[mckerney]

Originally Posted by Johnny93g

This whole concept to me is a fail. It contradicts this supposed growth from the character.

I thought the piece of Grantland from before the finale hit the nail on the head in regards to this.

Dexter’s Terrible Final Season and How Breaking Bad Ruined the Series

By contrast, the Writers' Room installment on Dexter indicates just how far gone the show’s writers are. They talk of the arc of the show less in terms of Dexter having to come to terms with what he’s done — or others having to pursue him because of those acts — and more in terms of the character becoming a “real boy.” They describe him in terms reserved for comic book superheroes. Sure, he’s killing people, but he’s only killing bad people, right? That’s not so awful. Maybe Dexter’s just misunderstood.

The problem with this idea is that Dexter itself has contradicted it in the final season. If Dexter can stop killing, if he was just a misdiagnosed sociopath (or whatever) who just needed the love of a good woman all along, then what about all of those people he killed on his table over eight seasons, tossed into the depths in Hefty bags? Couldn’t even one of those people have managed to turn their lives around? It’s as if the show forgot that a vital part of Harry’s Code has always been “Don’t get caught,” the tacit acknowledgement that what Dexter was doing was illegal and immoral, an attempt to do a patch on a malfunctioning bit of human software. In its second season — when it was revealed that Harry killed himself after seeing what he’d made his son — the show was clear-eyed enough to at least approach this idea. In its final season, that was shunted off to the side in favor of tearful good-byes and “I’m gonna miss you, pal” speeches that seem airlifted in from the series finale of M*A*S*H.

Dexter could have been a great show coming out of that second season. Think of how exciting it would be to have two antihero dramas going out at the top of their games right now, then think back to those early episodes of this season of Dexter to realize how close that notion actually came. There is always room for more than one antihero on TV. (Just ask Tony Soprano, who had to deal with a whole fleet of them while he was around.) But seeing the final season of Breaking Bad juxtaposed against the final season of Dexter simply reveals how little teeth the latter show had all along.

Like or hate Breaking Bad (or Walter White), it’s impossible to come away from that show and not think its creative team has complete and total control over what it wants to weigh about its main character. Yet even if you still like Dexter, even if you still cling to hope its finale might right the ship at the last possible moment, it’s difficult to watch this season and not conclude that the character became something else entirely along the course of its run in an attempt to soften him or make him more palatable. Walter White exposes the darkness inside all of us. Dexter Morgan had a chance to do that, but it was pushed aside in favor of more voice-over quips to the audience and reassurances that the guy you’re watching isn’t all that bad, so maybe you aren’t, either. It refuses to challenge either its characters or its audience, and that makes it more of a disappointment than anyone might have imagined back in 2007, when it had the world at its feet.