14 DAY TRIAL // “Dexter” ended last September after 8 years on Showtime. After a very strong debut and a decent middle run, the fan-favorite series ended on a very bum note, with the series finale dubbed the lamest, most underserving, and infuriating finale of all times. Give or take a few shows for good measure.
Season 8 kicked off in a very promising fashion, but soon gave way to negative criticism, with fans and critics alike lamenting a certain rush on part of the writers to wrap things up, tie all the loose ends, and have Dexter say his final goodbye.
However, no other episode was as maligned as “Remember the Monsters?,” the last one in the series – and the worst part is that this will also be the one that fans will remember 10 years from now: first of all because it was that bad and secondly because it failed to give Dexter the send-off he deserved.
Michael C. Hall, who gave life on the small screen to the Miami PD blood spatter analyst / serial killer / vigilante, agrees with all those who found the series finale a disappointment.
“Liked it? I don’t think I even watched it,” he tells the Daily Beast in an interview to promote “Cold in July,” a new film in which he plays a killer again, though, this time, he’s an accidental one. “I thought it was narratively satisfying – but it was not so savory,” Hall continues.
This is the first time that Hall shares his thoughts on the “Dexter” finale and, while the things he says are not flattering in the least, he deserves props for being delicate about it. After all, it’s not like he can honestly badmouth a show he was involved in for almost a decade: he’s too professional to do that.
At the same time, Hall is also too professional not to admit that something wasn’t right with the way the series ended.
“I think the show had lost a certain amount of torque. Just inherently because of how long we’d done it, because of the storytelling capital we’d spent, because our writers may have been gassed. Maybe some people wanted a more satisfying – maybe they wanted a happy ending for him, either a happy ending or a more definitive sense of closure. They wanted him to die or something, but I think the fact that he’s sort of exiled in a prison of his own making is, for my money, pretty fitting,” Hall continues.
Whichever of these fans wanted, they definitely never imagined their favorite (anti)hero ending up as a lumberjack. Then again, it wasn’t so much as the way in which the story ended as the way in which said ending was presented that bothered: the CGI storm Dexter rides into right at the end was dubbed one of the biggest lows in television in recent years. The same goes for what happens to Deb.
For those who somehow managed to avoid seeing “Dexter” all these years, we should note that the series revolves around the story of Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter specialist with the Miami PD, who moonlights as a serial killer who hunts down and takes out criminals who slip through the cracks of the legal system.
The consensus is that “Dexter’s” peak years are season 1 through to 5 or 6, tops. For many fans, the ride ended when Rita was killed, at the end of season 4.