One of the results I’ve noticed from my decade and a half of therapy is that there are things that bother me now that didn’t bother me in the past. As far as I can tell, it’s a result of me being more in-tune with my own emotions and removing the callouses that had formed around my trauma so I could actually process it and properly heal. All of which means that certain actions in video games bother me more than they used to. Or that certain TV shows I once found fascinating at best and interesting at worst are more than I can stomach without some amount of emotional fortitude (which I am still running short on these days). Which is why I started and then quickly stopped rewatching Dexter when I ran out of stuff to watch on a really depressed day. Turns out watching a show all about a guy who ties down, tortures, and then murders people is too much for me to handle without feeling anxious and bad. Who would have thought that casually exposing myself to one of my own trauma triggers would be mentally distressing? What a surprise.

Intellectually, the show is still a fairly appealing option. There’s plenty of it to watch, I’ve already watched a bunch of it, I don’t particularly care about it, and the emotional stakes are low at even their highest because it’s a cop-procedural show about a serial killer. Which makes it make the most anti-cop cop procedural I’ve ever seen, since not only does the protagonist, a serial killer in his own right with dozens of kills to his name, manage to constantly fool the cops (a thing he frequently points out in the show’s internal narration), but it also shows how the cops frequently mess up what might have otherwise been a clear-cut case. The show makes it clear that they have significant blind spots because of how these cops view themselves as individuals (usually shown in the episode as one of the cops suggesting something wild or unorthodox and the other cops being crude or derisive in response, only for the lone cop to be vindicated in the end) and it shows how far they will go to support their fellows or pursue extrajudicial justice. Which is an interesting point to make since that is how the protagonist, the titular Dexter, justifies his place in society: he’s taking out the trash that the justice system can’t collect (which isn’t a direct quote from the show, but it’s pretty close to one). There’s plenty of parallels between him and the cops who wind up going off-book in order to capture someone they feel is worth a little rule-breaking, which really feels like an interesting parallel for what is still a cop procedural, even if the show tends to set Dexter up as more of a murder-fantasy anti-hero vigilante than the unrepentant killer anyone would actually describe him as if they knew what he got up to.

It is difficult not to wonder how a show like this got made and if it was as intentionally critical of the cops as it wound up being. After all, I’ve read a few of the books the TV show is based on and they’re not NEARLY as critical of the cops as the first season of Dexter is (I think the following seasons are also critical of the cops, but I haven’t rewatched any of them recently and don’t intend to watch more than I already have). That level of criticism, intentional or not, is unique to the TV series. Part of me wonders if it got included because it came during a time when more adult TV shows were in vogue (it was a part of the era that gave us Breaking Bad). A lot of questionable things got made around then just because they were transgressive in a way that people found titillating. As streaming platforms slowly took power and could create things that existed outside of the bounds of what can be aired on TV (since there were now accessible distribution options outside of the video stores that were in rapid decline), more and more got greenlit that might have never seen the light of day otherwise. Dexter makes a bit more sense than most, though, since it was an almost sympathetic look into the mind of what popular media understood to be a “sociopath.” After all, he was so relatable. We all have bad days. We all have trouble connecting to other people. We all feel like the odd duck out at some point or another in our lives. That’s why I found the show so interesting, anyway. That, plus my burgeoning understanding that my relationship with my brother wasn’t normal and that there might be a word to describe the kind of self-centered, amoral person my brother was (and still is, as of the last time I saw him at our grandfather’s funeral in 2019, anyway).

These days, I’m a bit more interested in why this show seems interesting to me than I am in characters like Dexter Morgan. I understand the more universal nature of not fitting in better than I did when I was eighteen and just starting college. I understand the roll that trauma plays in shaping us and how untreated trauma can cause people to lash out in certain ways, often recreating their trauma in others, because they need to feel powerful and in-control in a way that was once denied to them (and what better way to do than than to reverse the situation in which you felt most powerless?). I won’t deny that there are some people who are just wrong-headed in some way or another, my brother among them, who have no justification for what they’ve done and don’t feel the need to spend the time or energy required to justify their actions, but there’s more going on than just some urge or need they’re working to fulfill. Most of them don’t become killers. Most killers need some kind of emotional drive, some kind of feeling, to do their business. Few do it out of a “need” for the act of violence itself, as much as popular media might try to convince us otherwise. If anything, it’s mostly about power, who has it, and how they can use it, all of which typically play out in other, less-bloody situations.

I don’t really have a good reason for why I felt compelled to watch this show again. At best, I was subconsciously pushing on a bruise to see if it still hurt, or to see if it hurt at all, in order to highlight how much I’ve grown since I turned eighteen and started watching the show for the first time (fifteen years ago, pretty much exactly, give or take a few weeks). At worst, I was struggling and did the only sort of self-flagellation I’ve ever done: subjecting myself to something emotionally painful or unpleasant. None of these are good reasons to do something like this, to subject myself to something as upsetting and as unnecessary as this show, which is why I’ve stopped. Instead, I’m spending more time on non-Dragon Age video games so I’ve got options for when I don’t want to be locked away in my office, staring at my computer and tapping the tab key to highlight interactable objects. That seems like a much more healthy response to me, even if I’m still struggling to sort through what is healthy processing and what is unhealthy escapism these days when I’m not sleeping enough to keep things as clear in my head as I normally do.