Understanding Showtime's Dexter

Dexter premiered in 2006, on premium cable channel Showtime. Dexter was adapted from the graphic novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, which was written by Jeff Lindsay. This new drama was an instant smash and one part of its popularity is the fact that you are supposed to cheer for Dexter and hope that he is not caught.

While the premise of the audience rooting for the bad guy was not unique, it should have been hard to like the character Dexter Morgan as he is portrayed as an emotionless lab geek who works with the police by day, and a heartless monster that kills and dismembers his victims at night.
The audience likes Dexter because there has always been a place for vigilantes who take the law into their own hands. Dexter is a serial killer but while he may lack a conscience at times, he has a strong moral code that they will not allow him to take an innocent life.

Dexter looks into old cases that the police cannot solve because of shoddy detective work or lack of evidence, and he does his best to bring the criminals to justice. Due to the fact that he is working on his own, Dexter can go places that the police cannot. He will break into cars, offices and homes to find concrete evidence that his next victim is guilty. After that, he enacts his own justice on the criminals.

Although he targets guilty parties, he only goes after serial killers, even though he is one himself. He stays ten steps ahead of the police, because his adopted father Harry Morgan taught him all that he would need to learn, if he wanted to become the worlds savior.

Dexter leaves little to chance as his every move is coldly calculating. He looks into a cold case or recent homicide and he begins his private investigation. Once he knows for sure that his next victim is indeed the serial killer that police have been looking for, he sets his plans in motion.

He will follow the killer and corner that person when they are alone. They could be getting into their cars, coming home at night or walking down an empty street. They don't know when, they don't know where, they don't even know that Dexter is after them, but once he is, Dexter will eventually capture his prey.

Once he has ambushed his target, Dexter will usually get them to come quietly after he jabs them with a syringe filled with horse tranquilizers. When the serial killer awakens, they will be at an undisclosed location that is covered floor to ceiling in semi clear plastic tarps. Before or after they are conscious, Dexter will use a scalpel to carve a line in their cheek and he will place a drop of that blood on a new slide. These slides are his only link to his kills. They are his trophies.

Once the slide has been filled, Dexter walks around his prey that are held in place by saran wrap like material across their forehead, chest and lower body while they lay on an autopsy table nude. He talks to the serial killers and in a series of humorous conversations they will usually admit that they are killers.

Many of the serial killers that he has gone after have been people like Dexter. They are not the people you would think would be a murderer. Their victims would never have seen them coming. This could be one reason that Dexter works closely with the police as a blood spatter expert, but only one is suspicious and dislikes him severely. Dexter Morgan himself in the pilot episode of "Dexter" wondered why in a police station filled with cops, was detective Doakes, the only one who suspected him of being guilty of something.

In the first half of the first season we knew little of Dexter's past and what little we knew was shown in a series of flashbacks. Whenever he thinks of his childhood, we are taken back to that time in the past and it usually involves his adopted father Harry Morgan.
On the outside, Dexter is a decent person who always has a ready smile and a box of donuts for his fellow officers. Very few people are aware of the dark secrets he hides.