Spoiler Alert!
It wasn’t the quite ending that long-time fans of Dexter had been waiting two years
for.
The final images we have of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) –
blood spatter analyst by day/serial killer by night – are of a pathetic,
grizzled, bearded man, sitting alone in a semi-lit room in his rundown home in
the woods, looking weakly into the camera. Fade slowly to black.
Alone and a former shell of himself. Self-inflicted
punishment. Atonement maybe.
Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) is dead. So is Daniel
Vogel/Saxon/The Brain Surgeon/the season’s main antagonist. Dexter is “dead.”
And Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski), Dexter’s serial poisoner girlfriend, is
now raising Dexter’s son, Harrison, in Argentina. The end.
A dark, unhappy ending is fitting. For all of the show’s
black comedy, it always mirrored Frankenstein. Bear with me.
Think of Dexter as Frankenstein’s monster and Harry (Dexter’s
late adoptive father) as Dr. Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein gave his monster
life. Harry gave Dex the code. But more importantly, both Frankenstein’s monster
and Dexter spend the entire novel/series trying not to be a monster. Both end up
realizing that they are what they are, and cannot fit into the world that they
so badly want to be a part of, and living in exile.
The tone of the ending isn’t the problem. In fact, the tone
of the ending is one of the three best things about the ending.
Deb and Saxon’s deaths were the other. I’ll circle back to
that later.
The show ends with Dexter becoming a lumberjack and living in
the woods. No, really. That’s what happens. He makes a snap decision during a
hurricane named Laura (the name of Dexter’s mother… yup, we noticed) after Deb
dies, drives his boat, the Slice of Life towards the storm, and is presumed
dead. Then we see him as a tired, defeated looking man with a bushy beard,
leaving his job in the lumber yard for the day, walking home, entering his house
and sitting down at a table beside a window. The camera slowly zooms in on his
face, then dips slowly to black. End credits roll.
He loses everything, mostly by choice. Fine. Jail? A heroic
death? On the executioner’s table? No. He’s finishes the series a lonely,
ordinary man. I presume he no longer kills people because he’s too tired to
track anyone, and there are limited options for places to set up a kill room in
the woods. Or maybe he’s freer to kill because he doesn’t have a family to hide
the truth from any more, and no social ties that he’s trying to protect.
Thinking about the many ways he could have lost everything,
and the way it did happen, it’s not hard to understand why people were
disappointed. There was no big payoff at the end. It almost would have been
better if Dexter had died when his boat was destroyed by Hurricane Laura. Then
it would have been symbolic, one Laura killed him, after years of being haunted
by the death of another Laura. Poetic. But unfinished.
Sorry fans. Ramshackle little house in the woods. Bushy
beard. A bit of a disappointing ending.
It was almost as painful to watch as all of season five. And
season five was by far the show’s worst season.
By the way, how did Dexter survive the hurricane?
Moving along, the rest of the episode had its good moments.
Consider the opening scenes.
Remember the
Monsters? starts off light, with Dexter outwitting private investigator
Jacob Elway (Sean Patrick Flannery), who’s been tracking Hannah McKay all season
long. Elway locates Hannah at the airport, where she, Dexter and Harrison are
waiting for their flight to Argentina. Elway has Hannah cornered – stuck in the
ladies’ room – and Dexter creates a diversion using a ‘suspicious bag’ that he
plants beside a chair. He goes to a ticket counter to complain about the bag,
which he tells the woman behind the counter was planted by Elway. Security
zeroes in on Elway, and it’s safe for Hannah to leave the washroom.
A bit of comedy to break the ice, we fans are a bit on edge
about this being the end of the line and all, so it was a good move to start out
light. Elway is a skilled investigator and not a ‘big bad,’ so watching Dexter
and Hannah foil his plans to take her into custody works.
We’re then taken to Deb. At the end of the previous episode,
Saxon shoots her in the stomach after he’s freed beside a table of knives. Saxon
gets away, wounded. EMS and Miami Metro find Deb, and she’s taken to the
hospital, not before she gives specific instructions not to tell Dexter what
happened. Quinn (Desmond Harrington), her on-again boyfriend and fellow cop,
rides along with her to the hospital.
Deb’s has grown-up and matured since she dropped her first
f-bomb as a rookie in season one. She started out as a kid who could only see
black and white into an adult that is so conflicted that she tells Quinn that
she is now getting what she deserves. In the ambulance, Quinn tells her he’s
screwed up too and they now have a chance to make up for it. All the good
they’ll do will cancel out the wrong. But her wrongs aren’t the same as his, she
tells him. She did kill her boss, Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Velez), at the end of
last season, which led her to quit her job and hit rock bottom.
I, for one, am happy that Deb and Quinn had a brief happy
reunion in the last few episodes. A few seasons ago, Deb rejected Quinn’s
proposal, which led him to fall apart. Both of their love lives went off the
cliff after they broke up. I mean, Deb did think she was in love with Dexter for
a while, and did we ever dodge a bullet at the end of season six when she saw
him kill Travis Marshall (Colin Hanks). Did that infatuation ever end quickly. I
liked this reunion because they both returned to the relationship that did make
them the happiest, and they were both mature enough to make it work. I did
mention it was brief – happily ever after only works on TV when it’s not quite
ever after.
Captain Matthews (Geoff Pierson) defies Deb and tells Dex
that his sister has been shot and he leaves the airport for the hospital. After
Deb’s surgery, as she recovers in her room, she tells her brother that she’s
responsible for her live and he isn’t responsible for her shooting. She then
tells him to go with Hannah and Harrison to Argentina. They say their goodbyes
and Deb’s doctor tells him that she’s “optimistic” about Deb’s condition.
Cue softly lit flashback: He remembers the first time he and
Deb visited Harrison in the hospital after his son’s birth. The flashback ends
with Deb saying “everything will be different now.” And this is the point that I
started to get the sinking feeling that things were not going to end well.
Meanwhile, Miami prepares for Hurricane Laura. Next scene,
Saxon forces a veterinarian to treat his wound. Nearly forgot about him. He’s
been one of the season’s bigger letdowns. Unlike ‘big bads’ of seasons past, it
took the writers a long time to reveal the Brain Surgeon’s identity. As a
shadowy figure, the Brain Surgeon was intelligent, methodical and targeting
Doctor Vogel (Charlotte Rampling). But his motive for his killings were weak –
Vogel’s his mom and the fact that she was helping Dexter deal with his urges to
kill and not pay attention to him led him to become a serial killer. That reveal
seemed like a bit of a waste. Saxon is just a needy child. He’s more pathetic
than anything else.
Moving along. Hannah and Dexter plan their escape from Miami
in a hotel room. They come to a decision that they’ll make their escape in the
confusion of the evacuation, get on one of the evacuation buses, and go to the
airport wherever they end up and fly out to Argentina. When they do go to the
evacuation centre and are about to board the bus, Dexter has a last-minute
change of heart and stays behind. Hannah and Harrison get on the evacuation bus
and leave.
Even if he is in love with her, that doesn’t change the fact
that he’s left his child in the care of a serial killer. Wait a minute, a serial
killer was raising his son. Never mind. Harrison did also tell Dexter that he
loves Hannah.
So Saxon and the vet drive to the hospital where Deb is
staying. He promises not to talk. Saxon cuts out his tongue and sends him
inside. The commotion distracts everyone but Dexter, who realizes what’s
happening and goes to Deb’s room, where Saxon is heading. As Dexter is about to
stop Saxon, Lieutenant Angel Bautista (David Zayas) puts a gun on Saxon, who is
then arrested.
Relief.
Short-lived relief. When Dexter goes into Deb’s hospital
room, she’s not there. Something’s wrong. He finds a distraught, disheveled
Quinn. (Who are we kidding, doesn’t Quinn always look disheveled?) Quinn tells
him Deb stopped breathing. Her doctor finds them and tells them that Deb has a
stroke and her brain was damaged because it was deprived of oxygen, all caused
by a blood clot. She tells them that Deb won’t be able to think, or reason, or
know that they’re there. She ends her bleak prognosis by telling them that Deb
needs a miracle. Needs a miracle? Doctors say that now?
Dexter has another flashback, which is really a continuation
of the last one.
“You’ve always taken care of me,” Deb says. “Don’t you
remember the monsters?”
She reminds him about the ‘monsters’ that would climb her
wall at night when the lights were out. One day,
Dexter tells her that they’re
just shadows.
“You’ve always made me feel safe,” she says, and the
flashback ends.
Dex tells himself that Deb was wrong about that. More
buildup.
The next few scenes can be boiled down to:
-Dexter starts to contemplate whether or not he should let
the police build their case against Saxon and let the State of Florida execute
him.
-Elway finds Hannah on the bus. She offers him tea, he
refuses because he knows her M.O. Instead, she stabs him in the leg with one of
Dexter’s tranquilizer syringes. She takes Harrison and escapes after Elway is
knocked out.
Now for the show’s best scene. Others will say that the final
episode lacked a payoff moment. No, there was no big, exciting climax. But this
last kill was entertaining – and out in the open.
Dexter, still carrying his credentials to the end of the week
after putting in his notice, takes a gunshot residue kit to where Saxon is being
held. He and Saxon sit in a room alone, with only the security camera watching.
“I wish I could blame you for everything, but I know it’s my
fault,” Dexter tells Saxon. He tells Saxon that what he’s done is help open his
eyes to look at himself. And all he sees is a trail of blood and body parts.
Dexter has finally accepted that he is a killer, always has been, and always
will be. Great, because now we know Saxon will die.
“I’m here to kill you with that pen,” he says, looking over
at the ballpoint pen beside his hand.
He pauses for a minute, allowing Saxon to pick it up and stab
him in the shoulder. Dexter pulls the pen out, stabs Saxon in the jugular, and
he bleeds out pretty quickly. Then Dexter presses the panic button.
Quick cut to Dexter, Bautista and Quinn sitting in a room at
the police station reviewing the security footage. Bautista and Quinn were at a
loss, but everyone wanted Saxon dead. They figure out what Bautista’s going to
put in the report, and Dexter’s free to go. Home free, after openly killing a
serial killer.
Back to Deb. Dexter has fully rejected being ‘normal,’ no
longer wanting to feel what normal people feel, and he takes his boat to the
hospital’s dock and parks it outside. The storm’s still barreling towards Miami.
He goes to Deb’s room, looks at her hooked up to all of the machines and sits
with her. Tubes and wires attached to her, keeping her alive. The agony is all
over Dexter’s face. He apologizes to her and says he can’t leave her like this.
“I’m your big brother,” he says and puts his hand over the
power switch of the life support machine. He pauses, and for a moment, I caught
myself thinking that he couldn’t go through with it. But then he switched the
machine off, pulled out the breathing tube, unhooking her from everything. He
tells her he loves her and watches her vital signs monitor go flat. She
dies.
It’s was the most powerful moment the show’s had in a long
time. Well acted, as always by Hall. It was also the right end for Deb. While
she’s grown and matured and was so close to having her happy ending, she’s not
like Dexter. She couldn’t go through each day knowing that she killed LaGuerta
unprovoked. It’s not that she deserved to die. I don't think she did. It’s that
the show could not end with the possibility that she could be caught, or spiral
out of control again without Dexter around, in the post-finale possibilities
ether. She suffered so much, throughout the show’s lifespan in exchange for all
of her growth. While I’m not sold on the mercy-killing aspect, going that route
allowed Deb and Dexter time to say goodbye to each other. If that didn’t happen,
I don’t think there’d be a fan out there, myself included, that wouldn’t be up
in arms about it.
Back to the finale. Dexter wheels her bed out of the hospital
during all of the hurricane-related commotion. How no one at all sees any of
this is beyond me. No one saw. He wheels her down to his boat. He puts her body
in the back of his boat and unmoors. He heads towards the storm, then stops the
boat.
He calls Hannah and speaks to Harrison one last time. He
tells his son he loves him, and tells him to remember that every day. He says
goodbye to Hannah, then throws his phone into the water. Then, he pulls the
sheet from over Deb’s face and looks at her one last time. He picks her up and
carries her to the side of the boat, then drops her into the water. He watches
her body, wrapped in the white sheet sink to the bottom of the ocean. As she
fades away into the water, my heart couldn’t help but sink. It was probably the
hardest thing Dexter’s ever had to do. Let go of his son and his sister at the
same time – the two people he unconditionally loved the most.
“I destroy everyone I love,” he tells himself, vowing to
protect Hannah and Harrison from him. Then he steers his boat into the storm. In
the next scenes, we see the fallout. Dexter is presumed dead. Hannah reads about
it in Argentina on her iPad and then takes Harrison for ice cream.
A part of me wanted the show to end here, but as a fan, not
knowing Dexter’s true fate would have been unacceptable. I’ve been watching this
show for eight years. I wanted a real ending. Not more questions.
Overall, it wasn’t a perfect episode, but a number of things
were right about the ending. But ending it with Dexter as a scruffy,
defeated-looking man in the woods? That didn’t feel right.
I don’t think any ending would have felt right, whether
Dexter died, went to jail or moved to Argentina with his son and girlfriend.
After all, how do you end a show whose protagonist is a serial killer?
Roll the credits.
By: Thia James