WARNING: some spoilers ahead...

Dexter is a TV show that focuses on a character named Dexter Morgan, a forensic blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police department. Despite his relatively normal life, Dexter has a secret: he is also an avid serial killer. Like many sociopaths, Dexter is able to blend into society, and no one in his environment of cops and detectives is even suspicious of him being a killer. There is even an entire season surrounded by the fact that someone found the bodies Dexter had dumped in the harbor and the police investigation never discovered that the true killer was working among them.
Dexter had always had an urge to kill, and he would kill and torture animals from a young age. However, his adoptive father Harry noticed this and gave him a code to follow where if he felt he had to kill, it should be only bad people. This is part of the reason that Dexter doesn't feel remorse for his actions. Not only is he incapable of feeling empathy or remorse but he is also justifying his actions by only killing frauds or criminals that the police or the law had failed to bring justice to.
Later in the series, it is revealed that when Dexter was a toddler, he and his older brother had watched his mother get murdered in a drug confrontation. The trauma he experienced as a little kid had resonated with him through adulthood and gave him the urge to kill and be violent. In the first season, a case the Miami police department was investigating was a serial killer who was eventually revealed to be Dexter's older brother. Since Dexter found his brother before the police did, he killed him (since he fit the code of being an undiscovered criminal) and the police never ended up finding the real killer because Dexter had killed him. Another sociopathic trait he has is the inability to feel love. Dexter gets married to a woman named Rita, who he says he doesn't love because he is unable to, but he says if he was able to love anyone it would be her.

At the final season, (again spoiler alert) things start to go downhill which is no surprise and he ends up faking his death and moving to Seattle to become a lumberjack. There are a lot of other details like the fact that he moved his new girlfriend to Argentina with his 2-year-old son (not blood related to the new girlfriend) and never contacted them, and that he had a sister who was also a cop that got shot and died after Dexter pulled the plug on her while she was in the hospital shortly before he faked his own death. For clarity, I won't go into these details or other details but there is no question that Dexter displays many or all traits of a typical sociopath. I highly recommend this show it is super interesting and even though I provided a lot of detail already there is a lot of really good content, so much more than I explained!
I think it is crazy that Dexter's father is aware that he wants to kill people, but doesn't do anything about it. Instead, he promotes it by saying that he should be killing bad people. When really, he is the bad person. He definitely shows qualities that we went over in class of a psychopath. He doesn't feel bad for what he is doing and doesn't feel love for the women he is with. He also is a violent psychopath because he had a horrible childhood. Some psychopaths that have amazing childhoods, don't act out in violent ways. This show does sound very interesting and I'm going to start watching.
ReplyDeleteI think the approach Harry took in raising Dexter is very interesting. Because he was a cop, he knew exactly how to train Dexter to only kill bad people and not to get caught. I think Harry's code was invented for moral reasons. Harry came to Dr. Vogel, who was studying psychopaths, for advice and together they formed the rules for how Dexter would kill. Harry clearly didn't understand that nurture is a big part of taming violent behavior because he did the exact opposite. In a way, this might have been a good thing because Dexter always said that if he didn't have Harry's code to follow then he would be killing innocent people instead.
ReplyDelete