Mischief Maker wrote:

I tore through the first two seasons on Netflix watch instantly, but I have to do the mail thing for seasons 3 and 4. I watched the first 3 episodes of season 3 and I'm disappointed.

Frankly, I think the show has turned into exactly what the TWP housewives wanted. In retrospect the whole problem started in season 2, but that season's A plot kept me distracted. Season 3's blah A plot lets the decay shine through.

The thing that I loved about Season 1 was that it was blatantly clear that Dexter was insane. As in really creepy and unpredictable insane. Emotions and personal connections were just a big act for him, he chose his GF in the hopes that her rape-survivor status would minimize sex in the relationship, a relationship he kept up purely for appearance. When his "best friend" Angel got stabbed, he had no emotional reaction. The only time he was truly emotional and happy -and the only times he got sexually aroused- was when he was visiting grisly murder scenes and living them out vicariously. When he did kill his victims, he didn't just kill them, he tortured them for hours with a dentist's faceplate to block the blood spatter. It was very very difficult to root for Dexter because the show kept giving you these did he? false scares like when the neighbor's yappy dog disappeared. It made for a compellingly disturbing show because the antihero really lived up to the "anti" and the audience is constantly thinking, "how long is he going to keep doing the right thing for the wrong reasons?"

The really big shocker was at the very end of season 1 where he said in voiceover that Harry betrayed him. In the movie "Manhunt" the serial killer makes an attempt at being a normal person. He takes out a blind woman from work and the date goes really well. The audience begins to take the vain hope that he could be redeemed. (This was handled with all the subtlety of a fog horn in Red Dragon) Then he sees her getting driven home from work by another male coworker, completely blows an innocent gesture out of proportion, then kidnaps his girlfriend and prepares to make her his next victim, a scene that's all the more horrifying because it's heartbreaking at the same time. In Dexter, I was half-expecting the antihero to start straying from the code and killing innocent people after he decided that Harry keeping a huge secret from him was a "betrayal."

Then season 2 comes along and Dexter suddenly stops being a violent sociopath. He feels guilty for leaving Rita and the kids for Lila and comes back for the little boy's sake. He suddenly has a normal sex drive with Rita, no grisly murder scenes necessary. He's angry at Lila for setting up his friend Angel. He struggles with his conscience as he sets up Dokes to take the fall. His reason for killing his victims seems to switch from a violent compulsion to a righteous avenging anger. He no longer tortures his victims, he just stabs them in the heart so that the audience doesn't think there's anything icky about rooting for a serial killer. Again, the A plot was exciting enough to distract me from this, but wouldn't it have been a million times creepier if he killed Lila just because her murder of Dokes made her fit Dexter's code and without the excuse of her trying to kill Rita's kids?

Finally season 3's A plot is boring and I swear to God the B plot seems to be about Dexter learing to believe in himself and get the self-confidence to become a father. Cripes, why not add a CGI jimminy cricket while you're at it? I fucking HATE fiction that uses an antihero for added "edginess" tension, but at the same time gives the audience rooting for the antihero an "out" by giving an excuse that morally absolves the antihero. Season 1 was excellent, but seasons 2 and 3 seem to be turning him into the TWP housewives' dream man. My interest in the show ended abruptly when he (bloodlessly) killed a pedophile eying Rita's daughter and growls, "nobody hurts my family!"