Dexter - The Final Season - The Thread

As has been said by a few people in this thread, the showrunners seem to have fallen too far in love with Dexter and were, in turn, afraid of having him do anything meaningful that might have us see him in a negative light. Inversely, of course, that made him boring and now we all hate him. The Dexter who did despicable shit and justified it with the code was much more interesting. I'm reading the latest book right now, and the Dexter of seasons 1-2, even a little bit in 4, is much closer to the Dexter of the novels, though Dexter is really kind of a despicable, selfish, truly sociopath character still in the novels, which is exactly how it should be. That Dexter would smirk in a somewhat smug, superior fashion at the Dexter we've been subjected to since 2009.

Man I don't even know where to start.

Dexter -the man who will to any length to protect his family- takes his sister off life support because he feels like she 'deserves better'. Obviously the people she cares about don't deserve better though because Dexter's idea of 'better' consists of a cold, anonymous grave at the bottom of the ocean.

Super. Now in addition to losing Deb, all of her cop friends have to deal with the disappearance of her body and her highly suspicious brother.

Also I'm sure Elway won't notice that both Deb -Dexter's brother- and the US Marshall pursuing Hannah McKay -Dexter's lover- were killed in the same fucking room together. OR that Hannah was last seen with Dexter's kid. That doesn't look suspect at all and certainly doesn't raise every conceivable law enforcement flag. A 2 minute chat with Miami PD would basically fill in all the gaps in Elway's story and practically out Dexter as one of the most prolific serial killers in the US.

Uhm and Harrison grows up without a father in a foreign country because... Dexter wants to do his best Wolverine impression?

Fuck this show. Seriously.

Well, it wasn't boring. I expected it to be boring, but it wasn't boring. I will give them that.

You know, on paper, the idea of Dexter having to kill his sister sounds like it could have been a tragic and powerful ending. But it really just came out of nowhere. It felt cheap and unearned. And because I'd already checked out so many episodes ago, my reaction was less "oh no, Deb," and more "oh God, this show." It's like with 30 minutes to go, someone finally remembered this was the last season and tried to make it count. They certainly tried.

I don't think the only way it would have been satisfying was to have him get caught.

But, ultimately...if we're talking about the END of his story, there does have to be a finality to it. The ending they went with seems like there's going to be a movie or another season to it. I get they that they went for a "nothing is left anymore" concept, but considering he's still the same age and it's so soon after what's happened, who's to say his Dark Passenger won't awake again in a year? Maybe showing him thirty years later, having not killed anyone since Deb...living in complete isolation in all that time, cut off from the world, then maybe I'd accept that he's paying his penance. Him dying at the hands of another killer was always another option that could have worked for me, and leaning into one theme they seemed to flirt with, which was the idea of the cycle of violence being passed onto his son, who had already lost his mother in a similar manner to Dexter losing his.

My biggest problem is that it doesn't seem like the end. Just seems like another chapter.

The last episodes just hardly acknowledged that he's a fucking psychotic mass-murderer. An occasional line like "I thought I'd be running for my life instead of to it" isn't enough. The writers just threw away everything that came before this season to tell this one story, instead of using the past stories to build into something bigger. You had to fill in the blanks yourself, like when Dexter was in the interrogation room after he pen-stabbed the guy. I felt like Quinn and Batista were thinking, "that was a straight cold-blooded murder. Dexter's like a psycho for being capable of that," but nothing fucking came from it. Grrr, just a shitty way to end it.

Amazing set up, badly executed.

And that last ending...just...come on. What?

I read an interview with the original showrunner yesterday and he said his original ending was the camera would pull out and show dexter receiving a lethal injection at a florida penitentiary and the whole series would have been his life flashing before his eyes. Also, all of his victims would be in the observation room watching him die.

Aside from how shitty the ending was in terms of plot, man was it just me or was the CGI for that storm something outta 2003? I know Showtime doesn't have HBO money but I come on. The actual look of the storm wasn't that bad but look of the boat was so pasted on it looked terrible.

@genfuyung said:

I read that, too. Clyde Phillips got the character. While I wasn't terribly happy with the show's desire to deviate from the novels (they're more like black comedies than dramas/thrillers), the show did earn those deviations by taking the character to interesting places and exploring different themes than the books.

Out of all of this I think I just feel bad for the cast. They were on a great show that went to shit for no reason other than Showtime gave the show to someone who didn't understand the character or the ultimate point of the work.

Yep.

I'm glad its over now. I didn't feel like the Dexter character had many interesting ways left to develop; I guess he came full-circle.

I will say this for the show:

Despite an overall decline in quality over the years and a terrible ending, it absolutely shits all over the novel series in terms of overall plot. The novels started out great but went not so much downhill as off a cliff.

Yeah, it's a rare case where I was actively told by other to NOT read the books if I enjoyed the series.

If there was something I did miss, overall, from the previous years of Dexter...it does have to be the dark comedic aspect. The ending to the first season, for example, isn't about taking it all so serious. There was something fun about being able to see something like that, that would never ever be seen in any "real world" approach.

Sarcastic Dexter, this season, was kind of a callback to it for me. Dexter telling Deb, "I'm so fucking happy for you" in about the funniest way that character could say it had me wishing they had leaned more into that.

Doakes constantly calling him, "motherfucker" and the whole "I own you" headbutt are all comedic aspects that they seemed to completely forget about by the end.

This season felt as if the writers were told half-way into writing this season that this would be the last one and instead of rewriting the whole season just said F'it since it would be their last season anyway and just rewrote the ending.

To sum it up, series started to get a little shaky by the last two or so seasons(which ever one saw dexters wife killed off) and the ending of this one was just a broken down mess.