Dexter: Is Harry Morgan The Villain?

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

So, this is it! Dexter: Original Sin season 1 is over! After watching the final episode, and confirming to myself that Dexter hasn’t been this good since at least season four of the original show, I think there’s one real question that needs to be answered: Is Dexter’s foster father, Harry Morgan, the main villain? In order to answer that question, we have to look at this through the same kind of window in which we viewed the plot of Breaking Bad.

And, we need to keep in mind the title of the newest show, “Original Sin.” Who’s sin? Dexter’s? Or, more directly, Harry’s?

In a society where healthcare is for-profit, and, sometimes, a life or death situation, is it bad to become a criminal in order to pay for your cancer treatment?

Obviously, I wouldn’t blame someone for robbing a bank, or selling drugs in order to pay for treatment that could save their lives. It’s the actions that Walter White takes, and the things that he does, that make him the antagonist.

Walter White was a product of his own selfishness and violent desire.

But, Dexter … Dexter is a completely different beast, as a character.

In a corrupt and unjust society, where killers and predators walk free, is it bad to kill them yourself?

This question is something I’ve thought about ever since I started watching the OG Dexter series in 2008. Everyone says that what Dexter does in the show is bad, but, is it? Is it really?

As a fictional character, he, for sure, goes off the rails a bit and his “code” slips. There are ways in which he becomes and acts like just a normal, everyday serial killer (and we’ll explore further down if this is part of his own inclinations, or sins of the father). But, for the most part, his actions in both of these shows are things that are shown to have saved lives. So, I guess it circles back to the real world line of thinking that a lot of liberals hold, in that if you enact evil against evil, you are evil.

Which … I don’t believe.

If you punch a Nazi in the face, you don’t become a Nazi. This isn’t the Marvel universe. We don’t have some magical transference of energy that occurs when you hit someone hard enough.

If Dexter kills a child predator who buries his victims under a shed, he doesn’t somehow become a child predator. Unlike Walter White, Dexter doesn’t unconsciously “absorb” pieces of his victims into his own personality.

Dexter does what Dexter does. He uses police resources to investigate killers, collects evidence, and then dumps them in the ocean. And then he goes home with a splotch of blood on a slide, and eats a sandwich.

But, we can’t really piece together a full canvas out of these things, unless we also look at the person who made Dexter.

The man who sees himself as a hero, who saved Dexter from becoming something much more along the lines of a monster, like his own brother, Brian Moser. I am, obviously, talking about the character, Harry Morgan.

Walter White and Harry Morgan are more alike than Walter and Dexter.

Both operate out of selfishness, out of a need for vengeance, for their own twisted version of justice, and both are men of tragedy, who see themselves outside of social norms out of a sense of immense pride, immense, inflated egos. Where a regular person would concede, that if they don’t do their job properly, as a cop, killers might get away. Or, in Walter’s respect, a normal person would just take help from their rich friends in order to pay for cancer treatment.

And, in both shows, these men are framed in a way that make the audience sympathize with them, which, in turn, makes it harder to see that the person you’re empathizing with is actually committing some pretty heinous crimes. Because, if there’s any way to get groups of people to excuse bad things, it’s to appeal to their sympathy, and put them in the shoes of those who do bad things.

Because most people are capable of empathy.

Harry is a man who adopted a child from the scene of a murder, of a woman with whom he had an affair, and then molded someone he believed to have inclinations toward murder, into his own “arm of the law.” In order to enact justice against those who escape it.

In his own way, Harry is just another killer. He just can’t pull the trigger himself. In his own selfishness, he creates the anti-monster, out of a child who, and I can’t stress this enough, may not have even ended up that way, as an adult.

That’s right. There is nothing in any of the shows that currently exist that suggest Dexter would have definitely become a stone-cold, regular serial killer. Sure, he committed small-time acts of violence as a child, and through prodding from his foster father, he grew to believe that he had “urges” that needed to be “satisfied.”

When you’re a child, your parents create you. Everything you know, do, and believe, is a product of how you were raised. Harry Morgan knew that, as a very young child, witnessing murder could lead someone to become antisocial, a “psychopath” later in life, and therefore more inclined to be a predator (the idea that someone can be diagnosed as a psychopath, and then also be considered inclined toward murder and violence is definitely something of a topic of contention, but this post isn’t about that). He didn’t know for sure that this is what would happen to Dexter. And yet, he imprinted this idea upon him.

Dexter is a victim of his own upbringing.

Harry Morgan is a man of tragedy. He’s a man who lost his first son to an accidental drowning. He lost the woman he had an affair with, and then he lost his actual wife to sickness. He’s a man who failed to be a good officer of the law on numerous occasions (if such a thing can exist), and it is through that failure, that Dexter was born.

Now, I’m not saying for sure that either Dexter or Harry are definitively good people. These ideas of “good” and “bad” in this sense are meaningless.

But Harry is only two steps from fitting within the moral code he gave his own son, so that he could be an ethical, and unseen, serial killer.

Think of Harry the same way you think of Jigsaw. Jigsaw isn’t a traditional killer. He never pulled a single trigger, or used any knives. He never directly ended anyone’s lives, himself. Jigsaw created the machinations that would do the killing for him, the same way Harry Morgan created a weapon that could kill, undetected, and above the law, without ever having to pull a trigger, himself. Jigsaw’s bear trap is to Harry Morgan what Dexter, is.

Jigsaw is a villain.

Harry Morgan … is a villain.

The next question is, “Can a villain have good intentions?”

Or, “What is a villain?”