Finished Dexter season 2 around noon. Funny that I feel joy when Dexter is out of trouble. Odds in his favor, all his obstacles removed one by one eventually and the "butcher" case got a closure. I believe I am not alone, feeling Dexter is turning into a better person. He is a serial killer, but appears to have a good heart, since he never kills "innocent" people. A better angle would be to zoom in a few of his victims, to show they, like Dexter, have their good and evil along with struggle all in one.

 

A good show or novel's success is based on if audience/readers can identify themselves with the main roles. If they can channel their confusion, frustration, joy and hope through those characters, it will be popular. Dexter provides the width and depth, with his obsession, relationship problems, masks and desire to be close to special ones mask off. The complication deep in core is the same with our ordinary life. Yet he has such a successful secret life, where he can release his tension through structured process. Maybe as audience, we envy that. The perfect thrill doesn't exist in our reality, every issue is sticky, bound to more than one other issues in our little circles. We cannot isolate them one at a time, and unlike a show, they almost never appear to have true break through moments.

 

I like the season 1 & 2 ending because it appears to be the true ending of the current crisis, and gives hope to another level of success for the next season. It is not repetitive to the last one, leave us with a bit anxiety to look forward to the next one. We go through life phase by phase. Sad thing is that we don't feel joy when one phase ends in a perfect tone, when don't view it as a good ending but wish it to be the middle step to a even bigger happier ending. So we miss the opportunity to review and reflect the past, then set a new goal, new theme for the next phase. I guess most marriage and relationships are like that. We stop giving effort, so they go away in their slow death. Success born out of failure, and vice versa.

 

But through failures, even when we do recognize the end of one phase (we don't at all times), many of us still fail to learn from the experience and make more mistakes in the next phase and follow our own steps towards falling deeper: the self destructive path. It is more often that we have failure after failure, than success after another. We only got ourselves to blame.