More murders than the immediate vicinity of Jessica Fletcher.
I liked Dan Fienberg trying to work through the logic of the finale in his podcast. First, Dexter learns that when he doesn’t kill people bad things happen because he doesn’t kill Saxon and Saxon shoots Debra. However, since Dexter is a serial killer, he places his family in too much danger. Therefore, his only choice is fake his own death and leave his son with… another serial killer.
Why not leave the kid with Jamie? Why would Hanna be more likely to take care of the kid than Jamie would? And why would Harrison draw pictures of Hanna as his mother when Jamie spend much more time with him?
Why does Saxon go back to the hospital? He shot Debra because he want to escape from the police. What was his motivation for going back to the hospital to finish Debra off instead of running as far away from the police as possible?
I thought Dexter killed Debra a little too quickly. Wait a week at least?
Saxon was just so STUPID during the finale. He knows that Dexter released those videos in an attempt to rile him. So he sneaks into Dexter’s house without thinking that it might be a trap? He goes to try kill Debra without thinking that the police might be expecting him to come back for her? I thought he was supposed to be smart.
It used to be such a good show. Such a shame.
My “willing suspension of disbelief” was suspended so far it was like a bungee jump into the Grand Canyon.
It snapped when Dexter unplugged Deb and no alarms went off and he just moseyed on out of the hospital with her body. What the ever-loving fuck.
And as if Hanna (supposedly on high alert) wouldn’t notice when that private eye guy got on the bus and sat right next to her. She spotted him easily enough in a crowded departure lounge. She’s already an idiot for not at least dyeing her hair or somehow trying to disguise herself, but damn.
Is Dexter some kind of mutant who doesn’t feel physical pain or lose blood? Getting stabbed in the shoulder with a pen didn’t even faze him.
I could go on but you all get the idea.
…and finally, as the credits rolled after that craptacular ending I said to my husband: “Ahh, the TV way to deal with any problems that concern a child - feed them ice cream.”
I stuck with this show the whole way. By the end, I didn’t give a crap what happened to anyone. I’ll always love the show for the great seasons, but they really shit the bed the last few.
Bumping this thread because Dexter’s entire run became available on Netflix. I gave up cable and Showtime around a year and a half ago so I missed the entirety of seasons 7 and 8. With how season 6 went, I really wasn’t jonesing for a new Dexter fix so it’s probably good I had a break.
I thought season 7 was a vast improvement over season 6. Now I’m on episode 3 of 8 and can already see it going downhill. It’s hard to read the thread knowing you don’t want to be spoiled on anything further than you’ve already seen. It’s also hard reviving this thread knowing you probably can’t read any of the replies for fear of spoilage.
Anyway, the episode “What’s eating Dexter Morgan” was weird. So Dr. Vogel gets a his and her package which leads her and Dexter to believe the killer knows that Dexter’s helping Vogel…but Dexter also makes the unfounded leap to conclude the killer probably doesn’t know who Dexter is. That would seem unlikely. My conclusion would be that if the killer is willing to announce he knows of my existence, I have to assume he’s been watching me for a long time and has done his research.
So Dexter takes this faulty conclusion and throws it right out the window when he stalks the fitness guy. Remember, Dexter already knows that the Brain Surgeon has seen Dexter. So Dexter goes right up to the fitness guy “incognito” and decides he’s probably the killer? Smart.
Then Dexter breaks into the guy’s place and gets weirded out by a finger in a stew? Really, Dexter? You remember you chop people up and dump them in trash bags off your boat, right? By the way, Dexter never really proves these people were killed by the fitness guy. For all Dexter knows, the guy broke into a medical lab.
Anyway, I agree with many of you that they might be setting Vogel up as killer and that doesn’t make any sense.
What may be more likely is that Vogel is doing with the Brain Surgeon the exact same thing she’s doing with Dexter…playing him just to see them both chase each other.
Episode 4 tonight.
So I just saw This Little Piggy (episode 5). The editing, camerawork, and actor reaction were so different from any other Dexter I’d seen, I had to look up the director to see what was up. It was directed by Romeo Tirone and this episode is his single imdb credit.
I can’t tell if I didn’t like it because Romeo’s choices were bad or because it was a different style from all other episodes. I’m leaning towards the former.
Just watched the last episode and apparently I am the only one who liked the ending.
Dexter lead his life believing that he was incapable of caring for others. He had his code at the beginning of the series and people were things to manipulate. At the end he realized that the lie he based his life on, that he was incapable of caring for anyone, got his sister, whom he loved, killed. His rules were more than just rules, they were a code he believed in but that code got the people he loved killed.
So he had a choice. He could continue to let his urges keep leading to the death of those he loves, he could kill himself, or he could remove himself.
Killing himself is out of character. He would think about it but never follow through because he is the center of the world. So that left removing himself, which is also a punishment. He finally realizes that, even though he enjoys killing bad people, he does love Harrison and Hanna and the only way they can live and be happy is for him to disappear.
The end is total self sacrifice. He finally has the chance to live like a normal person in Argentina, to have a family and learn to be fully human. Dexter realized that the lie he told himself all his life that he is incapable of loving anyone is false. But that same lie lead to the death of those he loves. So the moment he realizes he is capable of love is the moment he knows he cannot be with those he loves because of the lie he has been telling himself all these years.
And dropping Deb into the sea makes perfect sense. Dexters lies lead to her death. She is one of his victims. So Dexter killed, inadvertently, his sister whom he loves. She is his victim in that he lead his life based on a lie which caused the whole situation. (Side note, he took her out during a hurricane evacuation. I caan believe that would be chaotic enough for him to get away with it. Think about what happenedd in N.O.)
Or I could be over thinking it.
Slee
It was…an ending.
He needed to cast Summon Bigger Fish.
Holy crap, you’re right. That was a subplot that I guess got resolved? I mean, it’s cool that Masuka now has a daughter and they’re supposedly happy. But, what was the significance to the overall storyline other than filler?
I thought the entire article was ridiculous. You find a wrecked boat a few miles off the coast after a hurricane and what’s a reasonable conclusion to reach? The boat was docked and flew apart there. The reason you can’t find a body is because no one was driving it at the time it was destroyed. This almost gets confirmed when you realize the owner of the boat had plans to move out of the country at the time of the wreck.
Turns out it’s wrong, but that’s a much more reasonable assumption to make than that Dexter died at sea.
Oh and here’s an option I didn’t see anyone else suggest with regards to Harrison: send him to live with his actual grandparents and his half brother and sister.
In any series, there will be characters who fans of the show like, but who don’t serve an overriding purpose other than to pad the world the show’s main characters live in. Masuka spent the entire series as a perverted but brilliant doofus, and they decided to introduce a plot development which would mature his character so that he was more than just a one dimensional punchline.
More poorly written shows would have tried to shoehorn a character like Masuka into the main plot somehow, or kill him off since it’s “shocking” to kill long-running characters(although it’s kinda expected in a final season). Instead, I think they probably got together and discussed the endgame for all the characters and decided that this was a solid way to close out his story. And I think it was, even if it wasn’t exciting or germane to Dexter’s story.
The character arcs that did bug me happened in the season before the last, when they started out with Masuka’s creepy assistant playing a dangerous game with Dexter reminiscent of the movie Changing Lanes, and the Russian mobster also playing er, cat and cat with Dexter. Then halfway through they get bored with that and instead decide that Dexter should just have a new girlfriend.
I think are far better ending would be the one planned by one of the writers of the early seasons.
I’ve not watched Season 8 after I found out what was going to happen, doubt I will at this point.
A massive disappointment after all that has gone before. Basically they want to keep milking the cash cow and keep the options open for a spin off.
Don’t much like the alternate idea either. To me, there were only two satisfying conclusions: Dexter gets away with it all and lives happily ever after, realizing that he is indeed human and doesn’t need to kill. They teased it up until the last couple of episodes. I really thought they were going to go that way.
The other satisfying conclusion is that he gets shot by Debra(instead of her killing La Guerta) at the end of Season 7 and that’s the end of the series.
Well, maybe a third option: Debra takes him alive and arrests his ass at the end of season 7 and season 8 is all about Dexter’s trial, imprisonment, and the reaction of the public to a serial killer who only takes out Miami’s trash.
I don’t think it should have ended with Dexter getting away with it, mainly because I don’t think it’s possible for him to live happily ever after without killing.
I agree that it would have been better if Deb had shot him at the end of season 7, that would have been a satisfactory ending. Sadly they didn’t do that. I think I read somewhere that the series was meant to end with Season 7 but the network dragged it on in a similar way to Lost.
Hmph…never realized that was the actual plan.
That’s the ending my wife had proposed early on – that the entire series was his allocution just before being put to death, which would have been miles better than the actual ending.
The only reason I thought maybe he’d get away with it is because it seems his dad and the doctor just assumed he was a monster and would never be anything more, but the series went to great lengths to develop Dexter so that he was human. So I always figured there was a chance at the happily ever after ending.
Of course, he is still alive, just obviously not happy, and I doubt he’s killing people out in the boonies. Not enough murderers up there to satisfy his kind of cravings.