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He’s just as restrained in his personal life. In one episode his girlfriend (Julie Benz–she was Darla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) shows up unannounced at his door in a Lara Croft costume and proceeds to give him a blow job. “That was unexpected,” he murmurs politely, taking a steep spike into mild surprise.
I suppose the idea is to suggest the menace pent up beneath the placid surface. But there’s an awful lot of surface. Episode after episode Dexter goes to work, does his shopping, picks up his girlfriend’s kids at school, and washes his car. Sure, there’s all this ominously moody photography and Dexter’s creepy narration (“Another beautiful day in Miami–human body parts and a chance of afternoon showers”), but when you get right down to it, it’s still just a guy washing his car.
Unfortunately, though, his work of thinning the serial-killer herd has attracted the attention of his prey, and one of them, a particularly nasty specimen known as the Ice Truck Killer, has turned the tables and started stalking Dexter himself. And this is what’s really weird: the Ice Truck Killer seems to know Dexter so well, to be so conversant with Dexter’s history and habits, it’s almost as though he has a history with him. Why, he might almost be Dexter’s long-lost . . . well, look, it all gets very mythic. But there’s a certain point where the mythic tips over into the idiotic, and for me it’s when a serial killer who stalks serial killers is being stalked by a serial killer.
