Now available on DVD & Blu-Ray
Cast:
Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan
Julie Benz as Rita Bennett
Jennifer Carpenter as Debra Morgan
Lauren Vélez as Lt. Maria Laguerta
David Zayas as Angel Batista
Jaime Murray as Lila Tournay
Review:
I stumbled onto Dexter’s world when the first season had hit dvd. I don’t have Showtime, so I am not able to watch the show live. I had heard many good things, but wasn’t expecting much. Little did I know that the show would join my list of top 5 best TV shows ever (that list includes Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Quantum Leap, if you’re wondering). Before we go any further, I promise not to spoil anything for those who haven’t seen the series. What the hell are you waiting for anyway?
Coming off of an amazing first season, the cast and crew of Dexter had to find a way to top themselves, and did they ever. For those of you not in the know, Dexter (played with cold-blooded glee by Michael C. Hall) works for the forensics department at a Miami police department. He is there blood-splatter expert, and everyone is in awe of his ability to get into the mind of the killer and basically walk the detectives through the crime scene. The reason he can do this is because Dexter is a cold-blooded serial killer, only he kills bad guys, thusly ridding the world of trash and quenching his bloodlust at the same time.
The season hits the ground running as we find Dexter and friends months after the shocking conclusion of season one. Dexter is dealing with his own mixed bag of emotions, trying to reacquaint himself with his “regular” life and his supportive girlfriend when his body dump at the bottom of the ocean is discovered by a bunch of treasure hunters. Facing exposure as quite possibly the world’s most prolific serial killer, his life starts to fall apart again, this time affecting his work and his social life.
The FBI are called in and Sergeant Doakes, the only cop in Dexter’s precinct that ever suspected there was something wrong with Dexter, starts to follow his hunches and discovers that Dexter is indeed not what he appears to be. In the mean time, his girlfriend (played by Julie Benz from Saw 5) starts to suspect that Dexter may have been responsible for the drug overdose that sent her abusive ex-husband to prison and starts to believe that Dexter is a drug addict. To keep from losing her, the one things that allows him to pretend to be “human”, he joins a Narcotics Anonymous group and meets Lila, a wild and destructive woman that somehow understands Dexter on a primal level. Also his sister Deb (played by Jennifer Carpenter from Quarantine, who Michael C. Hall married in real life) starts a fling with The FBI agent hot on her brother’s tail, unbeknownst to her.
By the end of the twelve-episode season, all these stories come to a boiling point that threaten to not only change all the character’s lives, but end the show completely. There wouldn’t be much of a series if Dexter is caught. That being the case, the cool and collected mass murdered that we’ve all grown to known and love, can no longer be the thing we’ve known him as, an animal trying to disguise himself as a human with the full range of emotions he no longer possesses thanks to the event in his past that freed him of those moral trappings. By the last episode, all is resolved in a very convincing and bleak way, but brilliant no less. We are still firmly in the shows stranglehold and are very sad to see it end.
This season was one that split the fanbase. Maybe it was because they watched it week-to-week, which may have taken the bite out of the show. I can prove this fact with a show like 24, which plays better on DVD where you can do marathon viewings, instead of the spoon-fed and frustrating single episode a week. I had no problem with this season, in fact I thought it was so good that I kind of felt like it should have been the final season. You would think that Dexter being revealed as a serial killer would be the most logical way to run out the series, but placing it in the second season makes me wonder how they plan to close things out. Either Dexter gets away or he gets caught, but this could have been best left for us to enjoy at the end.
That being said, this season is perfect, intriguing, and incredibly suspenseful. We get drawn into the day-to-day drama of Dexter’s life as much as we get caught up in the manhunt for his hide. There is not one false moment in the season, and yes I even liked Lila. Her character was the much-needed anarchic foil that Dexter needed to play off of. Without her, he couldn’t battle against his constant need to kill 24 hours a day. Doakes’ storyline was my favorite, though. It added a stroke of genius to the already marvelously-layered season.
There is one sour note I should play here. I don’t mean to nit-pick, but a review is a review. The show “takes place” in Miami, and I am from Miami. While they do a good job of matching exterior locations and they obviously have stock footage of the area, the show is almost blatantly not shot in Miami. How can I tell? Very simply…the curbs. In Miami, curbs are almost non-existent in residential neighborhoods. In the show, curbs are shown all the time, and some of them are painted red, which gives away the fact that the show is obviously filmed in Los Angeles. I know this sort of thing happens all the time, I just felt like crying foul for my Miami gang back home. However, since LA and Miami are very similar in look anyway, the show does manage to get away with it for the most part.
The world of Blu-Ray is exceptionally kind to the lurid world inhabited by Dexter and his cohorts. The picture is unbelievably crisp and the colors are vibrant. The fake-Miami sun combined with the high-def transfer, turns the season into uncompromised art. The disc comes with new features not available on the standard-def release. These are Blu-Ray live features jam packed with podcasts, and a ton of cast interviews as well, so even if you own the regular version, this one is worth the purchase price because this time around they actually give us, the fans, the special features we’ve always really wanted to see. If you don’t have a PS3, your player will have to be connected to the Internet and the loading can be lengthy, but its still pretty cool and is enough to keep the rabid fans sated. Season 3, however, is bound for dvd soon, and that is something I am eagerly anticipating.
