where I live – than you would believe, including many Miami-based shows.  Next time you’re watching, say, your favorite Miami-set forensic crime show starring the first man to ever partner with Andy Sipowicz, there’s a pretty fair chance that episode was filmed a stone’s throw from where I’m writing this review.  If you’ve only seen Miami on TV, you’ve never really seen Miami; you’ve seen Long Beach.

It’s probably an odd manifestation of civic pride, but that fact is why I automatically like Dexter (and CSI: Miami and Transformers 2, even though it hasn’t even been released and I didn’t really like the first one).  It’s like rooting for the home team; it’s cool to turn on a show and see your city, your neighborhood, and on more than one channel too.

So Dexter is filmed in Long Beach, but not obviously so.  By “obviously so” I mean that every now and then we see a landmark – mostly in the deep background – that someone familiar would notice, but it’s not enough to take you out of the show.  It isn’t like, say, CSI: Miami, which is so obviously not Miami that it might as well be called CSI: LBC; I keep waiting for a city bus to pass by in a scene.  The shots in Dexter are so tightly framed that these characters could be in Miami or anywhere else; the photography makes the background convincingly generic.  When it is obvious, it’s obvious in scenes like the one where Doakes and LaGuerta talk on cell phones at locations that, we assume, are miles apart, but to the trained eye the two are clearly no more than ten feet apart, probably filming the scene at the same time.  There is one scene that I’m almost positive was filmed at the Aquarium of the Pacific, but that’s just stretching it.

So I can hear you thinking, that’s all fine and well, Dyl, by what do I give a shit where you’re from or where the show is filmed?  What does that have to do with anything?  And you’d be right, except that it makes it all the more difficult to point out the show’s flaws, like admitting that your favorite basketball team maybe doesn’t have the strongest starting five.  Dexter is a strong show, but it is not without its glaring weaknesses.

There are some interesting racial currents running through Dexter.  Dexter, the average white quiet next-door neighbor is one of the few white people left in his precinct.  The average white male, which Dexter aggressively is, is more and more out of place.  “Marginalized” is probably too strong a term, but it’s the first one that comes to mind; this isn’t Dexter’s world anymore.  The old days, Harry’s days, are long gone.  Dexter’s lab partner is Asian, the detectives (with the exception of Dexter’s sister) are black and Hispanic.  This includes both supervising officers we have this season.  And now everyone is hunting Dexter.  He has to navigate this strange new world, the world Harry never prepared him for.

Dexter’s first two attempts at killing this season are on a black man and a Hispanic man, and both attempts go horribly wrong.  While all of this is going on, Doakes is actively shadowing Dexter, trying to put his finger on just what is so off about him.  Doakes, who is easily one of the Blackest characters on television, sees through Dexter’s nice-guy act, but he doesn’t have enough to get specific.

There is an interesting turn though when Doakes finds Dexter’s collection of slides and takes a few.  He is snooping around Dexter’s place (illegally) and finds what he needs.  Apparently there are no labs anywhere in Miami that can be trusted, so Doakes travels to the blood analysis capital of the western hemisphere, Port Au Prince, Haiti.  Where we might think that he has Dexter nailed, this actually leads to Doakes being considered the prime suspect; the fact that he leaves the country doesn’t help.  As S.A. Lundy says, “He has a need to dole out personal justice.”

When Doakes returns to Miami, he has to go into hiding to avoid the glare of the manhunt, but he stays focused on Dexter.  It is amazing how close he gets to exposing Dexter.  He actually learns the truth about this weird little geek from the lab.  It all started with a bad vibe, and Doakes catches Dexter, in every sense of the word, red-handed.  If it wasn’t for the basic fact that if Dexter is caught the show would end, we’re left wondering just how he’s going to get out of this.  He’s caught.

Dexter somehow gets the better of Doakes (a cringe-worthy scene that stains credibility to the max) and locks him in a cage.  So the average white guy has a black man in a cage … like an animal … in the middle of nowhere in the Deep South.  I don’t want to read too much into anything, but it’s off that this is how it turns out.  Doakes does everything right (if not by the book) and cracks the case.  He does what an army of FBI agents cannot do, and he does it alone.  What happens is all the more tragic because of how he goes out and what happens to his name.

So maybe the police force of Harry’s day isn’t totally dead, but it is fading more and more every day.  Harry says it himself that nothing stays buried, and that could be applied to anything.  The “Code of Harry” might not be all it’s cracked up to be, but it still has applications in Dexter’s world.  We learn more about Harry this season, none of it good, but we also get another character that plays an important role in Dexter’s evolution.

We should probably hate Lila (Jaime Murray of Hustle fame) from the minute we meet her.  Dexter meets her in a twelve-step meeting, which should be an automatic red flag.  There is something Marla Singer about her at first: it’s hard to tell if she’s there because she’s really in a program or because she likes to listen to all the sob stories.  We later learn that she is a recovering meth addict, but she is a lot more than that.  

Lila is a scary character.  She is manipulative and a liar and an addict and she does the kinds of things addicts do.  She sees through Dexter (to a point).  She is the voice he doesn’t need.  The really scary thing about Lila is that there are actually women like her out there, forces of nature that leave nothing but wakes of destruction behind them, and you usually don’t know who they are until it’s too late.  She seems a little kooky at first, and we probably suspect more is coming, but we’re not totally sure what she is about.  Lila meets Rita and the family, and there is a sinking, wolf-in-the-hen-house feeling, but it’s vague.

Dexter brings Lila into his world; it’s a sign of trust.  She is a recovering meth addict, and the comparison is made between she and Dexter, that their compulsions are similar.  (If we break it down biologically to the dopamine release they both get from their vices, they probably are.)  Lila understands Dexter just enough to make his life difficult, but she also underestimates him.

Lila leads Dexter into temptation and then pulls him back from the brink.  This is how she seduces him.  As if we didn’t have enough to show us how off-kilter she is, when she is waiting in a motel room for Dexter she passes the time by painting over the idyllic-cheesy motel room painting, turning it into a village engulfed in flames and lava from an erupting volcano.  She punctuates this by telling Dexter about an old lover whose house she burned to the ground… (There is a funny-in-retrospect moment where Debra finds Dexter and Lila in bed, candles burning in every corner of the room.  Debra quips, “Are you trying to fuck her or set her on fire?”)

Maybe it’s because she’s such a bad girl, but it’s hard to watch Season Two and not have a crush Jaime Murray.  She’s hot.  Well, cute, but with a distinct don’t-fuck-with-me-vibe.  With her looks and her classic English accent, she’s like a sinister Mary Poppins, the kind of girl who would nurture you and fuck your brains out.  She’s the kind of girl who would torch your apartment … and you just wouldn’t be able to stay mad at her.  Lila is important in Dexter’s evolution.  She brings him out, brings his feelings into the open and she show’s him that Harry’s code isn’t something that can’t be amended.  Dexter isn’t bound by it.  He can take what works and adapt it to his own life, write his own code.

Lila, ever the manipulator, earns our hatred in the end.  She fucks Angel, then gives herself a roofie and claims he raped her.  She will drop the charges if Dexter takes her back, but by then we know that her fate has been sealed.  “I’ve created a monster of my own,” Dexter tells himself.  Lila is more like Dexter than he is comfortable with, and she has to pay.

Lila started out as Dexter’s sponsor, and she remained so, in a manner of speaking. Dexter is in a program, but he’s not recovering, he’s evolving, becoming.  At the end of his road he can shed Lila (and Harry) like and old skin.

When Lila goes batshit in the end, Rita is oddly stoic about it.  She has a ho-hum attitude that is unexpected considering what she has been through over the season.  Maybe she is just happy to have Dexter and to have Lila out of the picture.  She finds out about Dexter and Lila, of course, and she is at least a little responsible for putting them together, forcing him to enter a twelve-step program.

Julie Benz will always be Darla, the vampire bitch from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.  But here she plays a character that is the exact opposite of Darla.  It takes her a while to find the strength to stand up to her mother and Dexter.  Rita comes off as wounded and vulnerable but not weak.  She is a rock for Dexter, and it’s interesting to note that as their relationship comes apart over the course of the season, that trajectory mirrors the tightening noose of police-work around Dexter.  Only when he is clear of everything does his relationship with Rita get back on the rails.

Dexter’s relationships with women – Rita, Lila, Debra – are all honest; they seem real.  One of the biggest glaring holes in Season Two was the bad relationship of Lieutenant Pasquale.  The writing where this character is concerned is trite, one-note, two-dimensional, clichéd, dull: you get the idea; it doesn’t do the show justice.  Basically, Pasquale has a fiancé who is always cheating on her, or she is convinced that he is, which is really the issue.  This storyline is written badly and ends abruptly.  Pasquale cannot seem to hold a conversation about anything other than her cheating man.  When she brings a shirt in for Dexter to test (for whatever she smells on the shirt, which she’s sure is … something) and he turns her down, she loses it.  She has a full-on meltdown right in the precinct in front of everyone, lashing out and the whole thing.  This is supposed to be a high dramatic moment, but the melodrama is so far off the charts that it’s hard to take seriously.

Pascal all but disappears from the show after her little meltdown.  She was poorly written, but her sudden disappearance from the show still leads to a little head scratching.  So, after she had that meltdown, she … fell of the face of the Earth?  Not that anyone could blame her, but let’s have a little follow-up.  TO be fair, her whole character and presence in Season Two give the impression that the writers didn’t have the best idea what to do with her, or they didn’t have the time or money to develop her storyline, or maybe both.  Dramatically, we’re better off without her.

Dexter is less and less in control over the course of the season. Dexter isn’t so much smart as he is incredibly lucky.  He is reacting; he is not in control of his world anymore.  As his grip slips more and more, he learns more and more about Harry and the truth behind how that relationship came to be.  Dexter sees how deep Harry’s duplicity ran and is disillusioned by it.  At the same time, as the evidence mounts, Dexter becomes something of a folk hero in the guise of The Dark Defender, a comic book character based on the press-related exploits of the “Bay Harbor Butcher.”  He only kills killers; how wrong could it be?

How wrong?  That’s an interesting question when we consider that the other relationship eroding this season is the relationship between Dexter and Harry.  We learn that Harry lied to Dexter about pretty much everything: how they came into each others’ lives, Harry’s relationship with Dexter’s mother, what exactly was going on the day his mother was killed Harry came to Dexter’s rescue.

Dexter, in his way, has been sheltered his whole life.  Like the little league team that gets a trophy whether it wins or loses (something Rita’s mother mentions), Harry sees what Dexter is and uses it, he nurtures it; whatever Dexter is, that’s okay.  Just like every parent thinks their child is “gifted,” Harry submits that there is nothing wrong with Dexter.  Rather than get him some help, Harry nurtures him to be exactly what he wants him to be.  This goes back to that moral relativism I was talking about.  Throughout Season Two, Dexter is in a situation he cannot explain.  Harry never prepared him for this.  Of course, your parents cannot prepare you for everything in life.  Sometimes you just have to figure things out for yourself.

The most shocking thing we learn about Harry is that he killed himself, and Dexter probably drove him to it.  Harry walks in on Dexter in the midst of dismemberment.  Harry is hit in the face with what he sees, the reality of his creation.  Maybe his suicide was blowback.  Harry walks in to Dexter’s rudimentary, unrefined kill room.  Dexter innocently says “Hey, Dad” like he’s playing with marbles.  The scene is heartbreaking.  The half-chopped body is, to Dexter, no big deal, but Harry is horrified to his core.  He looks at Dexter like he is seeing him for the first time and he is confronted with what he has unleashed.

(Another minor annoying writing gripe here.  The whole dismemberment was brought on by an earlier scene.  A guy Harry arrested was released on a technicality and Dexter took it upon himself to turn said guy into biology homework.  The whole technicality issue is one of those things that seems like a pop culture-induced law enforcement fantasy, that some maniac goes a rape/rob/kill spree, only to be arrested and then immediately released because someone forgot to properly punctuate the police report or something numbingly superficial like that.  This fantasy usually ends with said guy doing even more killing, and one fuck-the-law maniac going after him and killing him.  “The system” is held up a weak, soft, too full of holes and dangerously liberal.  The fantasy is ridiculous, but you actually find people who buy into it wholeheartedly, their beliefs informed by the delusion that an un-dotted “I” will put the most heinous human beings back on the street.  Can it really be that easy?  This is the type of only-in-the-movies circumstance that moves a story along but probably shouldn’t be held up to defend anyone’s political beliefs.  More to the point, this released-on-a-bullshit-technicality is nothing more than an inciting incident to the violence we know is coming (but will totally condone), and it’s a lazy one at that.  The scenario has been done to death.)

Dexter, meanwhile, is hit in the face with how repugnant he is to other people.  The Harry flashback is triggered by Doakes and his reaction to seeing Dexter in action.  Doakes, a trained killer who has seen some shit in his life, is reduced to near catatonic speachlessness.  “Just stay away from me,” is all he can say, and it’s the same thing Harry said.  Dexter finally has a clue as to how other people see him and his influence on them: “Maybe this is how evil works, destroying everything it touches, including my father.”

What kind of culture produces a show like Dexter?  Watching Season Two I couldn’t help but think of the SUV I saw one afternoon with the slogan “Fuck Feelings” plastered across the back window.  Only a society that sloughs off its emotions – in fact holds them in contempt much of the time – could produce a character who extols the virtues of not feeling anything.  When Pasquale has her emotional breakdown in front of the entire precinct, Dexter quips, “It’s times like this I’m glad I don’t have feelings.”  Killing is no big deal, and Dexter asks us to feel empathy for a man who has none.  The show is so slick, the coat of gloss so thick, that no matter how much the characters open up we are always separate from them.  (How fitting it is that the promo campaign from Season Three is a series of glossy magazine covers all featuring Dexter in a different pose.  The whole show looks like a photo shoot come to life, like the characters walked out of a Guess ad (this isn’t a totally new idea.  The greatest magazine print ad of all time: an ad for Bruno Magli shoes that features two feet in a congealed red blood-ish substance.))

Dexter is the first real Gen Y, millennial show, perfect to for people who want to travel not to learn anything or to broaden their horizons but because it looks good on a college application or resume and who don’t care about anything beyond the surface.  Dexter can pretty much be summed up by a quick exchange between Dexter and Masuka (I think) when they stop to get gas shortly after hearing that Doakes is the prime suspect in the Bay Harbor Butcher killings.  “I can’t believe it,” Masuka says.  “What, Doakes?”  Nope, “$3.49 for regular.”

The slick look of the show suits Dexter.  The character is all surface, and the glossy look of the series is perfect for that. Michael C. Hall nails Dexter’s voice perfectly, that flat, emotionless, atonal drawl.  Even Keith “Arnie Cunningham” Gordon gets into the action, directing a few episodes here as he did in the first season.

How long can a show like Dexter go on?  It seems certain that sooner or later the novelty will wear off; this is a premise that could easily start to strain credibility after a while.  Season Two ends with Dexter more or less back to his old self, though perhaps a little wiser.


Video

Dexter is presented in the original widescreen ratio.  Dexter is a glossy, sun-kissed show with a lot of vibrant colors.  There are also darker levels, and the full palate is presented well.  The colors are sharp, and the sun-in-your-eyes look translates well on DVD.


Audio

This disc is presented in 5.1 Surround.  The soundtrack is sharp and well presented.  The audio here is dialogue-heavy, but there are a few scenes where the soundtrack really gets to show off.  The levels are crisp and well balanced, and the overall sound is great.


Special Features

Brotherhood Season Two: no, not the whole season, but we get the first two episodes here.  Showtime has a new take on “bonus material:” using it to advertise their other shows.

Dexter Season 3 Sneak Peek!: that’s a lie.  When you select this, a message comes up informing the viewer that the first episode of Dexter’s third season will be available on the Brotherhood DVD.  Of course, Dexter premiered on the 28th of September and Brotherhood came out on DVD in October, so there’s really nothing “sneak” here, not to mention that it would require buying more DVD’s.  Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

Biographies: exactly that.  These read like they were ripped from the back of a head shot.

Photo Gallery: just that, and not much.

There’s more.  If you pop the DVD into your computer you can see episodes of Californication and The Tudors, not to mention a couple of Dexter-related podcasts, but I didn’t bother.  Oh, the bonus material becomes available after you enter to win a 46” TV.


Final Thoughts

Dexter has some holes, but overall this is an endlessly compelling show that is always fun to watch.  I couldn’t put down the DVD’s until I made it through the season.  The A/V presentation is solid, but the bonus material is severely lacking.  This is one you have to check out.

VERDICT: RECOMMENDED

 

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Review posted on Oct 16, 2008 | Share this article | Top of Page

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