Dexter: Season 8

I've reviewed an enormous share of television seasons here, and that includes a number of final seasons of various TV shows. I need not reiterate this in depth, but in my mind, final seasons are crucial for long-running television shows. It's sort of anti-intuitive, but the longer a show runs, the more I want it to stick its landing. It's like, "Four seasons? Eh, not a ton riding on this ending. Eight seasons? Wow, don't fuck this up!" And, again, a series finale as an episode carries an enormous share of that responsibility. It doesn't have to be the series' all time greatest episode or anything, but it's so important to go out on a high note, to tie up loose ends, and to leave unsaid or unanswered only what didn't need to be said or answered. Put a bow on it, call it a finished product, and let it stand on its own as it will.

Dexter went on for too long, plain and simple. Showtime didn't want to let it end, and every year the seasons became more and more predictable, either sticking to a tried and true (and boring) formula or going increasingly over the top for shocks and awes. What was once at least a somewhat plausible concept with fairly human-like characters eventually became absurd and unbelievable in all the worst kinds of ways. Season 2 jumped the gun with a plot line that really should have been saved for Dexter's end game, Season 3 was fairly mundane, Season 4 was formulaic but buoyed by a shocking finale, Season 5 was a boring letdown, and Season 6 felt like complete self-parody. But Season 7 started strong. It sputtered and died, sloppily, but that slight uptick gave viewers some sense of hope that Season 8, Dexter's last, would at least not be terrible.

Joke's on us! Season 8 was just awful. The worst thing a TV show can be is boring, and that's exactly what Dexter was for eleven straight hours here. I preferred the series' previous low, Season 6, to this one because at least there was something to laugh at and not believe that time around. Here? Just poorly defined low stakes for Dexter and his family and a woefully tame "big bad" whose name and motivations I've already forgotten. Tertiary character arcs were almost entirely absent here, too. This was just Dexter doddering along toward some hastily made questionable goals that seemed more driven by which former guest stars were available for casting than how the writers wanted his story to end.

But then, in its final hour, Dexter went from boring to just fucking nutty. I don't say this lightly, but it got Heroes bad. Just flat out physics-defying, riddled with plot holes and character motivation contradictions. It was an absolute mess, but not a beautiful kind of mess like Entourage was. I just mean sloppy all the way from the writing to the special effects to the acting to the pacing. Garbage, garbage, garbage.

But wait! After finally mercifully fading to black, a surprise revelation! It turns out a character who just sailed his boat directly into a hurricane in an attempt to rid the world of his evil ways - yeah, okay, spoiler, it was Dexter himself - was only elaborately faking his own death! And he's alive and well! As a lumberjack living all alone! Does he still kill people? No idea! Has he contacted anyone in his family? Doubtful, but unknown! How did he survive a hurricane that utterly destroyed his boat? No fucking clue!

I could go on and on about the fumbles and misplays throughout this season, or I could point out how every somewhat important character (and there are only like six of them in Dexter) was wasted in the final season, but I don't even want to do any of that. I just want to forget about Dexter. Not just Season 8, but the even that came before it. Because in the end, it was a terrible, pointless show. It had no message, it offered no takeaways, and none of it mattered at all.