Dexter (TV Series) The Dark Passenger

The series has Dexter Morgan as its only protagonist, and the story is told from his own point of view, including as a narrative resource the fact that the spectators hear what he thinks from a voice offstage, which is used so that we may get to know what he really thinks about those who surround him and about the society in which he lives. Another narrative aid consists in that Dexter can not only see his dead father but he also talks with him, exchanges points of view, receives his advice, they argue, fight and reconcile; in the diegesis it is made known to us that it is not his father, but rather a split in his personality: his father is embedded in his body.

The diegesis makes it clear that Dexter was not born serial killer, but has come one of them due to the traumatic event that being present at his mother’s horrendous death meant; nevertheless, one of the recurring conflicts that appear in the story is the question that the character asks himself as to whether his condition was irreversible, or if it finally ended being so because of his father, who was indeed convinced of the incurable nature of his disease. This is a very important axis in the series because it explains the efforts he makes to overcome his trauma and annul his killing instincts, and who refers to himself as someone who was damaged in a clear reference to an occasion for which he is not responsible but rather a victim. The script plays with this internal conflict but the outcome of the plots in which it is developed always ends up showing that his efforts are fruitless, that he will always be a serial killer and that this mark will accompany him indelibly until his death.

I point out the term chosen by Dexter to diagnose himself and others like him who are damaged. Throughout the series he discovers that all those who surround him -normal people- are in one way or another, also damaged, though paraphrasing Jacques Lacan, “They are but they do not know”.

Thus, the philosophical discourse of the series consists in criticizing all genetic or natural determinism in the explanation of the psychological traumas corresponding to modernism, and in affirming that their nature is always social, although it falls into a deterministic conception in stating that once we have been damaged in some way, this condition is definitive. In this aspect, the series also distances itself from the stereotypes that the cinema or television discourse usually offers to explain the existence of serial killers, always inscribed in the order of clearly positivist and scientific medical-psychiatric terms (genetic explanations, chemical alterations in the brain or tumors, psychotic or sociopathic behaviour that cannot be explained, and so on).

How has Dexter been hurt? Dexter Morgan explains this by referring to the Dark Passenger we all have inside of us, and which, in his case, has freed itself of the chains that keep him locked up and controlled by feelings, morals, customs and the law. His Dark Passenger stops him from enjoyment, unless it comes through the pleasure he feels when murdering another human being and for this purpose he has cancelled in absolute terms his capacity for feeling. Dexter does not feel anything. Neither love nor hate, guilt or a desire for revenge. Is this quite so? The plot of the series plays on the possibility that in fact, Dexter may have feelings, although they are totally repressed, and even if he cannot recognize them as such it is difficult for the viewer not to recognize them in his relationship with Rita and her children; in the admiration he feels for his sister Debra in the passion he expresses for Lumen Pierce, in the deception caused by Miguel Prado (Jimmy Smith), whom he considered the closest thing to a friend.