What the hell was that!?!?!? A Daniel Lyons
special. (note: Profanities inbound, sensitive ears turn away)
So I don’t watch a huge amount of tv, and
when I do, it’s usually one show at a time, and in concentrated bursts. There
are a couple exceptions, like ‘The Walking Dead,’ but mostly it’s the burst
method. Among the many shows I burst watch include ‘Futurama,’ ‘The Legend of
Korra,’ and ‘Dexter.’ I was aware that the eighth and final season of Dexter
came and went a little while ago, and I managed to completely miss it, but I
finally got my hands on the whole thing, and decided to watch it all in one
day. Yes, 12 hours of Dexter, in one day.
Now for anyone who doesn’t watch Dexter,
this blog won’t be very interesting, and if you do but haven’t watched the
final season, or specifically the finale, then you might want to stop reading
because of spoilers.
Right, with that out of the way, I’m going
to say what’s on everyone’s mind:
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?!?!” (Hence the
title of this special.)
As a writer of films and tv, I can usually
understand where a writer is coming from. Even when the plot is contrived, or
the characters act completely out of… well, character, I can see what the
writers were intending, and go along with it. But with this ending, I am
utterly stumped. I have been trying to describe what that ending was to myself
for about an hour now, and I have completely failed. It is an ending that
resists description, resists definition, resists reasoning, and resists
motivation.
It’s funny that an ending like that should
be tied onto, what I thought, to be the strongest season of Dexter in quite a
while. I really got into the characters, I liked the arcs everyone was going
through, I thought the humor was spot on, the drama was stop on, and it avoided
Dexter’s usual problems of being hopelessly slow in the middle, and incredibly
repetitive.
In fact, I really thoroughly enjoyed the
season. We got a lot more backstory into Dexter and how he became a serial
killer, and we finally saw his personal journey coming to a close. Anyone who
watches Dexter will tell you, without a doubt, that the show has been about
Dexter’s evolution.
He starts the series as a serial killer. A
detached, unemotional, unfeeling person who lies to the world. But through the
whole series, through every trial and tribulation, challenge and emotional talk
with the people he’s about to kill, we’ve seen him change. He has learned to
have feelings, to have relationships with the people around him, to love, to
want to have a family, and finally, to not want to kill anymore. This was the
most important, he finally came to a point in his life when he just wanted to
settle down and have a family, and he wanted this even more than he wanted to
kill people, which had dominated his whole life.
This is powerful. Both of these were major
parts of his life, and he has battled with these for the whole show. Will he
keep using the people around him as cover, and keep killing? Or will he settle
down, have a family, and live peacefully?
The series finale of Dexter was about 55
minutes long. 45 minutes into the episode, everything was going fine, great in
fact. The battle was over, the main villain was captured, Dexter had finally
decided that family and a normal life was everything he wanted. Deb was on the
road to recovery, and would take her place back on the force, resume her
relationship with a much more mature Quinn, Batista finally got lieutenant,
Jamie was on her way to a dream job, Masuka was adjusting to having a daughter,
and Dexter was getting out clean. The show had come to a close, it was
satisfying, it was heartfelt, it felt organic in the universe of the show, and
every speech that was made, every conversation with Harry, every step to being
a better person that Dexter took fell into place.
And then the next 10 minutes happened.
I suppose I can think of it this way, it
had its ups and downs, but Dexter had delivered 7 full seasons, 11 full
episodes, and 45 full minutes of quality television. Sometimes it was dull,
overly formulaic, contrived, and overdramatic, and filled with plot holes, but
it was always moving in the right direction, had the right drama, had the
characters continuing with their journey. In fact, from a filmmaking
perspective, this last season was extremely well done. It was shot very well,
edited excellently, the acting was as top notch as ever, the writing sharp and
depthful (by TV standards.)
So I can only say that it takes a special
kind of writing to manage what the last 10 minutes of this show did. How you
manage to completely undo 95.8 episodes worth of character development, manage
to ruin every major character’s storylines, and after all that, not actually
end the show.
Well, in this last 10 minutes, they did
that, and they did it with flying colors.
If you haven’t watched the finale yet, then
start watching it, and the moment the scene where Dexter confronts the main
villain and he gets captured, switch it off. Invent your own ending, where
he joins Hannah and his son in Argentina, Deb joins the force, does good in the
world, marries Quinn, and has a family of her own, and other nice, satisfying
endings.
But whatever you do, don’t watch past it.
Because what happens next? A storm is
brewing in Maimi, and it serves absolutely no purpose for plot or character,
but it is nice to have going in the background. Everything starts going
completely sideways. Deb, despite being badly torn up, was declared to be ok,
but all of a sudden (and with no explanation) stops breathing and has a minor
stroke, and now has brain damage and will possibly be unresponsive. So things
are now fucked for her, and fucked for Quinn, and also pretty fucked for
Batista when you think about it. Why did the writer’s do this? Why spend a
whole season getting a character to realise she is a good person, and has
purpose, and loves another character (and is a main fucking character I might
add) only to throw this curveball in the last 10 fucking minutes of the
episode? I don’t know. I sincerely don’t know. I don’t know what the writer’s
wanted us (the audience) to feel, to think, to react to this. It completely
defies every storywriting rule I know, how the emotional payoff for a character
should equal the emotional impact they’ve had. Deb has had a glowing impact on
Dexter, and the people around her, and especially on herself, managing to pull
herself up from a downward spiral back to a healthy place in her life.
And after that? It gets even better. Dexter
has a little inner monologue, during which the line comes out ‘For so long I wanted
to be like other people, to feel what they felt, but now that I do I just want
it to stop.’ I’m gonna be straight with you Dexter, that is a special kind of complete bull shit. You’ve
spent the entire fucking series developing your feelings and your connections to
people, and that was all going great, with no hint that you were ever feeling
otherwise. Even Dr. Vogel said that you weren’t a perfect psychopath because
you have profound emotional depth. So
where does this line come from? What prompts it? What purpose does it serve? Does
it lead to anything? Does it make any goddamned sense? (No, to the last one.) This line is so ridiculously out of character I actually paused the episode, rewound it, and listened to it again to make sure I heard it right, and I've never done that before.
So how does it cap itself off? So now that
the character arcs of Dexter, Deb, Quinn, and Batista have all been thrown out
the window, the writers decide to run with this and construct a series of
scenes that seem to be in competition of which can make the least sense.
Dexter jumps on his boat, sails over the
hospital, and slips into Deb’s room. He says sorry to her (fair enough,) and
that he wishes he could take it all back (eh, that’s pushing it) and that none
of it had ever happened (that’s really pushing it.) And then he kills her. Yep…
Straight up kills her. Disconnects her life support and breathing tube and
everything, and kills her. No-one notices (that’s really, really pushing it)
and he then picks up her dead body, and carries it to his boat. That’s right,
he takes a body, wrapped in a white sheet, and carries it through a hospital
full of busy, hyper aware people thanks to the storm, and carries it all the
way to his boat (that’s just going too far.) He then sails away on his boat,
into the storm, and the most insulting scene of all comes on. Dexter calls
Hannah, and his son (Harrison by the way) and says goodbye, and that he’ll see
them soon. And just there, there is a glimmer of hope, that the writers may be
able to turn this around, and give this show some sort of satisfying
resolution, like maybe that the hero that we’ve been rooting for 8 years might
get a bittersweet ending. But no, that would be going against the ridiculousness
and crazy that they’re channeling. After hanging up, he throws the phone into
the ocean, then throws Deb’s corpse into the ocean, declares that ‘I destroy
everyone I love’ then drives away into the storm. Yep, he threw his sister’s
body into the ocean, then decided to abandon the love of his life, the person
who understands him, the one person who has made him stop killing, and his son,
his own fucking son, just like that. 7 minutes earlier, he couldn’t wait to be
with them, to leave with them and go to Argentina and live like a normal
person. But fuck that, we’re running with the crazy here.
The next day, all the shit hits all the
respective fans, and lots of dramatic looks reacting to this crazy bullshit are
shown; no-one speaks, no-one reacts, no-one moves on, and we don’t know what
happens to anyone. Dexter’s boat is found destroyed, Dexter is presumed dead
and Hannah reads on her ipad that he’s dead. The show then ends with Hannah
taking Harrison, now her sole responsibility, for ice cream in the city of
Buenos Aires.
I wish I was making all that up. That this
was some kind of sick joke from the writers to test if the Dexter fans were
really watching, but it’s not. What basically happened was:
No-one got a satisfying resolution
No-one got a fucking resolution, because we
now don’t know what’s going to happen to everyone
Everyone’s character arcs were thrown into
a shredder
And the whole series was now a giant waste
of time
All that growth Dexter had from being a
serial killer, to being a good person, the entire focus of the show. Gone. Just
like that.
Well done writers… You thought that you
couldn’t ruin an entire series in the last ten minutes of the last episode, but
you were wrong.
And then… I can’t even describe it. All I
can say is… ‘Lumberjack?’
I truly don’t know what to make of it. There
is no talking, there is no information, nothing really happens, and the scene
is tacked on after a scene that would act as a perfectly suitable (albeit fucking
insane) conclusion. This scene adds nothing, tells us nothing, and really just
makes it even more unresolved. The randomness of this sequence is actually
quite astounding. I am sincerely curious what the writers were thinking with
this scene, what were they trying to do? Like I said, I can almost always
identify where the writers were coming from, but I am completely in the dark
here.
Dexter was, and is, one of my favorite shows.
It had incredible standards of production, writing, acting, and while it had
problems, I never stopped liking it, or gave up hope on it like other fans did.
But this ending, I don’t even know what to think.
So that was my special, R. A., I’ll read from
you on Tuesday.
Daniel Lyons.
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