Endings: Dexter's Finale

It's a terrible thing:  Alas, no more Dexter 'til September, when Season 6 will presumably begin (huzzah for renewals!)  Season 5 has given viewers a lot to ponder, not least of which is the birth of Lumen's Dark Passenger. 

I won't bother to spell out the synopsis for Dexter's Season 5 finale; there's already a fantastic one over at Dark-Passenger.net. It was a good season and a solid finale, if it ended a little too neatly for my tastes.  However, I'm sure I'm not the only one who was heartily disappointed by Lumen's decision to reject Dexter after her ordeal had come to an end. 

My disappointment isn't so much in Lumen's rejection of Dexter, sad as it was to see him so hurt.  Rather, the disappointment is rooted in the writer's decision to make Lumen's passenger magically disappear after her ordeal ended. 

I'd like to believe it could work that way, but I really don't believe it does.  Post-traumatic stress disorder fundamentally changes the wiring in a victim's mind; it changes the way you think and experience the world.  I don't believe that killing her rapists would magically revert her wiring to normal functioning.  She knows what a knife feels like in her hand, the power it can hold, and I don't believe that she'll simply forget that.  All it would take is a reminder, something that ignites her darkness again, and she'll be picking up that knife and coming right back to Dexter.

Who says I have mother issues?

When I was a young girl, my mother said she'd blow my brains out.  She didn't know I was home to hear her say it; she thought she was alone with the grandmother she'd tried to kill the night before.  My sister and I had jumped to Grandma's defense when she came after her with a Maglight, trying to bash her brains in for refusing to give the drunken old whore more cigarette money, and we had to forcibly throw her out of the house.  I don't remember where Dad was--stoned in the basement, probably.

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It was the night of my 11th birthday.  I pretended to be sick the next day to stay home from school, a trick I used a lot in those days (hell, still do if I'm being honest), and she didn't know I was there.  She came into the house, walked into my grandma's room across the hall from my own, and told her that she'd blow our brains out--mine and my sister's--if we ever touched her again.  She denies it to this day, but I know what I heard.  And I've hated her ever since.

My Dark Passenger: An Introduction

I'll be the first to say that using a description derived from fiction is cheesy at best, but it's accurate enough that I don't particularly care.  The Dark Passenger, as described by Jeff Lindsay's uber-popular serial killer Dexter Morgan, is real enough.  And while I suspect that the Passenger manifests differently for each of us that know him (or it, since I can't imagine it feels male to everyone), it's always felt male to me.  I've known him since I was a kid, and I suspect I'll know him 'til the day I die.

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The Dark Passenger is like the boogeyman waiting in the dark that comes when my inner light is switched off.  That's the best way I can describe it.  I'm not an unfeeling, uncaring monster all of the time; there's quite a bit of light and love in me.  But my wiring is damaged, and it doesn't take much to flip that inner circuit breaker.  And when that switch has been flipped, my light is just... gone, and my Passenger rears up out of the darkness to fill the void left by the part of me that gives a damn.  I have to reconnect with people and things I do give a damn about to flip that switch and regain my light.  It's just hard to find the breaker box in the dark...

Yes, I realize that I have serious dissociative issues.  But just to clarify, I'm not a serial killer, and I've never hurt a person.  I've never even killed an animal that wasn't used for food.  Now, ask me whether I want to.

If you were standing in front of me, looking into my oh-so-pretty blue eyes, I'd lie to your face.  "Of course not!" I'd say.  Or, "oh no, I respect human life far too much."

Except... I don't.  I respect individuals based on their worth to the species and to the world we inhabit, but there are hundreds of people I've met--and thousands more that I haven't--that I would secretly enjoy seeing on a slab somewhere.  And when my light is off, it's fun to think of all the things I could do with them in the dark.