Fridge / Dexter

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

The Series

Fridge Brilliance

• Dexter kills his brother, "the only person who sees the real him", and saves his sister, who sees only his mask of humanity. Dexter secretly hates his real self. The human Dexter isn't simply his mask, it's who he desperately wants to be his real self.
• Season 7 features Call Backs and Continuity Nods to every previous season...except for Season 3. Or maybe it did include that season after all, in a more implicit way. Consider how Season 3's villain, Miguel Prado, deliberately turned away from the Code and plotted to murder LaGuerta in order to protect himself... Sound familiar?
• In season 3, Camilla has terminal lung cancer and asks Dexter to kill her. When speaking to Deb about it, Deb mentions that if that ever happened to her, she'd want someone to pull the plug. In the series finale, Dexter does just that when Deb is a vegetable. Dexter isn't really killing Deb in his typical way, he's just carrying out her wishes from 5 years prior.
• The Koshka Brotherhood’s name. Koshka literally means ‘she-cat’ in Russian, which comes across as somewhat Narmy, but remember that they run strip clubs and work in human trafficking—it’s not ‘Kitty Brotherhood’, it’s ‘Pussy Brotherhood’.
• Some have complained that Batista and LaGuerta’s relationship is a case of Strangled by the Red String. That’s not a mistake: the main theme of the series is loneliness and trying to find your place in the world and how often trying to overcome these goes awry. This relationship was one example out of many of it going awry.
• In S2 E4, Doakes must confront Curtis Barnes, one of his own brothers-in-arms from special ops, who shares the same demons and post-traumatic stress that he does. Doakes is forced to shoot Barnes, and is clearly sorry he had to do it. Seven episodes later, again holding a gun on a man, Doakes is just a beat too slow on the trigger . . . and Dexter takes full advantage.
• A fridge brilliance of a mythology gag. In Season 2, when Dexter and Lila are having a cup of coffee and she describes how the addiction is, using the words "need" and "a thousand whispering voices" before Dexter uses the term Dark Passenger. In the first chapter of the first book Darkly Dreaming Dexter, when Dexter goes after the priest, he uses the same terms when it comes to describing his Dark Passenger driving him. Even Lila's "Now" matches how it is in the book (with Lila using it to signify the urge of using drugs, while in the novel, it is used to set Dexter off into securing the priest similar to how he does in the first episode).
• Dexter states he doesn't like guns, and is shown to be a terrible shot (despite Harry and him going out and hunting animals his Dexter's early years). This makes sense in regards to someone like Dexter, who has been shown not to just perform quick deaths to his victims, but (depending on the severity of the crimes committed by his victims) slowly sawing them into pieces while they're still alive (see the priest in the first episode and the psychiatrist later on in the same season, episode "Shrink Wrap"). A gun is too quick a death and leaves behind too much evidence, in addition for regularly finding guns that can't be traced on a regular basis being an issue. Sometimes, Dexter likes to savor the kill, and a gun would end it too quickly.

Fridge Horror

• As if Rita's death wasn't heartbreaking and horrific enough. When you start to think of what a sadistic freak Arthur Mitchell aka Trinity was, just imagine what he said to her. Poor girl had no clue why she was dying... and her baby had to watch.
  • What's worse is that her death didn't fit the pattern: she was a mother of three, not two, and mothers were pushed off buildings. The daughters were bled out in bathtubs. So while it could have been him, it could just as easily be an unknown copycat killer.
    • Confirmed not to be the case in Dexter: New Blood, in which Harrison has a flashback that shows Arthur did kill her.
• While we know that Dexter's code keeps him from killing innocents, and he is able to control his Dark Passenger enough that he is not a danger to those around him, in season 2, he tells Lila that he keeps himself at a distance from the people he cares about for fear he might "hurt them... like I've hurt so many others." Dexter has actually considered the possibility that he could unleash his dark passenger on his family or co-workers. This comes to a head in the first season finale.
• At the end of series 2, Dexter holds Doakes captive and has long conversations trying to convince him they're not so different, it sometimes comes across less as justifying himself for killing people and more like trying to justify killing Doakes and cutting him up. And as Dexter kills a drug dealer after very little research in his preferred manner right in front of Doakes, you can assume Dexter was feeling very stabby at the time.
• In Series 5, One of the serial rapists has a tendency to stick three fingers in the mouths of his victims. Creepy enough even before you realise that this guy's other distinguishing feature is that he is a dentist. A children's dentist. He puts those fingers of the mouths of children on a regular basis.
• Hannah is a sociopath, who poisons anyone who pisses her off, or for whom she has no further use. Bye bye, Harrison.

Fridge Logic

• Cracked points out just how much incompetence is required of the Miami PD for Dexter to go undetected.

The Novels

Fridge Logic

• How come Doakes doesn't follow Dexter all the time like he used to? Sure he's now gone through a lot of shit since the second book but that shouldn't stop him.
  • Even a badass can be worn down somewhat. Plus he had been following Dexter for a long time with literally no results.

Fridge Horror

• Dexter's kills are not at all like the quickie knife-in-the-chest kills of his TV counterpart. They're slow, torturous vivisections that cause the victim to die in the most agonizing way possible. But hey, the victims are murderers so its just karma right? Until you remember that Brian kills in exactly the same way, and his victims are prostitutes who's only crimes was being reduced to selling themselves to survive.
  • Not to mention there's no mention of Brian being asexual like Dexter, so what're the chances he rapes them first?
    • About the same, since rape stems more from power than sexual attraction.