Four years late to the party, but I’ve finally finished watching all of the Dexter television series. Back around the start of season 7, I made an off-hand remark to a friend that I hadn’t even seen season 6 at all, and was promptly recommended to skip it. Before I could get the statement “still, I should watch it” out of my mouth, this friend blurted out the big reveal of the season, and said that he was saving me trouble and doing me a favor, allowing me to skip ahead to 7.
Naturally, my reaction was to just stop watching it outright, and a year later, the final season came and went, and I’d been none the wiser to the television happenings of everyone’s favorite forensic expert/serial killer.
With a lot of house shit done, and life somewhat kind of settling back down, I’ve had lot of time on my hands to watch television, and I’d been doing just that. And in the span of the last two weeks, I’ve basically gone through all three of the last seasons of Dexter that I had never watched before, and one good thing about having such a gap, was that I even forgot about the big reveal that my friend had spoiled for me years prior.
And it’s good thing too, because it’s pretty much the reason why I don’t really trust anyone’s opinions about any show or movie except my own. When the day is over, I’ll come to my own judgments, and there are plenty of times in which I feel completely different than what the hive mind of the internet tends to think.
That said, I thought season 6 of Dexter wasn’t at all bad. The religious undertones of the season were definitely prevalent, but not at all offensive or overbearing in my opinion, and one of the subplots that arose throughout the season was understandably weird for some, but I felt it was executed pretty sensibly to where there’s logic and a degree of believability behind it regardless. And despite being a smarmy know-it-all when it comes to television, I’ll be the first to admit that the season does manage to pull a really good swerve that completely got me.
Season 7, I would have to say was a good rebound for the series as a whole, considering the popular notion that the series tanked pretty hard in season 5, following the pinnacle of the series in season 4. If I had to rank the seasons, I’d still put 4 at the very top of the list, followed by like the first season, and then like 2. I’m adamant that 3 and 5 were definitely amongst their weaker seasons, but I think 6 and 7 were a good gradual rise up to decent again, following the stinker that was 5.
Make no mistake, I had this thought and contemplation on what was a worse fate for a television show, for it to get shitcanned and be left unresolved, which was almost kind of what happened to Dexter, because of supposedly the writers’ strike, or to have the series solder on with a revolving door of writers writing loose plots just to reach a conclusion for the sake of having one.
But for what it’s worth, I thought season 7 was a good season that really was plot-driven and succeeded mostly on the performances of the actors themselves who I thought acted their asses off in portrayal of mostly Deb, whom I would say carried the season. I think the plot reset itself once too many, and I was beginning to grow concerned over the gradual deconstruction of characters that inevitably were beginning a slow winding down to the series as a whole.
Which brings us to the final season, which there’s something about watching a show when you know it’s the final season. In the back of every viewer’s head, there’s an acknowledgment in knowing that shit is most certainly going to occur, and in big and dramatic ways, because well you know the series is coming to a close. Season 8 of Dexter was no exception to the rule, and I remember being at Comic Con that particular summer with all the shit out there to market and spread awareness that season 8 was coming, and it was the final season.
I often say that the biggest fallacy of storytelling is the sheer lack of ability to write endings in the world, and I would wager that a good 85% of stories that exist in the world have endings that are definitely on the end of the spectrum that is negative. Whether they’re convoluted, vague, full of holes, or just plain bad, ending a story is clearly the hardest part of the entire journey, and I almost never have any expectations that the conclusion of any story has any chance of being good.
That, and I’d kind of heard and remembered people bitching about the way Dexter the show ended, and braced myself for something that wasn’t good.
Regardless, I went through with it and made my way through the final season of the show, and probably like most everyone else back in 2013, was left with this dissatisfaction and scrunched eyebrow at the way the show ended. I will say that Showtime was pretty good about deliberately misleading people in their marketing with how the show might end, but instead throwing a screwball to the viewers to lead them in a different direction.
The bottom line is that I wasn’t thrilled with the way the show ended, and was left with this emotionally drained state, having watched 36 episodes of Dexter in the span of two weeks. The show was always very well acted, and they touch on enough topics and storylines to really keep a viewer like me fairly engaged, but to those of us who have ridden the entire ride, it’s a little sad to see how certain characters develop, and the directions that some of them go throughout the journey.
Whatever though, it might be way late to the party, but I’ve now seen all of Dexter, like many others. As a whole, it started off as very good show, but it became very apparent that there was too much of a revolving door of show runners, because things began to get wonky as the series progressed.
In addition to having watched the rest of the show, now would be as appropriate time as any to talk about the Dexter book series, since it technically kept going on past the television series’ finale.
It’s no secret that tv season 1 was closely based on the very first Dexter novel, but I would say after about 75%, the show and the books decidedly went in two different directions. Key characters that were in the show die in the book and vice versa, and there’s a notably different cast at the end of the books than there are in the show.
But much like my concern for Game of Thrones, I felt that the author of the books, Jeff Lindsay got to a point where he kind of became a television writer instead of the traditional author that put him on the map in the first place. I want to say Lindsay wrote three books before the show took off, and every book afterwards had the alternate universe of the television show in existence amidst it.
And it felt like it showed as the books progressed in their own unique direction. Character portrayal grew inconsistent from one book to the next, and by the time the final book came around, I don’t think it could have been any more apparent that Lindsay had already checked out of the series, and this book was kind of an intended mercy kill that ended up being an agonizing death sentence of a novel.
Needless to say, seeing as how I feel like one of the few people who have actually watched all of the show and read all of the books, I’d like to say that I feel that the Dexter idea was definitely one that started great with a compelling and intriguing premise, but both the show and the books suffered the indignity of having been dragged out way too far and more than any creators really intended, probably in the pursuit of money. And as good as both of them started, they both ended up ending in pitiful and undignified ways.
It’s like the master becomes an ironic unfortunate victim to his own table, metaphorically.
Bon voyage, Dex.
