Asking the Wrong Questions

The most shocking moment in Breaking Bad 's final episode, "Felina," happens in its teaser.  Having spent months holed up in rural New Hampshire as his body finally succumbs to cancer, fed only by scraps of news about his family's (mostly ill) fortune in the wake of his exposure as the meth manufacturer Heisenberg, Walter White is headed back to Albequerque.  Slipping into an unlocked car, he frantically and ineffectually scrapes at the ignition with a screwdriver.  As the lights of an approaching police car begin to illuminate the car's interior, Walt--sick, tired, and cold--leans back in despair, and then speaks.  "Just get me home," he rasps.  "Just get me home.  I'll do the rest."  With less than an hour left in his show (and only a few days left in his life), Walter White is praying. At the most basic level, this is shocking because Walt has never been presented as a person who thinks about spiritual matters, much less the existence ...

This time last year, it seemed like Homeland and Dexter couldn't have more different trajectories.  Dexter was coming off a plodding, padded sixth season that had devolved into the butt of a sad joke, full of nonsensical plot twists, increasingly boring subplots involving the show's perennially underserved secondary characters, and an growing sense that no one involved with the show knew what to do with its central character.  Homeland , on the other hand, had just concluded a triumphant, impossibly assured first season that not only established its two lead characters, bipolar CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and POW-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), as complex, nuanced avatars of mingled heroism and villainy, but delivered a fast-paced, pulse-pounding story about terror and anti-terror that nevertheless managed to remain rooted in mundane reality rather than flying off into 24 -style action-adventure fantasy.  And yet, going into their second...

In my write-up of Dexter 's third season, I concluded that the lesson the show kept driving at, the one it wanted its main character to learn, was that in order to be loved by the people whose love was worth having, he would have to hide his true nature.  Anyone who could look on Dexter as he selected, stalked, ritually murdered, and dismembered his victims without recoiling in horror wasn't worth Dexter's time or devotion.  In the show's superb fourth season Dexter tries to live by this lesson, only for the full tragedy of his existence to become apparent: he alienates his loved ones by hiding behind a mask of normalcy, and his attempts to learn how to make that mask more believable ultimately lead to the murder of his wife and the disintegration of the very family he's worked so hard to hold on to.  Perhaps in an attempt to counteract that tragedy, in the show's fifth season its writers try to imagine Dexter's perfect match: someone monstrous enough to a...

After four seasons, it's easy to become blasé about the magnitude of Dexter 's accomplishment.  In a television landscape in which so many shows flare brightly and briefly and then go to pot, and others are cut off in their prime, and others still are content to wallow in carefully maintained mediocrity, Dexter is that rare artifact--a series that has maintained, with some peaks and troughs, a high and highly satisfying level of quality for four years.  It's not a perfect show by any means.  It relies too heavily on clomping, obvious dialogue and an times insultingly over-explanatory voiceover; its pacing is often off, with seasons dragging in their middles and racing towards their endings; it tends to shunt off interesting minor characters into uninteresting, dead-end plotlines.  The fourth season, just now concluded, suffers from all these flaws as well as other, more serious ones, which we'll discuss below.  But it also displays the show's strengths--a rolli...

There are certain genres and story types one associates with serial killers. Procedurals, thrillers, intense games of pursuit and evasion between detective and killer or killer and prey, psychological horror or the regular, visceral kind. In its first season, Dexter hewed pretty close to the expectations created by its premise, pitting the eponymous (anti-)hero against a rival serial killer whose ultimate goal was to turn Dexter away from the path of provisional righteousness on which he was set by his cop father, who taught him to kill only those who deserved it. In its second season , the show abandoned the mystery which drove the first season, but retained the procedural and detective elements surrounding it, as Dexter struggled to avoid being uncovered by his fellow cops when the bodies of his victims were discovered on the ocean floor. Dexter 's third season, which concluded this week, seems to have cast off even these elements. Though the season had its share of gruesom...