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Dexter: The Final Season


Petey

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That pan to Harrison's pocket got me! I thought that was going to be it for the daughter.

Decent episode though, coming together nicely now, even if a bit conveniently. 

So far it's on a par with about season 5, not quite there with the seasons 1-4 (I really liked the Jimmy Smits season), but still very enjoyable.

Spoiler

Will be interesting to see how Kurt goes from being arrested in the next episode for Iris and other women's deaths to assumedly being on Dexter's table at some point soon.

 

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2 hours ago, Leonidas said:

That pan to Harrison's pocket got me! I thought that was going to be it for the daughter.

I caught that too. He did say he wants to hurt everyone all the time...

A lot of story progression this week. Where I think the story is leading to...

Spoiler

Kurt & Harrison are starting to bond. Dexter already suspects Kurt of being a serial killer, after working the scene for Angela it's gonna confirm it. Dexter coming for Kurt is going to push Harrison over the edge. Harrison comes to Kurt's aid and he's the one that takes Dexter out. Harrison is the real villain this season.

 

The one annoyance I have with this season is the exact same annoyance I had when Deb found out about Dexter. There's all this info that you'd like them to bring up and discuss and they just ignore it all. Like Deb knew Dexter was the Bay Harbor Butcher. So she had to have suspected Dexter killed Doakes somehow. But they never talk about it. So she's just gotta be okay with assuming he killed their innocent coworker. That's out of character for her. There's all these things Harrison and Dexter should be talking about. Stuff Harrison has to have questions about. But they just don't ever talk about anything. He doesn't ask. And that's not very realistic to me. He knows his mom was killed by Trinity. He's never asked Dexter why. Even if Dexter wouldn't tell him the truth, in Harrison's shoes that's the first question I'd ask.

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Quite a few shocking moments this episode. I'm really digging this season. It feels like it's righting all the wrongs from season 5 onward. 

I also thought that Dexter was suspected to be the BHB when the series ended so I was surprised that wasn't mentioned in the obituary. 

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Lots to like about Episode 6.

Spoiler

Harrison thinks that Dex is being a deadbeat dick, when Dex is actually trying to keep his secret from coming out and has no idea how to tell his son he is a serial murderer.... just like his son is slowly evolving into without the guidance of the Code of Harry. 

I also like how Dexter makes the wrong call and initially goes after Molly.  it is even better that Dexter considers letting Kurt get away with killing Molly, but decides to save her instead and puts himself on Kurt's radar. 

Kurt gives Harrison a job AND encourages his dark side?  This is bad.

Aaaand Angela has found her missing best friend in the cave.... and needs Dexter's forensic expertise.   Also bad..

 

Edited by J.T.
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Dexter’s foils are typically dark reflections of him, but Kurt is a particularly interesting case. I can’t tell whether his generosity and compassion is a genuine compartmentalized portion of his personality (similar to Dexter’s streaks of humanity) or if it’s entirely part of his cover. Kurt probably wouldn’t know either. 

Man, Harrison….it’s alway something with this kid.

Anyway, my favorite new character is Logan. He seems like he’d fit right in with the quirky but capable (but not enough to capture the real Butcher) gang at Miami Metro Homicide.

Although

Spoiler

They laid some groundwork this week with him that points to him possibly being Kurt’s first apprentice before Harrison, and his accomplice. It’s even possible Iris was his first and doesn’t fit Kurt’s pattern in some way.  

 

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Hell of an episode this week. I really want this to be picked up as a full series going forward regardless of the outcome. But I sense there's going to be some kind of definitive closure for the Dexter character. (Either Harrison goes full on bad guy and kills him, or Kurt takes him out leading Harrison to take Kurt out). The New Blood series could live on without him as a living character, but only if they use Michael C Hall as the Harry for Harrison.

Molly is as good as dead. If this season sticks to how a lot of the originals worked, she's going to find out the truth about Dexter. But right before she's able to get the word out or show her evidence she's going to get killed. And it's usually not by Dexter. I could see her finding out, Kurt getting her, her begging to get away by telling Kurt everything. Kurt kills her anyways. But now he knows everything and uses the knowledge of it against Dexter / Harrison.

Really enjoying this season. The quality that was missing without Clyde Phillips is definitely back.

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There were some good moments this week but the one word I would use to describe this episode was FILLER.

 

Spoiler

The extended hillbilly hunting Dexter in the woods scenes were just a chore for me to get through. All of the Kurt stuff and even the Angela stuff I enjoyed. But they spend so much episode run time on the slow hunt through the woods, but they never do anything with it. You know there's no chance the guy gets Dexter. So at least make it a creative or fun journey. Do something clever with the blood trail. Just do something basically. Nope. We just spend 30 minutes where the distance between them changes wildly, all just for the dude to get stabbed in a summer camp cabin.

The Kurt / Harrison stuff was great. Kurt going out of his way to show Harrison all the father son stuff he's been missing just to take it away by killing him is some deep psychological torture. I was expecting Dexter to run him over and end that arc to leave the last two eps for Bay Harbor Butcher stuff. I just don't see how this can wrap up the Kurt story & the Angela finding out story in two episodes. I'm sensing some big cliff hanger ending with an announcement of another season (I hope).

Angela pieced it together. Now what does she do about it? Arrest him? Give him a chance to explain? Contact Miami Metro? Get killed by Kurt? A lot of story options still on the table.

 

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My thoughts on Unfair Game:

Spoiler

I actually enjoyed the irony of Dexter Morgan, serial killer, hunting his prey at a summer camp right down to the slasher movie incidental music.  I smiled inside when Dexter tried the old walk backwards in your tracks trick like Danny did in The Shining.  That only works in the movies, dude.

The Kurt / Harrison stuff was really good..  I think that Kurt was genuinely trying to bond with Harrison before some switch flipped and decided to try to murder Harrison.  Why did Kurt suddenly flake?  Why is he hunting off script when his victims are usually women?  Oh, well.  We have two more episodes to find out where this goes.

I am not sure whether we should all be happy or frightened that Dexter and his son are finally bonding in the way we expected them to.

Angela is a really good detective.

 

Edited by J.T.
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Really good penultimate episode. Dexter is getting sloppy, too many leads left loose for supercop Angela. 

Spoiler

Big shock with Molly's deathface in Kurt's mausoleum, creepy place! 

Preview shows Dexter having his photo taken in jail, but that's probably a red herring. I'm thinking Harrison kills him and I'm thinking he deserves it... Very excited for the finale.

 

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The tone of this episode was a weird shift for me. I didn't really like it.

Spoiler

I don't know if it was a conscious writing choice or not but Dexter came off a lot more unlikable than usual. He's downright giddy while cutting Kurt up with zero recognition of how Harrison is not quite all the way on board. It's also a bit strange to me that he didn't come totally clean from the start. So he makes Harrison think he just scares these people at first. Once Harrison realizes he kills them, within 20mins they are chopping a dead guy's limbs off. Dexter's always been way more cautious than that. I'd think he would have done things gradually letting Harrison in and not just jumping straight away into the deep end of the process.

Which leads me to believe this was a conscious writing choice. I think it's going to basically end up that Harrison just has anger and rage issues, and not actually a dark passenger / a need to kill. He wasn't enjoying what was happening to Kurt like Dexter was. If that wasn't the writing intention, then they should have calibrated the actor's reactions a little better. I guess we will see.

So Molly is dead. Dexter's house burnt down. Someone left a letter for Angela about Dexter killing Matt (and the timeline doesn't really leave room for that to be either Kurt or Harrison). A lot happened in this episode. But not a lot of meat left on the bone for the final episode. I had enjoyed this season quite a bit but my excitement for the finale is pretty low now after this episode. But anything is better than the season 8 ending. So a low bar and all that.


 

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Next week is being billed as a season finale, so it looks like we're getting more of this next year.

As for this week...

Spoiler

I'll agree that Dexter was really unlikeable and I'm also not sure if that conscious decision or what. Dexter also glossed over killing people who weren't murderers that discovered he's a killer. In this situation, it was so fucking easy for Dexter to be like, look, Kurt tried to kill Harrison, but failed because I tracked Harrison's phone, we needed evidence to prove he's a murderer, we used a drone that Kurt gave us to find the location of his hideout, we broke inside and yeah I know that's illegal but all of the proof is there that he has killed numerous women including the podcaster who had to be his most recent kill.

That's literally fucking it. That's all that would be needed. Angela probably wouldn't be thrilled, but I'm guessing she would swallow a bitter pill in how the evidence was obtained to put away the guy responsible for her best friend's and a ton of other girls murder. Shit, Dexter should be smart enough to pin Kurt's son's death on Kurt - look, here's this titanium pin that Kurt recovered from his son's body! That last part is a little shaky. It at least still works.

There was just no reason for Dexter to have that much glee from killing someone and likely leading his son to become a murderer as well, something he desperately wanted to avoid.

It was just really shit writing. They had a real opportunity to take the show in a totally different direction by having Dexter not give in to his impulses and lead Harrison towards law enforcement instead being a serial killer and instead they chose the rote son follows the same pattern as his dad.

And I'll give Dexter a pass for being pretty bad at covering his tracks since he's likely really rusty, but it's not like he turned into an idiot over the last 10 years.

This is still better than the final season of the original series, but it's quickly circling the drain into the same shit that made the original series really dumb.

 

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On 12/13/2021 at 12:28 PM, NoFistsJustFlips said:

He knows his mom was killed by Trinity. He's never asked Dexter why. Even if Dexter wouldn't tell him the truth, in Harrison's shoes that's the first question I'd ask.

IIRC Dexter clearly misrepresented this in the last episode ("I killed him because he killed your mother" or some such), but I'm sure Harrison's about to put two and two together. 

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Another solid episode hopefully leading to a solid conclusion.

Spoiler

If you're going to tell your son about the Dark Passenger, you may as well tell him that you kill people.  Harrison is not stupid.  Eventually he will connect the Bay Harbor Butcher dots and then he will think you are a hypocrite and a liar.  I was happy when Dexter finally confessed to killing Mr. Wiggles and the Trinity Killer.

Kurt making the gun fingers at Harrison before leaving Angela's was the best.

Didn't really understand why Kurt went to burn down Dex's house?   Sure, retaliation but aren't you also tipping your hand by going nuclear with your response?

RIP Molly.  I was totally heart broken.  Thing is that Iris doesn't fit Kurt's MO so maybe he was telling the truth about his father murdering Iris?  I guess it doesn't matter now that he's ashes.  Kinda bummed that Kurt is dead.  I'd like to know the significance of the white evening gowns he dresses the corpses in.  Does it represent purification or something?

Super detective Angela is going to figure out that the fire at Dex's was retaliation for his murder of Matt Caldwell.

The Christmas themed outro was pretty awesome.

There is not enough love for the dudes sneaking War by Idles into this episode's incidental music.

 

Edited by J.T.
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1 hour ago, J.T. said:

Didn't really understand why Kurt went to burn down Dex's house?   Sure, retaliation but aren't you also tipping your hand by going nuclear with your response?


I think it was just the best plan he could come up with to kill them ASAP. If the house is on fire they would run out, and he was waiting with the rifle to kill them. Not sure if he had a plan beyond that to cover it all up. But just a one note evil plan to get them to run into his line of fire. Burning down the house was irrelevant beyond picking them off coming out of the house.

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And that's a wrap. I liked this ending far better than Season 8. I also thought this episode was the best of the season. Just really good tension building. But now that we see the series as a whole, it was pretty predictable. Still enjoyed it and very much prefer this ending. Man it could have been so much more creative tho. Hardly a “break the internet” type ending as Clyde Phillips teased last summer.

Case in point I saw one person's prediction to the ending that I am just accepting as the true reason for this season. Please don't read this before watching the actual show ending. Because this is a far superior ending and I don't want to ruin the real ending for you lol. It just makes too much sense to not be at least the subtle intentions of the show runner...
 

Spoiler

Iron Lake isn't a city. It's a prison. The reason they show Kurt in medical scrubs while working on his kills is because he is actually the medical personnel administering the lethal injection to Dexter. This fan prediction goes on to tie every single character from this season into a person from the prison during Dexter's death. This season is all a fever dream hallucination stemming from the injection.

Kurt is the one administering the injection. Angela is the head prison guard Dexter has a crush on. Teddy & Logan are the other prison guards. The rich oil tycoon they only show a couple times is the warden. Molly Park is a real reporter witnessing the execution to write a story about it. Angela's daughter is actually Astor. Ethan that got stabbed is actually Cody. They are watching the execution next to Harrison in the viewing room. The moment the white deer gets killed is the second the shot is injected. When Harrison shoots Dexter in the heart that's the moment his hallucinations end and he comes conscious again right before the moment of death and locks eyes with Harrison. It's a sadness that feels like getting shot through the heart.

The video goes into even more depth tying things together that happened this season and fits them into the hallucination. It's pretty wild. It fits so well I am just assuming this is what the show runner intended. And he just went so subtle with and chose not to reveal it. It just makes way too much sense to not be the real ending. Now if we get more Harrison seasons that blows this theory out of the water. But man what could have been. Just seeing quick cut shots of all the reveals flashing through before his heart stops. Just would have been perfect.

 

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To be honest, I didn't think the season would end the way it did. I kept expecting some kind of bullshit deus ex machina thing to happen. I guess I'll spoiler my additional thoughts:

Spoiler

I appreciate how things played out. It makes sense that after 10 years of not killing that Dexter would be so sloppy and have so much bloodlust that he would fuck things up so badly. The short lived series Patriot on Prime, which I recommend watching, described this as a jellyfish problem. You encounter a jellyfish, so you cut it in half, only to now have to deal with two jellyfish, and when you cut those two, you wind up with four jellyfish. I don't even think pre-season 5 Dexter would have gotten away with the murders because Iron Lake is way too small of a town. The point gets made in the original series that Miami is so big and riddled with crime that no one gives a shit when some dirtbag disappears. In Iron Lake, you do that, then you go from a population of 100 to 99 and suddenly you're wondering WTF happened. Not only did Dexter repeatedly fuck up, but Angela is a good cop. It's not that Miami Homicide aren't good cops, they're just distracted by all of the shit in Miami. 

It also made sense for Dexter's previous murders of innocent people to come back to haunt him. It happened again here and I'm glad Harrison called him out on his bullshit. Dexter's dark passenger is a lame cover up for being a fucked up whack job that is only interested in protecting himself and his "code" is also bullshit. It's a bummer that Logan had to die for that reality to finally come to light, but at least at the end Dexter got to see himself for who he really was.

I still don't know how I feel about Harrison being the one to put Dexter down. It does seem fucked up though that Angela tells him to leave and never come back, but she's not mad at Harrison. There were better ways to cover up what Harrison did, or hell, don't cover it up. Claim it was self defense because honestly, who knows what Dexter would have done. Harrison found out the truth about his dad and pulled the trigger. What judge or jury is going to do more than put an ankle bracelet on Harrison and order him to go to therapy. Part of me thinks that Iron Lake would be the best place for Harrison to remain because it's a small town, he can be in therapy, and he would have a healthy support system around him with Angela, her daughter, and people at the school. At the same time, maybe there's just too much darkness in Iron Lake with Dexter dying there, Logan dying there, everything Kurt did, etc.

And then at the same time as all of that, Harrison being out on his own leaves the door open to a season 2. Personally, I think this is where the story should end. Following Harrison's journey from here would make this into a lame spinoff of Dexter. It would just be a shitty Dexter Jr.

For the Breaking Bad fans out there, how many of you saw parallels between how Dexter ended and how Breaking Bad ended? It's not totally 1:1, but there are a lot of similarities. Not saying that's a bad thing because if you're going to borrow from something, borrow from one of the best.

Ultimately, this righted almost all of the wrongs from everything after season 4 of Dexter. It wasn't perfect, but it was still pretty good and that's all I wanted.

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So.

Spoiler

I am kinda glad that things ended the way they did.  Dexter has paid for his sins and things are finally balanced.

I don't think that NoFistJustFlips's concept works.  I don't think Dexter is the kind of person that loses himself in fever dreams, even if they are induced by lethal injection.  He's always hyper aware of where he is and who he is just like a good predator should.  In his last moments, Dexter got to feel like a normal human and made the sacrifice any parent would make for their child.  Even a kid as screwed up as Harrison deserves a chance to get better.

I think this end is fitting because in later seasons, Dexter has always struggled with the Code and it figures that he would finally abandon it in order to save himself.  I am a bit surprised that Angela let Harrison go.  You'd think that super detective Angela would've deduced that Harrison might have Dexter's tendencies (he broke a kid's arm FFS) and maybe gotten Harrison some psychiatric help or at least tried to clear the name of the kid that Harrison stabbed.

RIP Dexter Morgan and apology accepted, Clyde.  You gave Dex a better send off than his author did.  The last three Dexter novels really sucked.

 

Edited by J.T.
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12 hours ago, J.T. said:

 

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apology accepted, Clyde.

Exactly this. Was this season perfect? No. It could have done with an additional 3-4 episodes to really show Dexter's change in full. However, it shows that series' can be rescued like this.

I've never watched GoT, but you'd have to imagine crossover fans from that are watching this and just going SEE? SEE?! IT CAN BE DONE. (No idea how GoT ended).

Ultimately I'm extremely grateful we got this extra season, goes a long way to make me as a fan feel a whole lot better about the overall arc, and the bad taste in my mouth is finally gone.

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Just caught up on the last episode.

Spoiler

I thought this was mostly a great season with some big flaws. 

Kurtis Caldwell was certainly a great villain, though.

The one thing that bugged me the most was the episode, where Angela met Angel Batista. Just way too many coincidences in that one.

 

Who sent Angela the letter with the screws? Kurt? 

Even though we know Dexter killed Matt Caldwell and burned his body, Angela's scenario of how Dexter killed and burned Matt's body makes no sense with the clues she was given.

If Dexter burned the body, why was there only one single screw in his house? Makes a lot more sense that the same person who burned down his house, tried to frame Dexter for the murder.

 

Harrison murdering Dexter was always one possible scenario for the ending of the show, but does the way it happened actually make sense?

I thought either Kurt would become a kind of mentor to Harrison and he would get him to murder Dexter somehow or Harrison would catch Dexter in the act of murdering Kurt, which would lead to Harrison murdering Dexter or something else...

But basically Harrison tells Dexter, that he's only screwed up because of him and that Dexter never murdered anyone to save people.. and then he proceeds to murder someone himself... Why didn't he just let him run?

What was the point of the oil magnate character again? I guess he was just a red herring, but they just spent way too much time on him in the first few episodes for him to just never show up again in the latter episodes.

 

Edited by The Z
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Holy shit, I forgot about the super rich guy. I too thought there would have been something more to him. As for Angela:

Spoiler

It's definitely pretty suspect for how she would have known Dexter burned Matt's body. All the note said was that Dexter killed Matt. I liked how earlier in the season that Kurt knew it was ashes falling down and not snow, but not once did they ever let on that Angela knew the same. I suppose she's smart enough to know, but unless it's said, it doesn't really count.

That ties into another annoyance I had. Fair enough, Kurt figured Dexter burned the body. Hell, I'll even allow him to know where the body was burned, but how in the world would he have gotten into that furnace to fish out the titanium pins? Not only that, but those pins were in pristine condition. No soot marks or anything, so they would have to have been cleaned. That's probably something the showrunner didn't put much thought into, but Angela is such a good cop, Logan too for what its worth, and they never even dusted the pins for prints?

Still, it's bold of them to go the route of killing Dexter. They could have easily let Dexter go for the murder of Matt because there wasn't enough evidence to prove Dexter was guilty and then they could have done a follow up season where there's a massive effort to prove Dexter was the BHB, but then that treads too close to the books and the trial stuff.

 

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