Dexter III -- He's One of Us

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
--What if God was One of Us?,
Joan Osbourne

I am he as you are he
as you are me
and we are all together
--I am the Walrus, The Beatles

And anyone can tell
you think you know me well
but you don't know me
--You Don't Know Me, Eddy Arnold

______________

Per Ms. Osbourne's plaintive, if grammatically incorrect, question: What if he were one of us?

Ranger does this as a pop cultural public service for you; someone's got to do it. But it is not as though he goes gently into that good night. No, not without the palliatives of Pilsner and chips. On with the show.

The season finale saw our hero, serial killer Dexter, facing a tough choice: to kill the episode's bad guy, which is normally his pleasure, or not. Problem: this serial killer what needed killin' was his brother. You guessed it, a Cain and Abel play of sorts. In the end, Dexter puts on a brave face and offs his brother so as to save his adopted sister who is an innocent in these sinister goings-on.

Fastidious to a T, Dexter slits the brother's throat and inverts him so he can bleed out nicely, the hanging carcass thus emphasizing the animal nature of all. Clean work, Dex! He really slays them.

Applying the metaphorical posture of previous posts, one could see the murdered brother as symbolizing the U.S. and the adopted sister as Iraq. Dexter becomes a George Bush archetype, bleeding out his consanguine brother (= the U.S.) to save the adopted sister (= Iraq).

As the show draws to a close, Dexter has a Walter Mitty-like reverie: if people only knew of his greatness and his martyrdom, they would praise him as a hero. Maybe even throw flowers at him, a la Mr. Rumsfeld's imago dei.

In a pure Hollywood moment, we see an airplane drawing a Dexter banner. This is his "Mission Accomplished" moment. Or maybe the screenwriters just meant they had accomplished the mission of a season of Dexter for this particular year. Maybe a clever double entendre. Whatever.

Finally, the screen fades out to Dexter's externalized thoughts: "Yes, they see me. I'm one of them, in their darkest dreams." But maybe, this "dark" is like saying "bad" when we really mean "good," as in street-speak for "not conformist." That would be deep, perhaps giving too much credit to screenwriters.

Who knows, but fade out to red, white and blue confetti falling all around Dexter, in a screen shot straight from a republican nominating convention. It is his Sally Fields moment -- They really like me!

He is, after all, one of us.