You know that TV's Dr. House was a cranky, sarcastic genius because every one of his actions and words proved it over and over. But there's a curious thing in TV where the "genius" character never actually does anything genius, and the "loser" actually has a pretty good life. The character's primary trait exists only in the form of people in the show telling us, despite all evidence to the contrary.

5 Dexter Morgan in Dexter Is No Criminal Mastermind

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When Dexter was just a boy, his foster father, Harry, realized that, unlike most kids, who pick up hobbies like model building or guitar, Dexter was into pulling the limbs off of people. Harry decides to embrace Dexter's passions by turning him into a weapon for good, instilling in him a set of rules to kill by. Dexter targets criminals who managed to slip through loopholes in the law, presumably because therapy doesn't exist in Miami.



Mass murder isn't a very effective treatment for psychopathy.

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Consequently, Dexter grows up to be a serial killer who, by the way, works with the Miami Police Department. He accrues dozens of kills over many years and gets away with every one. While he does make mistakes occasionally, this is a character who has absolutely perfected the art of getting away with murder.

Why This Is Bullshit:

The rules to which Dexter so strictly adheres aren't actually saving him; it's the complete and utter incompetence of the police that allows him the freedom to run around cutting up bad guys. If we look at even the easiest and cleanest of Dexter's kills, he still leaves himself exposed in a handful of ways. To begin, he relies on technology to track his targets; he downloads an absurd amount of protected information from police databases, and in the case of one of the show's most memorable bad guys (the "Trinity Killer," played by a sometimes-naked John Lithgow), Dexter talks to him several times on his cellphone before killing him. Apparently the Miami police don't bother checking up on the phone records when someone disappears.



We like to imagine that the priest from Footloose finally snapped.

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Even more troubling is Dexter's incredibly elaborate, time-consuming and evidence-generating method of killing. He doesn't walk up to his victims in an alley and stab them in a way that could be mistaken for a random mugging. He prepares a ritualistic "murder room" full of artifacts from the killer's victims, and covers the walls and surfaces with plastic to prevent any DNA evidence from getting anywhere. He injects his victims with some kind of sedative so he can strap them down.