The Dark Passenger

I've been enjoying Dexter, more than I thought I would. The season one finale caught me off guard with a haunting reveal, further delving into what the definition of justice is and what drives us to seek it. The question is not "how far would you go?" but "when you go that far, where does that put you?" Who does it make you and can it change you as much as the world around you? Even with saying that, you have to ask, how much the world is changed. A few dozen corpses in your wake, dropped in the ocean outside of Miami. What does it matter?

The second season episode, "An Inconvenient Lie", contains one of the most mesmerizing conversations in the show so far featuring a direct, acute assessment of Dexter's deeply engrained motivations. It takes place between Dexter and an attendee of a Narcotics Anonymous group, Lila Tournay.


Lila

There’s no way that I could know what you’ve experienced right?

I couldn’t possibly fill that need.

Like a thousand hiding voices whispering, “this is who you are.”

And you fight the pressure. The growing need rising like a wave. Prickling and teasing and prodding to be fed. But the whispering gets louder until it’s screaming, “now!” And it’s the only voice you hear.

The only voice you want to hear.

And you belong to it.

To this shadow self.

To this...

Dexter

...dark passenger.

Lila

Yes.  The dark passenger.

I immediately thought of Simon & Garfunkel's, "Sound of Silence" and its reference to the "darkness" as a proximate comfort and silence that festers within the human heart. It was probably close to my mind after seeing Watchmen again. A nice moment of intertextuality.

Hello darkness, my old friend,
Ive come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

The song closes with the words:

...whispered in the sounds of silence.