Don’t take it personal, Deb pisses everybody off, but like Dexter, she also grows on you in series two…just give her a chance to worm her way into your affections!
And “Yes”, it definitely IS a black comedy.
Don’t take it personal, Deb pisses everybody off, but like Dexter, she also grows on you in series two…just give her a chance to worm her way into your affections!
And “Yes”, it definitely IS a black comedy.
i agree with those who say tv-dexter isn’t a true sociopath. his big brother rudy? that fellow is nearly pictured in the textbook.
No, I understand you’re not laying out a hard and fast rule here, I was just curious as to how you felt about other examples. I do think that “Psycho” manipulates us into rooting for the killer, with such moments as when Norman sinks Marian’s car into the swamp (although at that moment we don’t know he’s the killer).
You’re misunderstanding the comparison. What he’s saying is that Batman’s refusal to kill the Joker makes Batman ethically culpable for the people the Joker goes on to kill. If Batman (who back in the day did carry a gun and kill people) had put a bullet through the Joker’s skull in 1940 then the next 68 years worth of the Joker’s murders wouldn’t have happened.
Semi-spoilers follow.
To those of you who think Dexter’s apparent sociopathy and his other attributes logically conflict, you’re missing a big part of the character. He’s not a sociopath, but he believes he is. The narrator is unreliable when he’s analyzing himself.
He’s certainly disturbed and has problems, but his father steered him into believing he was an unreedemable sociopath and shaped his world view. He thinks that his difficulty in interacting with people and having to try to fake normal emotions is evidence that he’s a sociopath, but he’s clearly developed real feelings for some others in his life and doesn’t fully acknowledge it.
This isn’t vigilante or revenge porn like some suggested. If it was, they’d spend a lot more time getting us to hate the victims. Sometimes the victims are barely fleshed out at all - in the first episode, for example, he kills someone that was a child molester, but almost no time was spent actually fleshing the guy out so we could feel like he got his comeuppance. Several victims barely had any screen presence.
The series also leads you to believe at times that Dexter doesn’t really care that he’s killing bad guys - he just needs to kill, and his father steered him into doing it in a productive and relatively safe way. But at other times (the imaginary parade at the end of season 1) he clearly believes himself to be doing society a service. But again, this looks through the lens of an unreliable narrator who doesn’t fully understand himself - would he kill regardless of who deserved it had he not been trained that way? Would he kill at all? Does he think he’s doing good, and how much does that factor in his behavior?
The character and show are a lot more complex than you’re giving credit for.
Oh, and to the OP:
I’ve been saying this (per the threads I’ve now burned off most of the morning re-reading) for months now.
Best show I’ve seen in years bar none! I can’t wait for season 3 to start.