Let’s All Remember How Genuinely Terrible The ‘Dexter’ Finale Was
"Remember The Monsters?" was a walking nightmare.
Most series finales are disappointing, rather than outright bad.
After all, TV shows have longevity on their side. Even if you’ve endured six seasons worth of garbage, there’s still usually something hanging around in the dark recesses of your brain that is keeping you watching. In most cases, that’s the strength of the early seasons, which, with only a few exceptions — The Wire, The X-Files — are the best a show ever gets.
That means by the time a show’s wrapping up, all it has to do is lean hard on your nostalgia, and conjure up images of those early days where life was good and the Starks were all mates together, or Doctor Gray was finding joy and fulfilment in Anatomy Hospital (Spoiler alert: I have seen neither Game of Thrones or Gray’s Anatomy.)
Such nostalgia never re-invents the wheel. But it does provide a quick and easy dopamine hit. And in a sad, difficult world, sometimes that’s enough.
Take the Seinfeld finale, historically considered the low-bar for sitcom climaxes. Sure, it’s not exactly ground-breaking. But the roll-call of past characters is a neat way of summing things up, all while reminding you of all the fun you’ve already had with your Wacky(TM) and Relatable(TM) friends.
And then there’s the Dexter finale.
The Dexter Finale Hates You
Dexter was mostly a pretty good show, a camp procedural that slipped through the looking glass and examined crime scenes from the perspective of a killer. It did a lot of very silly plotting around romances and the kind of shocking family revelations that you’d expect from The Bold and the Beautiful. But when it hit a good run, it had a silly magic all of its own.
Take, for instance, the fourth season, which introduced Arthur Mitchell (John Lithgow). Lithgow had a lot of fun as the evangelical killer, sucking up the scenery and chewing on it. So did Michael C. Hall as Dexter. The pair complemented each other well, there were some gruesome murders, some easy jokes, and the arc ended on a neat bit of foreshadowing, with Mitchell promising Dexter that he’d never be able to let killing go.
Oh, and then, just to cap things off, the season ended on one of the most tragic final shots in the show’s history.
Surprise Motherfucker.
He’s back. #Dexter pic.twitter.com/EDXov06rot— Dexter on Showtime (@SHO_Dexter) October 14, 2020
Again, not exactly Putlizer prize-winning plotting, but perfectly serviceable fun, precisely because it never made you feel stupid for going along with it.
The same cannot be said about the last episode of Dexter, “Remember the Monsters?” Indeed, the last episode of Dexter seems to want nothing but to punish fans, and the most diehard of them in particular. It’s not only silly and bloated. It’s silly and bloated in a way that ripples back through the highs of the series, and makes them seem embarrassing in retrospect.
Vegetative States and Lumberjacks
The central problem of “Remember The Monsters?” is that it chooses cheap pay-offs over complex and nuanced ones every time. The whole series, fans had been encouraged to both judge and to love Dexter. He was a villain and a hero, a killer with a heart of gold whose crimes barred him from the one thing he ever wanted — an opportunity to live a normal life.
So how does that tension pay off in the finale? Well, it simply doesn’t. The show looks the troubling moral problem that had kept things going from the very first season right in the eye, and then runs away in the opposite direction.
“Remember The Monsters?” chooses cheap pay-offs over complex and nuanced ones every time
Dexter is neither punished nor redeemed; he neither lives nor dies. After murdering his arch enemy in plain view of watching police officers, a shock that the show has to justify with some of the sweatiest imaginable plotting, the climax sees our serial killer hero try to undo every Gordian knot of a B-plot in sight, all with the clock ticking in the background. He resolves his on and off-again relationship with his foster sister by mercy-killing her; his relationship with his son by letting him get a new start.
The show has nothing definitive to say about either character, or Dexter’s feelings towards them. If the showrunners were brave, Dexter would have had to kill his sister outright, fulfilling the dark promise Mitchell delivered on his deathbed. But they’re not, so he tells her he loves her and disconnects the life support. And if the showrunners trusted themselves to take a risk, Dexter’s son would grow to resemble him, becoming part of a gruesome lineage. But that doesn’t happen either. His son suffers a treadmill accident (no, really) and then makes it off alive.
And then there’s the fate of Dexter himself. Does he deserve death or rehabilitation? The showrunners give him both, and as a result neither: after a fake-out suicide, we learn that the man has started again, living as a lumberjack (no, really) under an assumed identity. There’s no final word offered on anything; no resolution to what made the show special. It’s creative cowardice of the worst sort. And it’s why the finale might be one of the worst in television history.
Real Endings
Of course, there might be those who want to argue that Dexter could never win — that fans desired too much, and that the showrunners could never have satisfied every demand. Maybe that’s true in the short term. But one only need look at the current reputation of The Sopranos finale, a climax that made a hard, difficult call on the subject of punishment or rehabilitation, to see how a bold choice could have panned out.
At the time, viewers hated The Soprano‘s smash cut to black. But the years since have been extremely kind to such a gambit: now the sudden horror is recognised as part of the show’s essential genius.
Dexter enjoys no such reputation. By trying to cater for every taste, it catered for none, and in the intervening years since its release, such decisions have only come to seem more embarrassing. “Remember The Monsters?” isn’t just a bad finale. It’s the shorthand for a particular kind of cowardice.
Against that background, the newly announced follow-up series sounds like an attempt to make amends. Some winking, metatextual reference to the disappointing finale should be expected to come with the territory — I’m staking everything on a character telling Dexter that his decision to become a lumberjack was stupid or illogical, all while practically gurning down the camera lens. That’s fine; a necessary evil.
I only hope in the years since “Remember The Monsters?”, the show’s writers have summoned the courage to stick to their creative convictions.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.