Siblings or lovers? You be the judge.
Of all the joys humanity has ever known, none has ever surpassed that of having a ‘favourite’ tv series to watch regularly. I discovered this joy vicariously when, after several rounds of vetting, my wife selected Brothers and Sisters to be her show. The ups! The downs. The drama. The anticipation! Making a cup of tea in the ad breaks. Drinking the tea! I found the show mildly endearing (at least season one) but what I was completely enamored with was the effect it had on my wife. Could there be a series out there that I could call my own? That would have a similar effect on me? I had to know.
From these amazing beginnings came my interest in the Dexter series. Three seasons have aired on channel ten, and I’ve seen about two thirds of each of them. Several of them left me on the edge of my seats and forced me to remark on their high quality. I never quite made it to the level of devotee, but how could I possibly have, with ten’s effed up programming? (I sometimes suspect that a loose coalition of chimpanzees is responsible for commercial television’s scheduling of critically acclaimed series.)
There was something about the show I liked, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it – the something, not the show. I have no longstanding interest in serial killers who kill other serial killers, or Miami-based programmes. But the humour, edginess and highly competent way that plotlines and characters are woven together, both over a single episode and a series, must all have been factors. Incidentally, I am lead to believe that we are in the midst of a golden age of television, and that the high competence I just spoke of applies to several other shows, like the Sopranos, the Wire, Breaking Bad and Time Masters (hosted by Tony Johnston).
Well, be all that as it may have been, I was shocked to discover that Dexter’s fourth series was highly touted by the Sports Guy and someone else online who referred in a glowing term to the finale. I deciduously avoided any spoilers and vowed to discover when channel ten would be screening season four. But they weren’t ‘fessing up. I thought to myself, ‘why don’t I hire from the video store dvds of earlier seasons of Dexter, so I can catch up on the ones I missed, relive the good ones I’d seen, and prepare myself for the new season if and when it finally aired?’ After several close shaves I went to the video store but learned that the first series had been letted out by another customer. I am still waiting to pounce.
All the while, I had sitting in my wallet-ette a $40 voucher for borders, courtesy of my mother and christmas. One sunny day, I strolled into the store, put two and two together and bought myself the Dexter Omnibus, the first three books upon which the show was based. I finished the lot in about a week - yesterday. I am satisfied overall, but I disapprove of the turn author Jeff Lindsey took in the third book, Dexter in the Dark.
Basically, he needlessly introduces paranormalcy*. There might have been tasteful ways to do this, ways that cast some ambiguity over proceedings and allowed readers to interpret them in one or more of several ways. But those ways was not used. Instead, we learn that Dexter is fighting… evil itself! Yes, before humans evolved, before life itself evolved, before the freaking earth formed, there was Evil. And one day Evil reproduced and made little evil babies, some of which challenged mother Evil until mother Evil decided to go and kill all the other little evils which refused to obey it. Now I have a certain amount of sympathy for the Platonic view of things having an existence apart from any given instance of them – a square, a chair, love etc. But this takes the cake! It is just too stupid for words.
So it turns out that Dexter’s Dark Passenger is one of these renegade baby evils, and his opponent is a number of humans ultimately controlled by the big bad mother Evil. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but obviously Dexter survives, otherwise there wouldn’t be a fourth book I’m now strongly contemplating buying. So not only do we get this ludicrous and completely unnecessary intrusion of the paranormal, but we get a massive anticlimax for future instalments. I mean, where do you go after knocking off Evil itself? Philip Ruddock? Talk about bringing out the big guns too soon!
Despite all this, I have to hand it to Jeff Lindsey for actually making Dexter in the Dark a rather gripping read – more gripping than the first two books in fact (although grippingness, like tune catchiness, needn’t have any correlation with goodness). Reading the books reminded me that one of the things I like about Dexter is its straightforward treatment of, for want of a better words, mental otherness. You don’t see that often, or at least I don’t. It doesn’t judge (and by doing so allows us to, if we wish), it just presents things on their own terms. In this way it reminds me of Big Love, a surprisingly good show about a bunch of polygamists. I’m looking forward to reading the fourth book, rewatching the old series and catching the new one, which features John ‘Harry and the
*While I find some things very mysterious, I don’t believe in the paranormal, as it is typically conceived (so to speak). I hasten to add that I have no problem with the use of paranormal in works of art, so long as it’s done well. The Master and Margarita and the Schrödingers Cat Trilogy are two (five?) examples of this.
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