Dexter: Season Two

The Age

Thursday October 9, 2008

Philippa Hawker

Dexter: Season Two

Paramount, 607 min, MA, TV drama, 2008

3.5/5

Everyone's favourite vigilante blood spatter expert, Dexter Morgan (Michael Hall), returns for a second round of blackly comic murder and mayhem in the Miami sunshine. Dexter is a police forensics expert with a hidden appetite for killing who has devised a way to channel his murderous urges: he chooses to eliminate, after hours, malefactors whom the law was unable to touch.

That he enjoys what he does is a bonus. In the first season he made some uncomfortable discoveries about his past and he's not in very good shape at the beginning of the second season. His somewhat unorthodox relationships with his sister and his girlfriend have gone awry; he is attracted to another woman; one of his colleagues is even more suspicious about him than before and an FBI profiler (Keith Carradine) arrives on the scene to investigate murders that Dexter knows quite a bit about already. This next instalment manages, quite deftly, to maintain the entertainingly amoral tone that was established in the first season and to add some new twists: Dexter is not what he was the first time around.

DVD extras include: cast interviews