Transcription
From the beginning of the show, we knew that Doakes didn't like Dexter Morgan. He could almost sense the creepy vibes coming off of Dexter, but it took him a long time to figure out his secret. So, how did he go from simply calling Dexter a creep to actively stalking him to prove he was a killer? Today, we'll be looking at how Doakes knew Dexter was a killer.
The first thing we need to consider is just how hard it is to manage a full-time job with the Miami Metro Police Department along with a side job as a serial killer. Dexter Morgan could barely handle it, especially since both jobs intertwined on many occasions. So, of course, he was bound to go missing sometimes in the office, and this didn't go unnoticed by Sergeant Doakes. "I'm watching you, motherfucker."
Dexter was usually careful to do most of his killing at night after work hours to avoid suspicion. His daytime absences were mostly used for surveillance and preparation rather than the actual kills. He would typically use lunch breaks or claim to be running tests or collecting evidence as an excuse to cover these activities. For example, in season 1, episode 5, "Love American Style," Dexter fixates on a human trafficker named George Castillo. George's MO was to illegally immigrate people from South America, and when their relatives in the US couldn't pay off the fees, he would throw them overboard. He was the worst kind of human being, so thankfully, he didn't escape Dexter's notice. On his way to end George's life, Dexter tries to sneak out of the office, but Deb notices and asks him where he's going. He simply replies, "Crime scene." Unfortunately, Doakes wasn't paying attention during the scene, and Dexter had had his fun dishing out justice that night.
But as the Ice Truck Killer's case progressed, Doakes' suspicion of Dexter increased. In season 1, episode 12, "Born Free," when the Ice Truck Killer kidnaps Deb, Dexter is unreachable, making Doakes and LaGuerta come to his house to tell him about the situation. Doakes eventually follows him to the shipping yard, where we get the iconic "Surprise, surprise, motherfucker!" When Doakes asks him what he's doing there, Dexter gives the lamest excuse ever: "I ordered some furniture from Thailand. I was waiting for it to be delivered." Of course, Doakes doesn't buy his excuse, especially since he found out earlier that Dexter already knew that Deb was in danger beforehand.
But absences can be explained. So, Dexter might have kept his secret intact if things ended here. However, Doakes found more reasons to suspect Dexter aside from his constant disappearances and lame excuses. When Dexter was actually around, he did act strange when handling cases given to him. Here in season 1, episode 1, "Dexter," we see Doakes approach Dexter as he's spinning playfully in his chair, surrounded by several pictures of blood splatter. That in itself is weird, but what he says a few moments later is even worse: "Child's play. Messy work. All that blood on the wall looks like a finger painting. You give me the creeps, you know that?" Dexter: "Yeah, I know." It was a strange comparison, and Doakes seems to think so too, as he stares at Dexter with furrowed brows and calls him a creep.
That was not the only time Doakes caught Dexter behaving strangely at a crime scene. In "Circle of Friends," season 1, episode 7, the cops encounter a new case involving a student named Jason R., who is found dead with his major artery sliced open. The episode starts with Dexter imagining what the lives of other serial killers were like. While he was retracing castoff patterns near the body, he has this intense look on his face while he is thinking. Immediately, Doakes enters the scene and says that after the case, he will submit Dexter for psychiatric evaluation. Dexter proceeds to talk about what he thinks happened at the scene, when all of a sudden, he gets lost in his appreciation for the killer's work, making Doakes ask him if he was getting excited. "You getting a goddamn hard-on there, Morgan?" "No, it's truly horrific. He was your book committee. You said, 'I want to report on this tomorrow.'" Of course, his intense stare had nothing to do with arousal and more with recognition. Dexter found the wounds familiar, and later on in the episode, we discover that Jason's killer was Jeremy, a young boy who killed his roommate in an earlier episode but didn't stop there. After Jeremy is released from juvie, Dexter begins to follow him and finds him trying to kill other boys. After they find Jeremy's prints on the crime scene, Doakes approaches Dexter to tell him his instincts were right about the case. "I'm on to you." Dexter: "Excuse me?" Doakes: "You crazy ass knife-slashing twerp in the alley. You were right. Great work, Sergeant." Dexter: "Yeah, your instincts were dead on. They're always dead on when it comes to killers. Why is that?" I think Doakes noticed how much Dexter's mind was similar to that of an average killer, and this deepened his suspicion about Dexter.
Unfortunately, Dexter doesn't try to beat the allegations and does more creepy things that make Doakes suspect him more. In season 7, episode 12, "Surprise, Motherfucker," we get flashbacks of Dexter's interactions with Doakes. In one scene, Dexter dramatizes what possibly happened to a victim with a little too much excitement. "The killer grabs her and flips her over. He's on top of her now. Slices her carotid artery. She's terrified. Heart's racing." "I've never seen someone so excited about a crime scene before. You like this blood a little too much?" "I'm just doing my job." While reminiscing on that moment, Dexter says that he let his guard down by showing his excitement, and that was the first time Doakes got a glimpse of the real him, and it definitely wasn't the last time.
Now, one might argue that this is not enough for Doakes to suspect Dexter. After all, Vince Masuka, another forensic analyst at the Miami Metro Police Department, also says crazy things at crime scenes. For instance, that time he was trying to recreate a possible suicide case and decided to throw a dummy off the roof to experiment. That seems normal enough until he says that he put the dummy in a short skirt so he could see her panties as she fell. That statement alone was creepier than half the things Dexter did or said. I think Dexter's creepiness went unnoticed for so long because Masuka's outshined his. But still, there was a clear difference between Masuka's and Dexter's behavior. Masuka's statements were of inside jokes that made people either laugh or roll their eyes. There was nothing funny about the things Dexter said, mostly because he always either had an intense look on his face or a look of excitement.
But there's an even crazier reason for why Doakes suspected Dexter. The only real question I have is, why in a building full of cops, all supposedly with a keen insight into the human soul, is Doakes the only one who gets the creeps from me?" Since the very first episode of the show, Doakes showed a mistrust for Dexter, calling him things like "creep" and "psycho." At first, we saw it as just Doakes being the only one perceptive enough to pick up the strange vibes from Dexter, but as the show progressed, we saw that it went beyond that, and I'll explain in a second.
As a former Special Forces operative, Doakes had a highly developed sense for dangerous people. He saw through Dexter's friendly act and knew that there was something not quite right with him. "Something about you, Morgan. I should have seen it before. The fake smile, the donuts. It's all an act, and I ain't buying it." To every other character, Dexter's smile passes off as genuine, but it's clear to Doakes that it's very fake.
But aside from noticing the creepy vibes and fake smiles, there is another aspect of Doakes that not many people talk about, and that is the fact that he too was a killer. Let me break that down. Since Doakes was originally a Special Forces operative before he joined the Miami Metro Police Department, it's safe to say that he might have encountered some messed up, life-changing things. But that's still too far into the future. Let's look at his background. Not much is said in the show about his upbringing, but we do know that James Doakes' father was a butcher who is known to be abusive. His childhood might have been rough, much like Dexter's, and this could have contributed to the rough and violent nature he develops as he grows up.
In season 2, episode 10, "There's Something About Harry," Doakes catches Dexter red-handed while he's loading a boat with parts. They get into a fight where Doakes shoots Dexter in the leg, but Dexter ultimately wins the fight. He locks Doakes up in a cage and tells him while he dresses his wounds, "Why did you have to go and ruin everything? You're a killer." Doakes: "I catch killers, so do I. I caught you." Dexter: "I'm not a killer." Dexter accuses Doakes of being a killer, and when Doakes denies it, Dexter brings up his history of violence during his career. "You've always known what I am. That's why you have more officer-related shootings than anybody else." After Dexter points out his history of officer-related shootings, Doakes defends himself by saying that he only kills on the job when he has to. He effectively hides behind the law, the same way Dexter uses the code of Harry as a defense for his own killings. This shows that they are more alike than they would care to admit.
So, Doakes' ability to sense Dexter's darkness went beyond instinct and had more to do with darkness recognizing itself. This is unrelated to the show, but in the books, it is stated clearly that why Doakes disliked Dexter so much was because he had his own Dark Passenger that recognized Dexter, causing them to clash terribly. For those who don't know, a Dark Passenger in Dexter's universe is essentially the driving force behind a person's need to kill, and that is something Dexter and Doakes seem to share, even though it's channeled through different sides of the law.
If the fake smiles, absence from work, and weird fascination with crime scenes weren't enough to convince Doakes that Dexter could be a killer, then these things he did definitely increased Doakes' suspicion of him. Like when he lied about being an addict. Dexter initially lied about using drugs because Rita, his wife, confronted him about him framing her ex-husband Paul and about his absence from home. When she brought up drugs as a possible vice, Dexter immediately latched onto it as an excuse and even joined a Narcotics Anonymous program to support his lies. Doakes had started tailing Dexter at this point and confronted him after work. In season 2, episode 3, "An Inconvenient Lie," Dexter asks Doakes, "What exactly do you think I've done?" Doakes: "I know you're connected to the Ice Truck Killer." He goes on to list a bunch of reasons why he found Dexter suspicious: how Dexter kept all his assets in cash and didn't belong to any organization. "You were top of your class in med school, but you traded it for... blood spatter?" But I think this was the thing that baffled Doakes the most: "I know you studied martial arts in college, but I don't know what a lab geek needs with advanced Jiu-Jitsu." Someone whose job was to analyze blood spatter certainly had no reasonable use for advanced Jiu-Jitsu, and Doakes didn't buy the excuse of extra credit Dexter made.
Later on in the episode, Doakes walks into Dexter's Narcotics Anonymous meeting, saying he knew something was wrong with him. "And seeing you in a meeting full of drug addicts makes sense now. It all makes sense. A lot of cops have been where you are. The booze makes the job go down easier." He tells Dexter to stay out of his way, and after that interaction, he stops following Dexter. His newly found sympathy for Dexter evaporates when he talks with Deb, Dexter's foster sister, about her brother being a junkie. "Had a little talk with your sister. Turns out she didn't know you were in a program." "Anonymous?" Sergeant Doakes' suspicion is revived and deepened. He gets curious about what Dexter is hiding, knowing it must be bigger than his lie about using drugs.
Dexter decides that Doakes has to be removed from the situation and makes a report to Maria LaGuerta, Doakes' supervisor. She warns Doakes, but that is not enough for Dexter. In season 2, episode 7, "That Night, Another Day," Dexter gives Doakes a wrong analysis of a crime scene but submits the correct one to LaGuerta. Doakes goes ahead to wrongfully question a suspect, and this gets him into more trouble. He realizes that Dexter set him up and gets even more angry at him. But for Dexter's final trick, he gets into an argument with Doakes, tells him he owns him, and headbutts him. He casually strolls to an area where other officers are and lets Doakes hit him for seemingly no apparent reason. This makes LaGuerta suspend Doakes, effectively removing him from the office like Dexter wanted.
But Doakes didn't go down without a fight. In season 2, episode 8, "Morning Comes," Doakes breaks into Dexter's apartment and finds his box of blood slides he got from his victims. He didn't understand what they were but took them with him anyway to get them analyzed. If by some miracle Doakes had found out the origin of those slides on time, Dexter would have been done for. But at the end of the day, the slides would lead to his own downfall.