And what a perfect victim for drawing us to Dexter's side! Show me a person who doesn't take some pleasure in killing mosquitoes and I'll show you someone who hasn't spent much time in the tropics. I'm not much of an avenger myself, but I've passed many steamy nights in cheap guest-house rooms from Bangkok to Belize stalking the little bitches, finding a kind of grim joy in every fresh blood-stain I left on those moldy walls. Unlike most insects, whose offense is just a by-product of them going about their own business, mosquitoes are coming after us, coming for our blood while we sleep in the malarial night. Exterminate the brutes, I say.

Then the music starts. One critic described it perfectly as "spicy Latin in flavor and creepy Gothic in sensibility . . . like the ‘Addams Family' theme played by a Mexican Day of the Dead band . . ." The melody transmits an uneasy blend of warning and welcome.

The rest of the sequence takes us through Dexter's morning routine-though in his case, we might call it his morning "ritual," in that his obsessive compulsion for control allows for very little variation. He shaves (against the grain, of course); he cooks and chews his meaty, bleeding breakfast-complete with runny yolks and bright red ketchup splats on the plate (or is that Tabasco?); his juice is blood orange (the close focus makes the pulp look like particularly nasty road kill); the dental floss drawn taught around his finger visibly chokes off the blood flow, while the lacing of his boots echoes strangulation.

The sequence ends with Dexter staring straight into our eyes for an overlong moment, as if a confidence has been shared-a gift that might just seal our fate. Then, the locking of a door and a neighborly nod to us as he heads off for work.

Both "Dexter," the program, and Dexter, the character challenge us to join in, if we dare, for a journey along the razor's edge separating the cleansing execution of moral justice from the sticky evil that oozes from numbed slaughter-and, frankly, from the numbing depiction of killing.

But why complain? Dexter is all about cold blood, inside and out. His job is to read the messages violence leaves behind-crimson hieroglyphs splattered on walls or pooling significantly on the carpet. Painstakingly catalogued trophies from his own kills-clinical blood samples on glass microscope slides-are hidden in an air conditioner. What could be more cold-blooded than chilled blood?

Because we are privy to Dexter's darkest secrets, we know what nobody else does. This killer's ruthlessness is leavened by a limited range of authentic feelings, unlike the stereotypical sociopath, who fakes them all. Dexter feels real affection, if not love (for his sister, for Rita and her kids, for Angel) and respect (for FBI Special Agent Lundy, for Arthur). He yearns for connection (with his brother, with Miguel, with Arthur, with the ghost of his father). He wants so desperately to be known that one suspects much of the pleasure he takes in his pre-murder conversations with his victims is just this: he can confide in them in their last moments-they'll take his secret to their watery grave, and soon. He can finally, briefly share the truth about who he really is-even if just for a moment. But of course, these feelings which bring him closest to his humanity represent the greatest threat to his performance and continued success in fulfilling his "heroic" destiny.

And we do want him to fulfill this destiny, don't we? Part of the genius of the program is that by sharing Dexter's secret life with us in all its surface normalcy and profound justifications, we are emotionally-and even intellectually-aligned with this cold-blooded killer's view of the world. Miami is a safer place because of what he's doing-even if an innocent person occasionally gets offed in the process. Knowing what we do, both about the criminal underworld and about Dexter's traumatic past, we accept Dexter's perverse hungers as the price of justice, cheering him on as he battles "real" evil.

* * *

Tragically orphaned as a young boy, he was raised by kind-hearted adults who tried, often unsuccessfully, to understand the strange child he was. Gradually, it dawned on him, too, that he was different from everyone else and somehow disconnected from the source of his deepest, essential identity. But with his pain and isolation came unique abilities. His life would be all about learning to use these abilities to defend common, decent folk against those who would do them harm or, failing that, to seek revenge against those who already had harmed the innocent.

This is Dexter's story, of course, but it's a story he shares with Superman, Batman, and Spiderman: the holy trinity of American superheroes.

Spiderman has his webs, Superman his flight, and Batman his high-tech know-how. What's Dexter's superhero ability? Discipline. Obsessive and absolute, Dexter must live by Harry's Code, because he knows that any deviation from the strict moral code Harry taught him can only result in disaster-for himself and the innocent civilians he loves, in his reptilian way.

A surgeon cuts into living human bodies, week after week, until she feels nothing at all any more. It's just work, she's learned to tell herself. It's not a person under her scalpel so much as an object, a thorax, a liver. If she felt the trauma and horror most of us would feel at slicing into a living human being, she would be useless in the O.R. and lives would be lost. An essential part of a surgeon's psychological training involves the cultivation of this ability to not feel what "normal" people would feel deeply and immediately. Ask any doctor about that first experience with cadavers in medical school. She'll tell you about the joking, the nick-names the students give the bodies, the rituals needed to cultivate the necessary numbness.

In their book about post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of recent wars, psychologists Daryl S. Paulson and Stanley Krippner describe PTSD as "a condition that results from experiencing (or witnessing) life-threatening events that extend beyond one's coping capacity, emotional resources, and/or existential world view." Many first-year medical students work hard to extend their coping capacities and world-view in order to accommodate the presence of the dying and the dead. Adults have a fighting chance of finding their way through these sorts of traumas with their psyches intact-maybe even strengthened by their experience. But a child like Dexter was, locked in the bloody container with his mother's body for days, would have no such capacities or existential world view to help him overcome such an experience. But the developing consciousness requires integration, so Dexter embraced his horrific experience, integrating the blood, the death, and the resulting numbness into a more-or-less functional psyche.

Should Dexter ever get caught and face trial, his defense attorney might consider arguing that his client was like a well-intentioned surgeon operating on the social body of Miami, removing malignant tumors, cutting away infected tissue, clearing blocked arteries. Yes, pain was involved, and sometimes unintended death as well. But even the best surgeons lose patients sometimes. And overall, Dexter's was a positive effect on society, right?