15 Most Monstrous Villains In Television
5. The Trinity Killer (Dexter)
The bad guys in Dexter are all kinds of people, in the end - monsters, b*stards, sick freaks and delusional fools, predators and prey, sad cases and bad people - but they’re almost all hiding their true faces under a veneer of respectability, just as Dexter himself is.
Arthur Mitchell, the Trinity Killer, may be the antagonist that best exemplifies this, as he’s a mixture of all of the above. A loving middle-aged school teacher, deacon and family man on the face of it, he’s also a serial killer with a unique and elaborate MO, one he’s compelled to follow through, almost against his will. He’s also a violent psychopath, however, and his family know the real him a little better than they’d like.
Mitchell (played with whacked out, delicious menace by the amazing John Lithgow) is tortured as much as torturer, victim as much as perpetrator, but it’s decades too late to get to the damaged little boy inside of him. At first Dexter believes that Mitchell could be a role model for him: he’s astonished at the level of cover that Trinity has managed to develop for himself, and the older man’s skill and efficiency with his victims is breathtaking to him.
It’s when he gets to know Mitchell that he realises that his cover isn’t as airtight as all that. He abuses his kids, cruelly dominates his wife and is completely, almost rabidly delusional, almost to the point of giving himself away. Dexter never fully understands how Mitchell actually does manage to hide in plain sight for so long with so little self-control, but it’s enough to make the more reserved, economical killer despise him.
Of course, Trinity has lasted this long by being several steps ahead of the game, something that Dexter only discovers after ending his reign of terror with a hammer in a plastic-wrapped kill room. Arriving home, Dexter discovers his wife Rita bled out in the bath and his infant son Harrison sitting in a puddle of her blood watching his mother’s corpse; the Trinity Killer’s final three victims in tableau to finish off season four.