Darker than Dexter, Colder than the Ice Truck Killer

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Dexter Morgan, just like every other human on the planet, spends a lot of his time lying to himself. While most of us focus our self-delusions on our inherent goodness, Dexter ruminates on his self-imposed isolation from the rest of humanity. He likes to think he feels nothing, that he is incapable of feeling what other people feel. A large part of this was instilled by his foster father Harry, who saw Dexter as a tool through which he could, by proxy at least, train Dexter to vent his own frustrations.

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In "Love American Style," Dexter is forced to wrestle with the lie that drives him: namely, that he is devoid of the need to connect emotionally. Up to this point, he's been portrayed mostly as a merry prankster of mayhem, his singleminded devotion to his craft deftly played for dark humor. In the subtext of the plotline, however, there's always been a thread devoted to Dexter's understandable sense of isolation. After all, it's not easy to maintain mainstream appearances when your avocation is acting as an avenging angel.

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"Love American Style" brings that conflict to the fore, and takes the series into a more three-dimensional direction. Heretofore, the motives for Dexter's killings have been presented matter-of-factly--that one's a pedophile killer, this one's a snuff filmmaker, and so on. But with this episode, the series delves into the events that precipitate Dexter's grisly actions.

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More importantly, it scrutinizes one of the vilest, darkest and most overlooked aspects of illegal immigration-- the ugly trade of human trafficking, as practiced by the smugglers known as coyotes. Coyotes smuggle illegals into the States, for a hefty fee. Often, these would-be immigrants are never seen again. "Love American Style" explores this issue with a typically Dexteresque solution.

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When Rita asks Dexter to use his police connections to investigate the disappearance of a coworker's fiance, there is no doubt where the episode is headed. He immediately goes into Dexter the Stalker mode, and pieces together the evidence he needs to justify the coyote's untimely demise. Things get more complicated when he discovers at the last minute that the coyote's wife is the brains behind the scam. Together, they've drowned countless Cubans whose families could not pay the surprise transportation fee.

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Woven through this main line are the subplots and themes that make Dexter compelling. Tucci, mutilated but recovering, is the one solid lead the cops have on the Ice Truck Killer murders. Doakes and Deb are assigned to interview Tucci as part of the investigation. While Doakes is typically all business, Deb bonds with Tucci on a more human level. Doakes cautions her to put emotions aside, and deal with the questioning on a purely professional level. But Deb has always dealt with everything on an instinctive level, and here, it goes into an empathic level.

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Dexter's developing relationship with Rita is becoming the thread that may prove to be either his salvation or his ultimate undoing. As much as he tries to convince himself to the contrary, Dexter is in love with Rita, and his attempts to come to grips with this alien emotional state may be contributing to his carelessness of late. On the one hand, he seems more focused in adhering to Harry's Code at any risk. On the other hand, he's distracted by his new found need to lead "a normal life."

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All of this may explain the seemingly incongruous title of the episode. What "Love American Style" does is look at the various angles the word can bounce off of and still maintain its integrity. There is a scene near the end of the episode when Dexter asks the doome coyote couple how they've made their marriage last. "We do everything together," the wife replies. Indeed they do. Dexter sees to that.

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Love, as Dexter suspected at the episode's beginning, does complicate life--and death. His mission to avenge the illegals the coyotes had killed was complicated when it turned out he had two evildoers to eliminate. Consequently, he didn't have time to neatly cut the wife into pieces for disposal at sea. Whole bodies have a tendency to resurface, even when dropped indeep waters. "But sometimes you have to take a chance," he muses as he prepares to dispose of his victims.

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He has no idea what a chance he's taken. Somebody sees him loading the Hefty bags into the trunk of his car. We only see a moving eye watching from the trunk of a junked Mercedes. Is it a coincidence? Or is someone besides the Ice Truck Killer stalking Dexter? Either way, Dexter is poised to find his life becoming increasingly complicated.