TV Show Break-Up: Goodbye, Dexter
I'm pretty loyal to most of the shows I watch, and this either has to do with a plot I'm invested in, or characters I care about. However, as I blogged about previously, when a show gets down to *one* character I care about, I'm pretty hard-pressed to keep up with it, and then if a bad plot comes along, it's curtains for the show in general. A case in point is "Dexter", a show which I've been watching on DVD since season 1, but am thoroughly done with now. This most recent season, the fifth one, was rife with plot contrivances, disturbing subject matter (more so than the series' usual fare), and characters behaving utterly unlike themselves.
There were two major problems that really, really bothered me with this season, and they can be summarized thusly:
1) The plot with Lumen, gang-rape-victim-turned-vigilante, was disturbing at best and horrifying at worst. I should say here that obviously this show isn't going to be about rainbows, puppies, and unicorns (I mean, Dexter is a serial killer who murders criminals that the law can't do anything about), but the lengths of this particular plot line bordered on pornographic--in fact, some of the material must have been just awful to film, and the bits and pieces we saw of it really pushed my tolerance for what I'll watch. Lumen's thirst for vengeance was well-written, but it was at the expense of her as a character; for several episodes, all we knew about her was that she was a victim, and that she was afraid, damaged, and hurting, and when the writers finally got around to her background as a real person, the character development seemed like an afterthought, dismissed in one fell five-minute swoop where she decided not to run away with her former fiancee. Instead, she fell for Dexter and then abruptly left when "justice" had been served, and there was no need for her character to stick around on the show. Her character development was only a foil to Dexter's (see #2.)
2) This season made Dexter more of a hero than any of the previous seasons, and there were times when this character development read not as heroic, but forced and squicky. For example, Dexter's initial efforts to help Lumen take the form of imprisoning her again, twice while she begs for her life; when she eventually comes around to his point of view, he has to handle her mismanagement of the first murder by covering up the crime in a spectacularly inept fashion. There was also the subplot of Quinn hiring a newly-dumped-from-the-force, crooked cop, who tailed Dexter and bugged his apartment. Dexter's eventual murder of this man was meant to be read as heroic and noble, since the cop was utterly without redeeming qualities of any kind--but the upshot was that this whole sideplot felt like a paper tiger. In fact, it only served to make Dexter look good to Quinn, and almost frame him (Quinn) for murder. First season!Dexter would have looked on this whole sequence with repulsion, as well as the brief plot where one of Astor's friends reveals that her Mom's boyfriend is physically abusing her. Dexter beats the guy to a pulp and threatens to kill him if he ever touches the girl again. On one hand, this is noble and heroic--albeit incredibly violent--but it's also really attention-drawing behavior, something that I can't believe Dexter would actually do.
I think the reason that this season really bothered me was that there was some amazingly heroic and character developing moments for Deborah, but none of the attention was focused on her at all, and the female characters who did get the most attention were the victims of crimes, or perpetrated injustices, like the cop who Deborah initially champions, but who eventually betrays her in exchange for a promotion. Deborah's character arc was something truly interesting: in the beginning, she dealt with a string of violent, depraved murders that lead to a split-second decision that nearly cost her the job. Instead of giving up, though, she fought back, reclaimed her position on the force, and hung with tenacity and a whole lot of swearing--par for her, of course. There was even an incredibly telling and well-written moment where she revealed why she wouldn't let the murder/rape case go, stating that she knew what it was like to be helpless and afraid and she viewed the work, however repellant it was, to be a moral imperative that she could not neglect. I began to wish the show was only about her, an amazing woman championing the cases of marginalized women.
There is also the awkward issue that I don't like watching/reading things that make me want to commit violent acts. The very idea of the rape/murder club lead by depraved motivational speaker Jordan Chase made me want to find a blunt instrument and hurt every member of it, wait until they recovered, and then beat them again. And, generally speaking, I'm not a violent person. I mean, yes, I have my Hothead Paisan days, but by in large, I try to follow a semi-Buddhist idea that violence solves nothing, mixed with the pagan view that all things you do come back to you three-fold. But this show... had me throwing the three-fold idea out of the window and wanting to do some serious damage. I don't want complete and total escapism in my TV shows, but I sure don't appreciate having my sense of wa messed with like that.
In sum: it's a challenging season, and I'm glad it's done now. This break-up was sort of odd, in that I'd read that this season was wildly uneven and knew the basics of the plot going in, but I was still unprepared for the level of squick I found there. I suppose I'd still recommend the first few seasons of the show to people who like that sort of thing, but in general, I think I've had it with serial killers and semi-true-crime TV shows.
There were two major problems that really, really bothered me with this season, and they can be summarized thusly:
1) The plot with Lumen, gang-rape-victim-turned-vigilante, was disturbing at best and horrifying at worst. I should say here that obviously this show isn't going to be about rainbows, puppies, and unicorns (I mean, Dexter is a serial killer who murders criminals that the law can't do anything about), but the lengths of this particular plot line bordered on pornographic--in fact, some of the material must have been just awful to film, and the bits and pieces we saw of it really pushed my tolerance for what I'll watch. Lumen's thirst for vengeance was well-written, but it was at the expense of her as a character; for several episodes, all we knew about her was that she was a victim, and that she was afraid, damaged, and hurting, and when the writers finally got around to her background as a real person, the character development seemed like an afterthought, dismissed in one fell five-minute swoop where she decided not to run away with her former fiancee. Instead, she fell for Dexter and then abruptly left when "justice" had been served, and there was no need for her character to stick around on the show. Her character development was only a foil to Dexter's (see #2.)
2) This season made Dexter more of a hero than any of the previous seasons, and there were times when this character development read not as heroic, but forced and squicky. For example, Dexter's initial efforts to help Lumen take the form of imprisoning her again, twice while she begs for her life; when she eventually comes around to his point of view, he has to handle her mismanagement of the first murder by covering up the crime in a spectacularly inept fashion. There was also the subplot of Quinn hiring a newly-dumped-from-the-force, crooked cop, who tailed Dexter and bugged his apartment. Dexter's eventual murder of this man was meant to be read as heroic and noble, since the cop was utterly without redeeming qualities of any kind--but the upshot was that this whole sideplot felt like a paper tiger. In fact, it only served to make Dexter look good to Quinn, and almost frame him (Quinn) for murder. First season!Dexter would have looked on this whole sequence with repulsion, as well as the brief plot where one of Astor's friends reveals that her Mom's boyfriend is physically abusing her. Dexter beats the guy to a pulp and threatens to kill him if he ever touches the girl again. On one hand, this is noble and heroic--albeit incredibly violent--but it's also really attention-drawing behavior, something that I can't believe Dexter would actually do.
I think the reason that this season really bothered me was that there was some amazingly heroic and character developing moments for Deborah, but none of the attention was focused on her at all, and the female characters who did get the most attention were the victims of crimes, or perpetrated injustices, like the cop who Deborah initially champions, but who eventually betrays her in exchange for a promotion. Deborah's character arc was something truly interesting: in the beginning, she dealt with a string of violent, depraved murders that lead to a split-second decision that nearly cost her the job. Instead of giving up, though, she fought back, reclaimed her position on the force, and hung with tenacity and a whole lot of swearing--par for her, of course. There was even an incredibly telling and well-written moment where she revealed why she wouldn't let the murder/rape case go, stating that she knew what it was like to be helpless and afraid and she viewed the work, however repellant it was, to be a moral imperative that she could not neglect. I began to wish the show was only about her, an amazing woman championing the cases of marginalized women.
There is also the awkward issue that I don't like watching/reading things that make me want to commit violent acts. The very idea of the rape/murder club lead by depraved motivational speaker Jordan Chase made me want to find a blunt instrument and hurt every member of it, wait until they recovered, and then beat them again. And, generally speaking, I'm not a violent person. I mean, yes, I have my Hothead Paisan days, but by in large, I try to follow a semi-Buddhist idea that violence solves nothing, mixed with the pagan view that all things you do come back to you three-fold. But this show... had me throwing the three-fold idea out of the window and wanting to do some serious damage. I don't want complete and total escapism in my TV shows, but I sure don't appreciate having my sense of wa messed with like that.
In sum: it's a challenging season, and I'm glad it's done now. This break-up was sort of odd, in that I'd read that this season was wildly uneven and knew the basics of the plot going in, but I was still unprepared for the level of squick I found there. I suppose I'd still recommend the first few seasons of the show to people who like that sort of thing, but in general, I think I've had it with serial killers and semi-true-crime TV shows.