DEXTER Morgan has hung up his knives, torn down the polythene walls of his mobile kill room and said goodbye to Miami.
I was drawn to the early series, nice premise: serial killer avenging angel who kills only those who slip through the fingers of true justice whilst working inside the police department. It was always cheesy, the dialogue would clunk along but there was enough in those early series to keep me watching. But gradually the clunky dialogue got worse and the murdering monster of the week format was replaced by increasingly implausible storylines - ok they were always pretty implausible but somewhere after John Lithgow's turn as the mad murderer things on Dexter took a turn for the worse.
As the show made more illogical leaps I jumped ship. There's only so much plot exposition I can take from characters lips. No longer did they show, they relied increasingly on tell. Characters walked around telling each other the plot. And telling. And telling. Enough.
Dexter and I had parted company.
And then I saw the billings for The Final Series. I dipped back in. Boy oh boy. Had I misremembered the early series or had it always been this bad. Extraordinary gruesome things would happen and characters would have almost no emotional reaction. Jeeze, even if you worked for the police department surely you'd recoil at the sight of a dead body with a great melon slice taken from the back of the head? Wouldn't you? Not these characters. It was almost like they were reacting to a newly baked cupcake - despite the plethora of baking shows on TV you can't get emotionally excited about pastries.
Dexter became a show where the shark wasn't jumped once or twice, it was jumped in almost every other scene. Nothing made any sense any more.
Is this what happens when you extend the life of a series way beyond the potential for stories or was it laziness or - I'm worried by the thought - did they actually think this was good? Please god no.
The Final Series was car crash TV for me. I hated myself for looking but I had to. There was so much wrong but as we all know we learn more from the disasters than from the triumphs of screenwriting.
We writers struggle with our own plots and characters and stories; desperate that we stay the right side of the cheesy, the cliched, the hackneyed, it ain't as easy as you'd imagine. We need a slap to keep us on the right road.
Dexter's demise is the slap we all need.
I watched the whole last series. We laughed, we shouted at the TV, we groaned and we fiddled with phones and computers whilst trying to ignore the utterly dreary bits. The plotting and shooting of Ed Wood's greatest work 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' was starting to look sensible alongside Dexter's final antics. But I have to admit that I thought - wrongly - that they'd surely hit their stride again for the last ever episode. His past would crawl from the shadows, he would face a final reckoning, Dexter would not get out of this alive.
Well...
It turned out to be a hilarious mess that really didn't have any story left to tell. His sister Deb, who'd been shot but seemed to be okay, suddenly took a turn for the worse - in yet another off-screen moment - her demise was reported by a doctor who was there when it happened (I'm actually laughing out loud now). Dex's foul-mouthed sister had shuffled off her mortal coil (Deb was almost always believable and one of my favourite characters).He sent his son off with his new (mass murdering) love to Argentina (much had been made of them all fleeing to the sanctuary of South America, though why in God's name any of them thought that was a good idea was never explored).
Then he went looking for Deb's killer in jail and killed him in the full glare of the prison cctv - an action brushed off by Miami PD as 'obviously self defence, off you go'. Any attempt at police procedural went out the window, boarded a motor boat and headed off out to sea.
And that's where Dexter headed. Out to sea, into the force of a hurricane heading for Florida, Deb's dead body on the back seat. Having dispatched his sister to a watery grave he hit the throttle and pointed his boat - The Slice of Life - towards the storm.
When his demise was discovered by his new love 'in Argentina' whilst browsing her tablet in a coffee shop in downtown Buenos Aries her reaction was in keeping with all the other emotional reactions to death in this series. Hardly a flicker. No sign of shock, barely a watery eye, nada. Instead she turned to Dexter's son and said. "Let's get some ice cream".
The whimper was almost complete - but hang on, what's this:
Cut to
Ext. Loggin camp - Day
A bearded guy climbs down from his log-laden truck. We glimpse him, he looks a bit like Dexter.
Oh my god! It IS Dexter. He's not dead after all !
We follow him back to his log cabin and -
(I'm ahead of the writers now, he'll go inside, pick up his phone and make a call to South America. The beard tells us enough time has passed, any trail to his mass murdering love will have gone cold. Dexter, his lover and his son can be a family at last).
Uh, no.
This is it. No twist on the twist.
He looks at camera and we
Cut to black.
What began as a dark and interesting show ended on a note soap opera would be proud of.
Dexter. R.I. P
(please, no resurrections)
