14 DAY TRIAL // Showtime’s killer series “Dexter” kicked off a brand new season, its seventh to date, the other night. “Are You…?” offered plenty of answers but also posed many more, extremely intriguing questions. Jennifer Carpenter tackles some of them in a new interview.
After the season premiere, Vulture caught up with Carpenter, who plays foul-mouthed and witty Deb on the series, and asked her about the direction in which the series is going.
With two more seasons to go, Showtime’s one of a kind killer series must be rushing to tie up all loose ends but, as expected, Carpenter can’t reveal too much about the direction it is going.
She does say that Dexter (Michael C. Hall) won’t die in the end but she takes it back right afterwards, realizing she might have said too much.
Other than that, Jennifer stresses that she too is happy with the way things are playing out in the new season because it’s been a long time coming.
Fans will know that Carpenter has long expressed her doubts as to Deb’s incapacity to see through Dexter’s lies, she who is such a good cop now, so she’s thrilled that writers are finally giving her a free reign.
“That, I think, was pretty genius on the writers’ part,” Carpenter says of the ending of the first episode of season 7.
“It actually happens slowly. She thinks he’s killed one person, one very bad person. And then by the end of the episode, she realizes he’s killed a very small town,” the star adds.
She’s thrilled producers and writers are handling Deb’s discovery of Dexter’s true nature in a very organic fashion, not forcing a certain story line upon the two characters just because it would be the easy way out.
Dexter and Deb are not meant to become a team, but neither can she instantly turn into his enemy, not after the events of the previous seasons, particularly the sixth.
“You know, we’re ten [episodes] in, and I feel like I can still answer this question this way: It’s as if Debra walks around with handcuffs in her back pocket, and every other moment she considers reaching for them,” the actress says.
“And Dexter is finding himself having to walk this line. He’s very aware that she’s sitting on an ax that can fall at any moment on one side or the other — one that favors him, and one that doesn’t,” Carpenter adds.
As for how she imagines the show’s finale will be like, Carpenter plays it coy.
“I think they’re going to tear it to shreds. I can’t tell you how, I have no idea. I have one scene in mind, what the last scene of the series could be, and Michael [C. Hall] and I have talked about it: He says something to me, I say something to him, and something happens. [Laughs.]” she says.
Here is the full interview.