The anti-hero has been on the rise with Showtime’s “Dexter” and AMC’s “Breaking Bad” making the rippling waters of morality murky when questions of survival come into play. While Walter White and Dexter Morgan’s actions and the motivations behind them may differ, they’re both still criminals nonetheless. Yet, we root for them at every turn.
Both shows have succeeded in getting us to relate and even sympathize with these characters by painting them first, as normal then as victims of circumstance. They’re career oriented family men at the mercy of their own dark secret or in Dexter’s case, his “Dark Passenger.” Even his own character won’t acknowledge what he does as a part of who he is. It’s a separate entity, hijacking him, compelling him to do things he doesn’t want to do; all due to the fact that he witnessed his mother’s murder at a young age. This allows his character, from a psychological standpoint to almost play victim throughout the series as opposed to accepting responsibility for his actions.
Similarly with Walter, it’s his cancer that is the dark passenger. We sympathize with Walt the moment we meet him. He’s working two jobs to support his family and just turned 50 when he’s diagnosed with cancer. We wonder right along with him, “How will this family afford treatment costs and what is going to happen to them when he’s gone?” While cooking meth certainly doesn’t occur to most people as the obvious answer to these problems, we all follow that train of logic and enjoy the ride, even after it becomes clear the line of need vs. greed’s been crossed.
With Dexter, he and subsequently we justify his actions because he has a code that says he can only kill, killers. Except, the lines have blurred here as well. He has still been responsible for the deaths of innocent people.
Our involvement with these characters has led us to become accomplices of sorts, much like the women in their lives. Once the truth’s revealed to Walt’s wife Skyler and Dexter’s sister Deb, their initial moral outrage is inconsequential. Their attachment to these men leads to their need to protect them with almost complete disregard for their own corruption in the process.
Those who threaten to expose these men, even for no reasons other than moral high ground become villainized in our heads and consequently their deaths become rationalized.
As far as any evidence of guilt, overall it seems Dexter (the sociopath) has more of a conscience than Walter (the sick Chemistry teacher). By the end of the latest season however, we have been left with the impression that Dexter is no longer in denial, he’s accepting the truth of who he is as a whole, there is no such thing as the dark passenger. While Walter seems to think he is going to slip out of his sinister role as simply as he does his hat. As if he could just return it to the shop he bought it from.
Walter is a much darker character than Dexter. He is hardly recognizable from the man we met in season one. Walter’s greed for money that he no longer needed and his desire for power he never needed led him to not only perpetuate the cycle of addiction and death in the nameless, faceless masses that consume his product but also to commit murder, poison an innocent child and a myriad of other crimes. Can one come back from that?
While his statement “I am the one who knocks.” came a bit premature, it certainly was an accurate prediction for the direction his character has taken.
