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Love how everyone thinks V is a psycopath when she obviously isn't: hannibal is psychopath, villannelle is a sociopath. Quick temper, easily offended and low self control are a couple of the obvious external signifiers.

It successively got worse.

Phoebe wrote 4 episodes only and would have worked on them with a team of writers who basically did all the work in terms of plot and she just wrote the scenes out with her comedy style. She's decently funny but no where near good enough as a writer to get credit for the whole show.

OMG I never knew the dubbed version of this was such trash.

Subbed after ten minutes of watching this video. Poor writing (no offence I’m sure it was just to pump it out quick) but the essence, the idea, the premise, the editing, but most importantly: **the philosophy** absolutely apex. Well done

I disagree that the main reason the action didn't work in extraction 2 is idiot plot. That's only part of it. The main reason is actually that the action sequence in the first was positively motivated by character and consequence. Getting the kid to trust him, navigating an action sequence and car chase with a dependent, fighting the guy who's supposed to be his equal, etc. all of it a means to show positive character growth and interaction. Then take the sequences from the second movie, and it's more just an excuse for action to happen. Why didn't the kid trust him in the first one? Because who the hell would trust a guy like that who just shows up out of nowhere after being kidnapped in the first place. He has no reason to believe he isn't being kidnapped again. Whereas, why did the kid in the second movie blindly idolise his father? So the action could happen. The dude repeatedly beat on him and his mother, and his adoration for his father is explained how? Well it's not, really. He just idolizes his father because that's what is necessary to create conflict. There's no reason for any of it. I think the dumb decisions are a symptom of the same problem - there's no character motivation for anything that happens. It only happens because it results in a cool action sequence. That leaves the whole movie feeling like a disconnected and frustrating mess. The first movie is characters reacting to a situation and forcing their will on the plot. The second movie is the plot forcing characters into circumstances that don't make sense.

As someone who adored the first two seasons of Dexter but never finished the show, I think there's a third option here. Change the code. Dexter gets by on a strict set of minimal rules because that makes decisions easy for him. The best way to show the mounting complexity of his life and emotional attachments is for him to try changing his code on his own, without Harry's influence. It gives him a chance to try to adapt to the situation, rather than only making one of a few decisions. He realises that Doakes presents a singular exception to his rules, and he needs a third rule. He's already 'caught' in a sense because there's someone out there who knows the truth, so he can't apply that rule. He has to either make up a new one, or decide whether killing someone who is innocent is actually justified if it means he can keep doing what he's doing ridding the world of awful people. That's how you create the moral dilemma. He knows what he 'should' do, which is release Doakes, but he knows that he also 'should' continue killing serial killers, because it provides a practical solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem. Practical being the key word. Instead of killing Doakes, he finds a practical solution, because that's how his brain works. He doesn't see the grey area, because that's too complicated for him in season 2, so he decides to force Doakes' hand by implicating him in the crimes. Doakes' decision then is to either go on the run himself, or join dexter. Season 3 becomes less of a game of cat and mouse, and more about what it takes to make a good man turn into someone like dexter. Doakes could have served as an insight into the things that would justify a staunch moralist like him becoming just like Dexter. Instead we got 'rocks fall, everyone dies.'

One small criticism - the text on screen needs space to be read and processed. If you put up an editor's note while talking at your usual pace, it can sometimes mean viewers need to rewind to read it, or rewind to listen back to the part of your video it distracted them from. Maybe that's just a me/ADHD/attention span problem, but it's possible it affects others, too.

I don't know that I'd call it a moral dilemma to be honest. The whole point of the character was that he didn't have morals or feelings and instead imitated morals/feelings to fit in. The code was an extension of that in some ways, but also to make it less likely for him to get caught. Targeting the people he targeted was less for moral reasons and more for not getting caught reasons. Similar to how many serial killers with high body counts targeted people that society doesn't care about like the homeless.

It is my favourite Miyazaki movie because I also cursed myself more than 20 years ago.

OH OH ~ *if you want a masterpiec revolving around guilt* - WATCH 'FRIEREN' ... my god~ it hits gently but it leaves a mark

4:36 was that the original englisch line?! please tell me it was you dubbing Oo (she sounds fine though The german version sounds just right. Deep, manly, sorrowful... - it really has a Clark Cable feel. 8:25 okay now that sounds much better. not unlike the german I brought up. it has gravity

One of my favorites too. It brims with atmosphere and character. Its not whimsical. Its silly. but the details it gets right it nails well. I am also a fan of detailed machines the likes we don't see often in animes these days

I honestly think that the show would have worked better if season 1 was not season 1. There should have been kind of a prequel to that which lets the audience know the character and what he's about. Then hit you with the Ice Truck Killer that knows him as well as the audience does. This really has nothing to do with the subject of the video but you know.... Also, the show should have ended with Rita's death. I'm not saying this because the show went downhill after that, I'm saying this because it is the perfect ending. Full circle for the character. Finally his actions had consequences that bit him in the ass on a personal level and he literally put his own son in the same situation that fucked him up in the first place, all because he was trying to prevent that from happening.

U could have spared the spoilers of the tv shows u mentioned asshole

When I first watched this movie when it was released I had the exact same opinion that about an hour could be cut out of it. After 10 years it's great to have some validation. Just discovered your channel, congrats and thank you for the good work.

Hans Landa was better

The greatest character intro ever (imo) is Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds. He’s utterly charming, cunning, erudite and menacing throughout, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Hayao Miyazaki often draws himself as a pig so Marco might well be a bit of a self-insert. It was obvious to me watching this movie that this project was dear to his heart.

my phone is so creepy. i just switched apps from hulu watching this….

Beautifully done ❤

I dug up this movie once when I had covid, it was a scratched DVD and didn't play. Really cool to see that it has layers of nuance though. I like that the title easily wraps up not only the movie's themes, but the thesis of the video. June is a good movie not because it is linear but because it upholds inevitability and surprise. Cool.

Dexter pissed me off so much. He became so selfish that I just hated every time he was in the screen tbh

I fucking hate lyla's accent

😂 Why you pronouncing "episodic" like that? Good video but that stuck out like a sore thumb

you should watch barry

These are not moral dilemmas they are intellectual dilemmas.. Dexter was a psychopath. P is that ever changed.. to the best of our knowledge you cannot change. This is what made game of thrones rate until it ended at season 5. Characters faced consequences for their choices. Add a very bad things could happen to fan favorites. Once Dan and Dan took over Jamie became the misunderstood p Prince charming the female audience wanted. Every single character just became what the fans wanted or what the plot require

Epicsaaaaaawdic * is the word you are looking for my dude

The last 2 seasons were quite poor

I think there's definitely a bias that a lot of us have against small volume art. Feature length films are almost always considered superior to short films, in my experience. Novels are almost always considered to be more meritorious and prestigious than short stories. Even when it comes to books, big chonky ones like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones seem to be much more highly regarded than shorter ones in the public consciousness. Maybe it's just me, but does anyone else feel that? I've even had to teach a lot of my students that making an essay/story longer doesn't always make it better (and in fact often makes it weaker haha).

Now that you present it this way, he could have turned himself in and been a Rorschach in Prison type character. "I'm not locked up in here with you - you're locked up in here with me" They might have even gotten a season out of cat and mouse with the warden while plotting to take out the monster that runs cell block B, while using his talents to do something something drama, something something....

Agree with your breakdown of Villanelle's scene. But also, it shows that she actually doesn't know how to make a child smile. She's a psychopath, she's not capable of human connection, she needs to copy the vendor's actions but it's all a performance. Also the fact that the scene contains a little girl - rather than a tryst seeking couple - suggests to the audience that there was significant disfunction in Villanelle's childhood.

First three seasons were some of the most brilliant television I have ever seen. Last two are some of the most horrible.

With or without Lila, he would have killed Doakes. Dexter is so afraid of being caught. He would have also killed Laguerta.

You using the 2010 version of Murder on the Orient Express actually kinda hurts the video essay as Poirot's character is favorite logical and that version of the story was forced to make the dilemma seem difficult by making him religious.

Villanelle is also hedonistic. She loves the good things in life. We see her often eating delicious food, wearing designer clothes, her flat is beautiful and full on wonderful things. She stops in the middle of an assasination to ask about a quilt. I still remember her eating a cracker/tomato thing before she breaks into someone's house and murders them. We get a little bit of this in the intro, with her dressed in designer clothes and eating ice cream. Usually media shows women in coffee shops. But Villanelle is both childish and hedonistic, so she is eating ice cream.

Losing Doakes hurt the show a lot, other than Dexter he was probably the most compelling character, and a great rival. But to lump seasons 3/4 into 5, and ESPECIALLY 6 is wild to me. Season 4 had the high stakes, *costly* dilemmas that are not present in 2 and 7. To call out the show for not handling dilemmas well, but to ignore literally all of season 4 feels off the mark. To lump season 4 and 6 into the same category makes me feel like we were watching different shows - 5 was the beginning of the end, but season 6 was *embarrassingly* bad.

Tbf its not hard for the show to be better than the books, the first one was good and the second one was okay but after that? Pfft, i was doing audiobook and it because so damn bad i just dropped it in the middle of the fifth one.

I should have quit watching after the season with John Lithgow. He was impeccable. It had nowhere to go from there but down.

This was an incredible video essay.

To be fair, I don't think following a guy that knows he's twisted but doesn't care so hard he decided to keep it a secret means we should not consider morality as a topic being presented on the show. If anything it's a show that is not meant to go into trying to understand moral dilemas, the main chacater solved his biggest one from episode 1 so whether he was right or wrong with his answer doesn't matter, the topic was not there from the beginning of the show.

Given the ending we got, I enjoyed the sequel

I think there is a major point being dropped here. I do really like the point about Doaks, hated how he was killed off and frankly Lila was the worst character in the series in my opinion. The first thing I'd like to point out is that the code was never about keeping Dexter safe and or moral in any way. It was a way of controlling Dexter so that Harry could get to the criminals who got away. As for the moral dilemma where Deb shoots LaGuerta, this isn't a cop out because the question posed by the season was not what will Dexter do but what will Deb do? What is her moral dilemma? Her killing LaGuerta sets up a huge problem for the final season which is that Deb is no longer just aware, it isn't just bad guys Dexter is killing, it's that she is no longer simply enabling or complicit, she is guilty of killing, not just a criminal but an innocent. Where they really messed up is that Deb's death was relatively meaningless. It was simply a tool to justify Dexter breaking and showing his true self which wasn't really that impactful. I would almost put Deb in an identical situation after spending the season grappling with what she has done and it leading to her committing suicide in front of Dexter rather than repeat the choice which broke her in the first place. Dexter's reality needed to be broken in a way that more concretely highlights that his code was never sound or moral to begin with, that he was always the problem. Coping out of him dying in the storm undermined his decision to end the pattern and it made it about nothing more than self preservation implying that he never really learned. They kind of fixed it with the single season reboot but honestly it didn't really stick the landing either. It felt like nothing more than a half-assed redo to appease the mad audience. What made some of the other seasons good was that they were exploring other aspects of humanity and Dexter's ongoing need for acceptance, community, and to be able to show his true self which are very valid human narratives.

Survivor's guilt caused him to turn himself into a beast and "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." ― Samuel Johnson

I likes the season finale :(

I never expected a Dexter critique to go in depth on David Suchet's Poirot, but very well done. Excellent comparisons. Also, l am firmly in your camp concerning Poirot. I have at times enjoyed the others, but Suchet consistently delivered the iconic version of the character.

How does season two botch the dilemma when Dexter made his decision on the moral dilemma by setting up Doakes instead of killing him?

Dexter is a well written drama about a psychopath who prioritises self preservation. There's no deeper meaning/moral dilemma from the show that deserves a discussion.

You are putting too much emphasis on "Moral Dilemmas" as if that is the only thing that matters. Seriously calling Season 7 better than season 4 is some of the dumbest commentary i have ever seen regarding Dexter

My only big flaw with the original dexter series was that in one of the first episodes there is a line something like "there are only 50 serial killers alive today, we don't go to conventions or meet up for coffee." Point is, the show is centered around Dexter killing serial killers all within the city of Miami, Florida. Do all 50 live in Miami or something? And of course the last episode(s) were pretty terrible. . As far as your moral dilemma part, you couldn't be more wrong. Morality is subjective. Expecting Dexter to "grow" sounds like it's based on YOUR morality. You have to consider that Dexter is presented as a LITERAL PSYCHOPATH (and likely narcissistic at that, but I think that was secondary to intention). If you have any knowledge, or have done any research on psychopaths. It's unlikely they will be sitting there worrying about the morality of state and federal law. Dexter avoiding those cliche moral dilemmas you speak of was part of the character. It's part of what made him so appealing. "The code" was always just a bandaid for more deep seeded behavioral impulses. . And the worst part is that they had a GREAT opportunity to explore this dichotomy through his son in Dexter: New Blood. His son is clearly emotional and struggles with standard moral dilemmas. But they flopped so hard. The characters rarely ever actually communicated, and when they finally did, they just used it to kill Dexter as some symbolic effort to "punish him" for his "morally corrupt" behavior. And then cop lady immediately contradicts her entire character by letting the kid go. Dexter: New Blood was so much wasted potential. Sorry, semi-random rant here at the end.