The episode
begins with Dexter driving fast and weaving (somewhat erratically)
through Miami traffic, heading towards Miami International Airport.
At first,
it appears that he might be making a run for it, trying to flee the
country, after his sister, Debra, has found out his secret.
Later,
though, it is revealed that he's actually stalking a new victim, Viktor Baskov, a
Ukrainian who is about to get on a plane bound for Kiev, and who killed detective Mike Anderson.
Along the way, Dexter runs low on gas, and stops at a gas station to fill up.
But the same scenes are replayed later, as he arrives at the airport.
Q.
What is it actually in real life?
A. Several public streets and bridges.
Q.
Where can I find it in real life?
A. For once, a Dexter location is actually what it appears to be. Almost.
Most of those shots of weaving through traffic actually were filmed in Miami, Florida.
The top screenshot on this page, for instance, was filmed on the Julia Tuttle Causeway (AKA Florida 112) - while heading east across Biscayne Bay, from downtown Miami towards Miami Beach.
But the catch
is that Dexter (Michael C. Hall) isn't really in that car, in those Miami shots.
They just
sent a film crew to Miami early on this year, and grabbed a number of
useful shots like this, which they then mix in with local Southern
California footage.
In the few
shots where we can see actually Michael's face (such as the second screencap from the top), he is actually in Long Beach,
California, driving over the Queensway Bridge and along the Long Beach
coast. They simply intercut those Long Beach scenes with the authentic Miami footage, and voilà!: "Dexter driving in Miami".
At 36:16,
there is a particularly interesting shot, in which we see a cruise ship
docked off Dodge Island, with the downtown Miami skyline in the
background. That was shot heading west/NW on the MacArthur Causeway. (Here is a Bing StreetSide view.)
What
makes it interesting is that, for some reason, they flipped the image
horizontally!
Look closely at the screencap below, and you notice people driving on the wrong
side of the road.
Here is that flipped photo of MacArthur Causeway, as seen in the first episode.
And just for the fun of it, here's the show's screencap un-flipped (by me):
Q.
How the heck did you figure out where it was?
A. In the early seasons, I usually had to hunt down the locations after viewing the episodes,
using clues from the various scenes. By the now, though,
I've developed a small group of fans, spies & tipsters who kept an
eye out for Dexter filming in their neighborhoods, and would let me know
in advance when something was about to film there.
Between those reports, my own personal reconnaissance around town, and a
few new resources I discovered, by the time the first episode airs, I
already know most (but not all) of the filming locations, and only
need to watch the episodes and match up the scenes with the correct
locations.
This group of helpful fans includes Rick, Ellen, Elaine, Mia, Joel, Susan, Eric, Jeff, Kerry & others. My thanks to all of
them.
In this one case, though, I can claim lone credit. And it took a little hunting.
I've never been to Miami, but I've
spent enough time looking at aerial photos and Google StreetViews of
the city (while researching locations for these pages), that I'm now
fairly familiar with the layout of the city. Given the views of
downtown, the cruise ship terminal on Dodge Island, and those palm trees
on the MacArthur Causeway, it wasn't terribly hard for me to track down
the exact locations using StreetView. The only thing that threw
me, for a while, was that flipped photo of the cruise ship. It made no
sense, at first, until I realized it had been inverted...
