Can Dexter™ Overcome His "Dark Passenger"?

Can we ever really be free of the past that haunts us, the voices in our heads that tell us lies and make us do things that we don’t want to do? Can we be free of our subconscious?

The Showtime Entertainment™ series Dexter™ is a dramatic statement of those questions. Dexter Morgan is a genial serial killer/vigilante who is haunted by a “dark passenger” that forces him to kill people.

Dexter has learned over the years, and with the help of the cop who adopted him, to channel that urge to kill for “good”, killing only serial killers (with the exception of the occasional “mistake”) who have been released through the cracks in the Miami criminal justice system.

He is also a family man with a lovely wife, two step-children, and now a son of his own. His “demons” from the past threaten his family and he desperately wants to free himself of that “dark passenger”. But he is haunted by the “ghost” of his foster father, the very personification of his subconscious, telling him that he can never change, that he must always have some body on his killing table.

Unfortunately for Dexter, if he heals the wounds of the past, overcomes the seduction of the “dark passenger”, and silences the goading of his ghostly subconscious, his very profitable hit series ends. The writers of the Dexter series don’t want to admit (though they are willing enough to hint at the possibility in order to sustain dramatic tension) that he will ever be able to change.

In fact, at the end of the fourth season they killed off his wife, Rita, to make sure that he doesn’t just become an average joe with no marketable obsessions.

But what about the rest of us? We all have some “demons”, don’t we? We may not be serial killers, but we all have some dark phases of our personalities that keep us in thrall to the lies that our subconscious recorded years ago and keeps playing over and over. Is it possible for us to change?

In a word – maybe. But it means facing our demons, answering the lies of our subconscious with the truth, and being responsible for our actions.

Oh, I know that is not a popular word in our modern society. We don’t want to have to be responsible; we’d rather blame everything on someone or something else. Whatever the ill may be, it certainly isn’t our fault. It must be the fault of the government, the President, our mommies or daddys or, failing all else, “the devil made me do it”.

In fact, there are murderers and child abusers, bullies and pedophiles, cheaters and theives and all manner of criminals who refuse to take responsibility. They think that they should be excused for their anti-social behavior because their fathers beat them or their mothers used harsh toilet training techniques.

Being responsible does not mean that we never have bad thoughts or evil impulses. Rather, it means that we are able to respond to those thoughts and those impulses in mature, positive ways instead of simply surrendering to the shadow side.

Did you catch that slice and dice? It has almost become cliché, but being responsible means that we are response able. That is, we are able to choose how we respond.

There’s not much hope for poor Dexter but there is hope for you and me. Yes. We can be free of the past that haunts us. We can silence the voices in our heads that tell us lies. We can be response able to the best that is in our subconscious minds. We can live responsible lives.