 |
"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | It's already over. | „ |
| ~ Arthur Mitchell's words to a vast majority of his victims before he kills them. |
Arthur Mitchell, better known as the Trinity Killer, is the main antagonist of the Dexter franchise.
He was portrayed by John Lithgow.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- Has the highest body count in the series, with give or take three hundred victims, surpassing even Dexter himself.
- The ways in which he kills his victims are horrific.
- First, he kidnaps a young boy, keeps him for several days, and then buries them alive in cement.
- Afterwards, he kills a young women by slicing her femoral artery in a bathtub, causing her to bleed to death.
- Next, he proceeds to make a middle-aged women fall to her death.
- Finally, to complete the cycle, he bludgeons a middle-aged man to death with a hammer.
- He is extremely abusive towards his family. He controls his wife, beats his son, and keeps his daughter captive in her room.
- He has an estranged daughter who he for the most part avoids and keeps out of his life, only occasionally visiting her, eventually disowning her after finding out that she shot Debra and killed Lundy.
- He uses a dog he bought to catch the attention of a woman so he can later make her his next victim. At first, he seems to care for the dog, but after it serves its purpose, he callously abandons it on the streets.
- He murdered Dexter's wife, Rita, after finding out where he lived.
- His influence would continue even after death, as his other daughter would also commit suicide, and his son turned into a killer.
- He doesn’t seem to love his daughter and his family, as he called her weak after she committed suicide, even though he was shocked at first. He constantly seems to be annoyed by her, and he didn't even care about her most of her life, which is one of the reasons she killed herself. The same goes with his family, as he abandoned them in the end and overall abused them way too much, as he even attempted to kill his own son and would have done it if Dexter hadn’t stopped it.
- Even though the heinous standards for the TV series are extremely high as there are a lot of killers and rapists, he is easily the most heinous, as his kill count is the largest in the series, and he is one of the most personal villains to Dexter as he killed his wife and even traumatized his son, as shown in the events of New Blood.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- He is somewhat tragic, as whilst he has committed truly heinous atrocities, his childhood traumas of his sister and mother dying while he was young in circumstances that, whilst weren't his fault, were unintentionally caused by him and with father constantly beating and blaming him has had far too strong of an impact on his actions to be considered subverted or irrelevant.
- He feels intense remorse for his actions which is clearly evident in punishing himself for each murder. He claimed to dislike what he did and said that he didn't enjoy killing. At one point, he even attempted to commit suicide, but Dexter saved him, showing that his remorse for his actions is sincere.
- He does have standards against two things:
- Firstly, despite abandoning his dog, he does show restraint against directly harming animals, as he was unable to kill an injured deer he accidentally hit with his car and was horrified when Dexter to kill it himself.
- Secondly, while he has no problem with murdering children, he does appear to have standards against pedophilia, as he shows a hatred of pedophiles and becomes enraged when accused of being one.
- Whilst his care for his late and present family, or his daughter(s), is too debased and twisted to count, he does seem to genuinely care about his sister, as he got very upset when Dexter held his sister's urn, and he almost killed his son when he broke it and even cried about her in front of a child he kidnapped.
Trivia[]
- He is one of three Dexter villains (alongside Brian Moser and Kurt Caldwell) to be Near Pure Evil.
External Links[]
- Arthur Mitchell on the Dexter Wiki.
- Arthur Mitchell on the Villains Wiki.