Dexter: Episode 101 & 102

After hav­ing lost all inter­est in CSI, I stopped doing episode reviews. But there is this other show that’s foren­sic sci­ence related, some­thing called Dexter. Now I don’t have Showtime, so I pretty much know noth­ing about the show. The com­bi­na­tion of repeated rec­om­men­da­tions by Dexter enthu­si­asts, and a gen­eral lack of things to watch on TV, my wife and I decided to give Dexter a try.

Finding sea­son one wasn’t easy, but I picked up a triple pack of the first three sea­sons. Last night my wife and I watched the first two episodes. For those of you who don’t watch, a BRIEF sum­mary of what we’ve learned:

Dexter is adopted. Dexter was adopted by a police offi­cer. Dexter liked to kill ani­mals at a young age, and had urges to kill peo­ple. Dexter’s cop father decided to encour­age Dexter to chan­nel those urges towards peo­ple who “deserve it”. Dexter was taught how to “cover is tracks” by his father. Dexter is a blood spat­ter foren­sic expert for Miami-Dade PD. Dexter has extremely poor inter­per­sonal skills. Dexter “fakes” his inter­ac­tions with other peo­ple, in order to appear nor­mal. Dexter has NO inter­est in sex. Dexter is a sociopath.

OK. So far so good. I can get behind that. Basically it’s a CSI show flipped back­wards. He uses his “foren­sic skills” to kill killers. In doing so he sati­ates his per­verse need to kill peo­ple (I imag­ine some day we’ll find out what hap­pened to him as a kid to screw him up), and rids soci­ety of bad people.

OK. One thing. I’d LOVE to be a full-time blood spat­ter expert work­ing for a munic­i­pal agency. There is no way it could be a full time job.

Another bonus is that I’m not all that into blood spat­ter analy­sis. So I can enjoy the show and not catch EVERY LITTLE tech­ni­cal error in the show.

So between char­ac­ter devel­op­ing flash­backs and a nicely done nar­ra­tive by our main char­ac­ter, we are begin­ning to learn about Dexter. One would imag­ine hav­ing a socio­pathic work­ing for your police depart­ment, that can really “think like a ser­ial killer” because he IS a ser­ial killer would come in handy.

In both episodes Dexter is enam­ored? by a ser­ial killer who is leav­ing behind vic­tims bod­ies that are but into frag­ments. Three sec­tions to the legs for exam­ple. The odd thing though is that there is no blood at all in the bod­ies, or at the scene. This of course freaks our friend Dexter out, because he LOVES blood.

Eventually he fig­ures out or ser­ial killer is using a refrig­er­ated truck to kill his vic­tims (all pros­ti­tutes), so that the cold will slow the blood flow. As luck would have it, Dexter hap­pens to run into the exact truck late one night on his way to his girl­friends house (right after killing another ser­ial killer). Dexter fol­lows the truck, and gets a sev­ered head that was miss­ing from the lat­est victim.

When Dexter returns home he dis­cov­ers some­one has been in his apart­ment. He finds the head of a plas­tic doll on his freezer door, and a cut up plas­tic doll (cut in the same man­ner as the pros­ti­tutes) in his freezer, laid out just like the pros­ti­tutes were. One hand of the doll has the fin­ger nails painted a par­tic­u­lar series of col­ors. Basically the ser­ial killer is chal­leng­ing Dexter.

The freezer truck is located by Dexter’s fos­ter sis­ter who is a cop work­ing vice (soon to be homi­cide). The truck is clean of all evi­dence, save for a block of ice which con­tains five sev­ered fin­ger­tips. The cops fig­ure the killer is taunt­ing them, because now they can iden­tify the body from fin­ger­prints. Dexter knows the killer is actu­ally taunt­ing him, because the fin­ger­nails were painted in the exact same sequence as the doll hand.

Later in the show, the doll head is placed back on his freezer door, and the doll body has been removed. Dexter is enjoy­ing his new playmate.

Throughout the course of the show, Dexter man­ages to track down, and kill 3 or 4 other ser­ial killers. He has a par­tic­u­lar rit­ual. He injects them with a drug that par­a­lyzes them, then strips them naked, binds them down with strips of cel­lo­phane wrap, cuts their right cheek with a scalpel, col­lects a blood drop, puts it on a slide (which he keeps in his col­lec­tion con­tained in a wooden slide box hid­den away behind/above his apart­ment A/C unit), kills them, cuts up the bod­ies, and dis­poses of them. It’s all very dark and grue­some. A lit­tle dark for me and the wife. I think the direc­tor could have accom­plished a bet­ter effect with a “less is more” approach. Leave more to the imag­i­na­tion of the viewer kind of thing.

One part of the show that did res­onate with me, was when a par­tic­u­lar detec­tive (the only one who senses Dexter is a freak), gives Dexter a series of pho­tographs of the blood spat­ter from a case dubbed the “Cocaine Killer”, and tells Dexter the killings are a drug deal gone wrong and I your report is going to say as much. Of course Dexter looks things over, and later reports to the detec­tive and the detective’s lieu­tenant (who has a thing for Dexter — ewww) that the “Cocaine Killer” offed the hus­band quick and easy, but took his time with the wife. Therefore the killer is an ex-boyfriend of the wife.

Apparently I have REALLY missed out on my foren­sic train­ing. I’ve never been sat down and been taught how to psy­cho­log­i­cally under­stand the phys­i­cal evi­dence. But regard­less, Dexter is right, the detec­tive is pissed.

It res­onated with me because I had a case where I was asked to look at bul­lets recov­ered from autopsy. There were two dif­fer­ent kinds of pro­jec­tiles. Each had spe­cific design aspects, that allowed me to iden­tify what make/brand of ammu­ni­tion they were. This infor­ma­tion was passed along to the detec­tive in charge of the inves­ti­ga­tion. A while later, said detec­tive arrived in the lab with a request for analy­sis, a copy of my orig­i­nal report, and a firearm with loaded mag­a­zine in a plas­tic evi­dence bag. He beamed con­fi­dently he had his gun. Look! It has the right kind of ammu­ni­tion mixed in the magazine.

I con­firmed that the mix of ammu­ni­tion was indeed the same. I then looked at the muz­zle of the firearm, where I could see the ends of the rifling, read over my orig­i­nal report, and sadly informed the detec­tive he might have the right guy, but this isn’t the right gun. The rifling was all wrong.

The detec­tive looked like I had run over his favorite dog. He then got play­fully angry. Saying that at least the guys down the hall in ques­tioned doc­u­ments OPEN the evi­dence bag before telling me I’m an idiot. I said I’d open his bag, work the evi­dence, enter test fires into NIBIN, give him a writ­ten report, but next time if he has a spe­cific result in mind when he sub­mits evi­dence, he needs to include an answer-key with his request for analysis.

We all had a laugh.

For my wife and I the jury is out on Dexter. I’m cau­tiously opti­mistic. My wife is regret­ting the money spent on the DVD set. So just in case we don’t end up lik­ing the series, this blog entry is my jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for claim­ing the DVDs off as a tax deduction!