Maybe I’m not the old Dexter anymore.
WORDS: Hattie O’Connell
The series finale of Showtime’s Dexter has been much anticipated, if only to finally put an end to the slow and repetitive storylines of the last few seasons. Fans are all saying the same thing: Dexter should have ended years ago, when it was still a gripping and innovative psychological thriller, before it became a bad soap opera. Perhaps that’s why this finale was so unsatisfying: Dexter hasn’t been himself for a very long time anyway. Even when the Dark Passenger was given a shoutout in the second-last episode, the writers only mentioned it in case anyone was getting annoyed that they’d forgotten about the entire point of the show. ‘Remember the Monsters?’ was a bad finale to a bad season of what was once a really good series.
The series finale of Showtime’s Dexter has been much anticipated, if only to finally put an end to the slow and repetitive storylines of the last few seasons.
The problem with having a homicidal sociopath as your main character is that a character with no feelings is not easy to develop and the audience can’t sympathise with him. In recent years, the writers have made clumsy attempts to make Dexter grow as a person, which have only half worked. The pilot episode opened with Dexter looking into a cardboard box and thinking “Just like me: empty inside.” That quip set him up as a character who knows he’s a sociopath, but damned if he isn’t going to be a charming, witty, vigilante justice kind of sociopath. It was a masterful hook for the series. But if you look back on it now, after all the writers have done to Dexter’s character lately, it just sounds like something a moody teenager would say.
Series finales should evoke a sense of loss, and it must have been a daunting task for the writers to try to make the audience feel anything for Dexter. They used Deb as a human sacrifice to make the audience grieve, and that could have worked if it had been sudden and brutal, but they drew it out in an attempt to use it as an emotional rollercoaster and provide dramatic tension for the whole hour, thus it lost all its shock value. In fact, that seems to be what happened with the entire episode. They tried to use some foreshadowing, with Deb confessing her love for Quinn and with Harrison telling Dexter he loves Hannah, but those little hints weren’t at all subtle enough. The events of this episode are so predictable that it pretty much spoils itself. Perhaps that’s why it fails to evoke any real emotions in the viewers.
Series finales should evoke a sense of loss, and it must have been a daunting task for the writers to try to make the audience feel anything for Dexter.
Nothing in the finale that was meant to be shocking was shocking, not even what Saxon did to the veterinarian (Ilyn Payne had his tongue cut out before it was cool). It seems like turning off Deb’s life support was meant to be a tragic turning point in Dexter’s life, but there was nothing moving about that scene. All of Dexter’s kills up to this point had been sentient people, but Deb was already braindead with no chance of recovery. Letting her die was the logical thing to do, it’s what Deb would have wanted, and Dexter has already killed people who didn’t fit Harry’s code. So while it’s poignant that his last kill was his sister, the moment itself wasn’t shocking at all. It wasn’t even that sad because by then the damage had already been done by the stroke.
Dexter sailing Slice of Life into the heart of the (badly animated) storm was melodramatic, and it would have been a lazy ending, but at least that scene left us wondering if he survived. Finding the wreckage of the boat and announcing that he was missing, presumed dead, was cliché, but still forgivable. Hannah leading Harrison away into a new life in Argentina might have been a decent ending, it would have left us speculating about their future together. Words can’t express how awful that lumberjack scene was. It was probably meant to reassure us that Dexter has to live with the horror of what he has done, but it was just ridiculous.
It’s a shame, because a finale where Dexter got caught for even one cold-blooded murder could have been satisfying. It would be interesting to see how his friends in Miami Metro might react to that. Quinn and Batista even saw a video of Dexter killing Saxon in a calm and calculated way. They’re detectives, they should have realised that that wasn’t his first kill. Instead, they remained blissfully ignorant and viewers were given this anticlimactic waste of an hour, whose primary concern seems to be leaving the door open for a future spin-off show.
Viewers were given this anticlimactic waste of an hour, whose primary concern seems to be leaving the door open for a future spin-off show.
Dexter started out as a sociopath who made the best of his situation and became a witty vigilante serial killer. The last season or two undid all that interesting stuff and left Dexter as an emotionally challenged man-child who apparently just needed to find a nice girl and settle down. The finale took away his normal future with a happy family and turned him into a lumberjack. Tragically for a show that was once so gripping, the most shocking and emotionally harrowing thing that happens in ‘Remember the Monsters?’ is that beard and the way it obscures Michael C. Hall’s rugged jawline.
