Tell your dark passengers to look away if you don’t want SPOILERS, 3.5 readers.
I REPEAT: SPOILERS! BIG ONES!
OK, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Is everyone here who wants to be here? Is everyone here OK with SPOILERS?
Alright. Here goes.
Dexter is dead. No, seriously. The Dex man is no more. Shot by son Harrison who realized his old man, much like a rabid dog, had to be put down before he bites another innocent person.
I didn’t see it coming. It felt like Showtime had put too much effort and money into this project to not get a few more seasons out of it. There were some brief, fleeting hints that Dexter and Harrison might lam it to LA, perhaps they’d become a dynamic duo of father and son vigilante killers, dismembering the trash in a new city each season.
But alas, the D-Man is dead. We see he has a red wound in his chest, dead center where his heart is. I mean, the dude drove his boat into an oncoming hurricane in the finale of the original series and still somehow made it out alive so anything is possible and perhaps given enough money and the right script, Dexter could be magically resurrected but even the showrunners are saying in interviews that nope, Dexter is officially dead. He will not be brought back to life and they realize their sin in the original finality was leaving things too open so they made sure to close those doors with great certainty this go around.
If this limited series does indeed mark the official end of Dexter Morgan, then I’d say it certainly brings more closure than the original. Dex aka Jim Linday’s girlfriend Chief Bishop (Julia Jones) collaborates with Angel Batista (David Zayas) the one cop on the original show with a heart of gold. Batista loved ex wife Laguerta but assumed she was loco when she arrested Dexter on Bay Harbor Butcher charges. He finally gets clued into the fact that Maria was right all along, though we’ll never see the devastation he’ll go through when he realizes his old good friends Dex and Deb Morgan had done despicable things behind his back and even killed his ex only to keep lying to him and pretending to be his friend. Perhaps it would be too much to see him go through that pain. In any event, the look on Zayas’ face when Angel sees a recent photo of an alive Dexter reveals all the pain we need to know about.
In Dexter’s final moments, all the innocents who got caught up in his carnage pass through his mind and this was always the hard part of the show. What made us initially root for Dexter was that he had a code – he only killed bad people. However, it was inevitable that good would be caught in the crossfire, be they framed and conveniently murdered by D’s crazy gf (Sgt Doakes) or killed by his sister as part of a cover up (Laguerta) or killed by the serial killer he took to long to kill (Rita) or driven mad (Deb) or again killed by the serial killer he took too long to kill (Lundy.)
I’ll admit, when Dexter started to push Harrison toward a life of serial killing (only bad guys) it made me think the character never learned anything. Hasn’t he learned Harry was wrong to turn him into a murderous vigilante? Wouldn’t psychiatric treatment, even institutionalization, though a bad life, be better than killing? Doesn’t he realize its impossible to do all that killing without killing or otherwise destroying innocents? Why would he put Harrison through that?
In the end, Dexter has learned. He can’t go on like this, but he can’t stop, and if he lives, he’ll bring his son down so he urges the lad to help him end it.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Disappointed there won’t be new seasons, unless Harrison takes his show on the road, perhaps with Dexter filling in the Harry imaginary advisor role but I’m not sure a Harrison the serial killer show would be as interesting as Dexter. If they wanted to drag it on a few seasons it would have been interesting to see his old Miami colleagues go after him but otherwise, this was a good end.
Bookshelf Battle 