Given the recent news of Showtime’s hit Dexter returning as a limited series, with Michael C. Hall reprising his most famous role as the serial killer with a code, it seemed worth reflecting on how the series ended. More specifically, it seemed worth re-watching that last episode, named “Remember The Monsters?”, with fresh eyes, ones that hadn’t just spent the past few months waiting patiently as Dexter Morgan desultorily plodded his way through a half-baked final season’s narrative in order to see if the show could stick the landing. At the time, it was nigh-impossible to avoid the general response from the audience at large when it came to assessing the quality of that final installment. You couldn’t help but imbibe the smog that was the overall reaction to it.
Because hoo boy, did people hate it. “One of the worst endings to a television show I’ve ever seen,” fumed The Atlantic. A “sloppy sendoff,” offered Variety. A “terrible end,” opined Vulture. Hell, we here at The A.V. Club hated it so much (“what was intended to be a gut punch felt more like a slap in the face”) that we ran a second review the day after the first, just to point out that the entire season already sucked so bad it was almost inevitable that the ending would be garbage (“What was once a horror program became farce…an awful ending to a coulda-been-great show”). If you were anywhere near the internet that week (or TV, or radio, and on and on), the stink fumes radiating off of the episode—and the vitriol that poured forth in response—were inescapable. Collectively, seemingly every Dexter viewer became Comic Book Guy in tandem.
And it’s the gift that keeps on giving through the years—the gift of rage, to be specific:
Even its generally diplomatic star, Michael C. Hall, eventually dropped little admissions into subsequent interviews acknowledging that, yeah, it may not have gone out on a particularly high note. In a conversation with The Daily Beast the following year, Hall said that he’d never even watched it, and ever-so-politely suggested the show’s writers may have run out of creative steam when it came time to wrap things up: “I think the show had lost a certain amount of torque. Just inherently because of how long we’d done it, because of the storytelling capital we’d spent, because our writers may have been gassed.” Sure, he may have been trying to keep with some vaguely generous motor-vehicle metaphor there, but the argument that your show’s writers were gassed is a pretty funny line.
But watching the finale again in 2020, two things become clear: One is that, yes, it’s definitely a bad episode of TV. The thing is not good, and should probably be locked in a time capsule to be opened at some undetermined future moment when humanity has created the TV-viewing equivalent of an mberry, turning crappy programming good the way those berries invert your taste buds. But it’s also noteworthy how much of what makes the ending lackluster was set in motion well before this episode brought it all home. The unearned stakes of Yvonne Strahovski’s Hannah McKay ending up with Dexter’s son, Harrison; the abrupt winnowing down of the voiceover (which the showrunners claimed they’d been slowly building to all season) utterly failed to land; the ignominious sputtering out of the Brain Surgeon storyline the series had mishandled; these were all time bombs of narrative nonsense just waiting for the conclusion to finally explode. Combine these things with the immediate post-viewing emotional letdown that ensued, and you can understand why people went HAM on it. So maybe it’s not the worst last episode of TV of all time, so much as it’s simply a dispiriting culmination of a bunch of dreadful things that came before.
Of course, there’s also the in-episode decisions to have Deb abruptly die offscreen, though not before assuring Dexter that nothing is his fault and he shouldn’t feel any guilt whatsoever, as well as having Dexter drive his boat into a literal hurricane, then somehow escape. Those are also choices, presumably ones to which the original Dexter showrunner—who is helming the revival series—is referencing in his publicly stated plan to “make that right.” So maybe it was somewhat fairly maligned.
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141 Comments
Utterly fucking awful. NONE of it worked. Hell, a compelling villain might have made it at least watchable, but there’s no reason to give a fuck about the “Brain Surgeon.”
That was seven years ago? I would have guessed two or three.
It feels equally just a year or two ago and also at the same time, like 50 years ago. 2020 is a temporal anomaly
We are truly in the dot in the i of the Jeremy Bearimy.
I feel like this might be the only poorly done finale I have never seen anyone defend. So effin’ awful.
Oh please, I think we all know Dexter was a project cooked up entirely by Vince Gilligan to ensure his finale would look amazing by comparison. It was a long game but it payed off big.
If we’re being honest, the show as never that good to begin with. It started out with an interesting premise in the first couple of seasons, but it was way too chickenshit to actually let that premise play out. Instead, the showrunners had to bend over backwards to make Dexter into some sort of hero. John Lithgow elevated season four, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, it was mostly a shit show.
Also, I’ll never forgive them for killing off Doakes.
i just finished watching it for the first time and agree with everything you said. except i was OK with doakes dying because he seemed like he was on a different show.
In that show police detectives are actually good at catching murderers.
Given the combination of the following: Doakes already hating Dexter, working out he was a serial killer, being ex-military I believe, a decent distance between him and Dexter and having his gun already drawn and pointing at Dexter (and did I mention he already hated him), I refuse to believe he wouldn’t have shot Dexter at least 10 times before he’d have been able to get anywhere near him.
I thought the first 2/3 seasons were very entertaining and delivered on their promise. Not exactly prestige tv, but good entertainment.I’m a bit curious how the show was “too chickenshit to actually let that premise play out”, when it pretty reliably delivered on the premise of “serial killer killer” (sometimes too much).
If we’re going to take the premise seriously, no one would actually approve of a serial killer going around killing people he suspects of being a serial killer. In better shows, like Breaking Bad or Sopranos, they more or less deal with the fact that the central anti-hero is in fact a terrible person, although they also play around with audience identification in interesting ways. Dexter just wasn’t smart enough of a show to accomplish that.
And in the earlier seasons, they suggest that Dexter is basically a psychopath who has to play act being a feeling human being, but eventually that gets discarded as well. At some point, they just decided to make him a superhero and to absolve him of his sins.
In better shows, like Breaking Bad or Sopranos, they more or less deal with the fact that the central anti-hero is in fact a terrible person, although they also play around with audience identification in interesting ways. Dexter just wasn’t smart enough of a show to accomplish that.I think that may not be the fault of the show so much as it being a product of a changing time in tv. If Dexter came around 5-10 years later, it’d be exactly what you’re describing. If it came around 5-10 years earlier, it’d be off the hook. It’s basically a procedural, with both detective work and night-stalking. I think the show was just pulp from the start, which makes me feel it didn’t squander an opportunity so much as it simply wasn’t Breaking Bad or the Sopranos.I think there’s definitely a turning point where the show decided it’d just spin its wheels until people lost interest. I mean, it’s a Shotime show; those things are known for going on for about a decade after we all stopped watching.
You’re right that part of the problem is expectation. I’m generally okay with watching a dumb show and just enjoying it for an hour. But I don’t think that’s how Dexter was discussed when it aired, during the supposed “Golden Age of Television.” I also have gotten sick of stories that try to probe the question of whether we want vigilantes running catching and or killing criminals because the obvious answer is, “No. No, we don’t.” With few exceptions (like the original Watchmen), it bugs me when superhero stories try to do this as well, and as others have noticed, Dexter basically became a superhero show. Usually, these kinds of stories are pretentious, and I use that word in how its actually defined, not just as a stand in for “too arty.” Too often the writers think they’re saying something profound about power and vigilantism, but the end results are almost always deeply stupid if you think about them for more than a few minutes.
I didn’t write it, so I’m just spitballing here, but the original premise was that Dexter was a true, affectionless psychopath who had been trained to just barely rein that in by a disciplined father figure. That is hard to write in a compelling way, but it is a bold choice that is virtually unheard of in a series protagonist, and potentially interesting in the hands of a show with balls of steel and brimming with writing talent.
By the last season, though, he had bonded with a dozen different people and had more close friends than the average internet commenter.
Agree with your first paragraph, but I don’t think I’d say that he “bonded” with people, other than his son. He simply stuck to his code very strictly.
I’d dispute that. “Don’t get caught” was like the first rule, and he routinely takes risks with/for Lumen, Brother Sam, Hannah, and Deb that jeopardize that. He confesses his infidelity to Rita when he doesn’t have to. He risks his life to save Astor and Cody. A half-dozen more I’m forgetting. If you really fanwank hard, you might be able to come up with alternate, non-emotional reasons for all of this, but I think you’re going to end up at odds with the performances and the show’s creative staff.
The problem was the premise was very unsustainable if you wanted to keep it interesting. For it to be fun, Dexter had to be close to getting caught at all times but you can’t sustain that over more then a few seasons before the series of Deus Ex Machina saving him every time gets to silly.
It’s a lot like the premise of Lucifer. The audience knowing the secret that the rest of the characters don’t is what creates all the dramatic tension, but that is unsustainable by definition.
Sounds about right. Remember when Dexter losing Rita meant it would be tougher for Dexter to go out and kill because now he had to watch them? Well the writers certainly forgot and even then they wrote those character out when things got too difficult.
Should have been a Netflix show!
I think it’s doable. The Shield is a good example of a show where the main characters were always hanging by a thread and it never felt like a Deus Ex Machina is saving them.
This is a great example. And the big difference between the two was that the Shield wasn’t afraid to cross the line in that first episode. The strike team committed an unforgivable act and that was the central thread for the entire run. Dexter had that opportunity with Doakes but chickened out.
Also, just the typical complaint of “just how many serial killers live in/come to Miami?”. It is borderline insane when you think about how many people Dexter has taken out in such a small area.
That’s the Midsommer Murders problem. If you lived in a rural English county and 1-4 people were brutally murdered every week, you might move
See also: Hannibal and how many serial killers are in Maryland
I think all the active killers in Maryland during the show were either Hannibal (The Chesapeake Ripper) or people who were copycats/obsessives of/proteges/pateints of Hannibal… or people who were brainwashed into believing they were the Chesepeake ripper/framed for being the Chesapeake ripper.
I’m pretty certain The Minnesota Shrike, Francis Dollarhyde, Lance Henrikson’s corpse totem-pole guy, Georgia Madchen, The Mural Maker , Mr. Mycelium, Mama Molly Shannon, the Angel Maker and the Horse-whisperer were all broadstroaks dispersed between New England, down to Florida and all the way over the Minnesota… I think Lance may have even Pacific Northwest…Also Hannibal’s ridiculousnesses are SOOOOO much easier to forgive because the damn thing was a fuckin’ abstract as fuck, surreal, Purple Prose’d nightmare realm Masterpiece of a show.
Using the observation that “The universe has a worrying proclivity for summoning up insane circumstances and characters in the general vicinity/orbit of Hannibal Lector on the show Hannibal” as a critique is akin to complaining that “There’s WAY too much fucking weird shit happening in the town of Twin Peaks on the show Twin Peaks!”
Yep, the show took a turn for the worse after season 4. I thought the premise became boring and the level of suspension of disbelief necessary to accept that Dexter wouldn’t have gotten caught yet went through the roof.
I always thought the finale would have been better if Dexter ended up getting killed by another serial killer killer who had figured out the Dexter was a serial killer, circle of life style.
Season 4 was terrible IMO and the only reason people think otherwise is because the only thing they remember about it is John Lithgow chewing the scenery. Season 4 was a mess; the pacing was terrible as the A-story ran out of material half way through the season and the B-story wasn’t particularly strong so several episodes end up being pure filler, it relied very heavily on unearned shock moments and gratuitous gore to keep people interested, and Dexter’s character kind of got ruined to put John Lithgow’s character over.If not for John Lithgow’s memorable performance nobody would remember Season 4 as anything other than a mess.
You’re probably right about the filler episodes and pacing. But dead Rita!?! At least there were some consequences to season 4.
Killing off Doakes was essentially what killed the show. With Doakes dead (not killed by Dexter himself) as well as pinning Dexter’s known murders on him removed all tension Dexter had working his day job. And sure, they tried to replace the Doakes role with that other guy but that barely lasted. And keeping Dexter clean in what would have been his most morally unrighteous kill was just to continue keeping him as “Murder Batman.”
But the Doakes scene gave us the one of the greatest hits of the Vine era:https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/agdpj8/surprise_motherfucker/
I mean… it became a clown show by season 2 when the premise was established that every major serial killer in the city would be personal friends with the department investigating them.
In a post-Breaking Bad world, Dexter would be a thorough character study that makes a bad person relatable. But, before that, you either made them low-key heroes or try to mostly ignore the real ramifications of their actions.
Never finished it. The seasons with Lithgow and Peter Weller were the best I have seen, but the premise really didn’t hold up well to stretching out for eight seasons.
It was kind of a trashy show – and dumb as donkey dick at points – but MCH was so perfect in the role it kept me watching. Even through that horrendous Collin Hanks season.
You’re spot on about Michael C. Hall. The show wouldn’t have lasted two seasons without him in the lead. I’m waiting for him to make his character actor turn.
I always wondered about the possibility of Dexter getting caught at some point. It could’ve been a hell of a final season depending on how they played it out -focus more on the hunt, or maybe his attempts to survive and/or escape before trial and sentencing? Lots of possibilities instead of what we got. I enjoyed the overall Dexter experience of it but it’s hard to come back at you with facts. Wasted potential…
It was fun trash that should’ve been more finite than it was- if it was four seasons and ended with Lithgow murdering Dexter’s wife, I’d be happy with that.
That is my official recommendation to people who ask how I liked Dexter (lol, just a few). Just stop at the end of Season 4.
Yeah, anything passed that point was so meandering- Edward James Olmos & Colin Hanks were pretty good in season 6 but post-Lithgow is just not fun any more.
I agree, the ending to season 4 was the perfect summation of the series. It was the last time there were consequences for his actions. He could never achieve the life he was fighting for because he couldn’t get past his own addiction/need. There were actual stakes. His son was left in the same manner he was.
They never actually dealt with any fall out. One episode of sad Dexter, ship the kids off and its back to normal. Same with seasons 7 and 8. A couple of episodes of Deb spiraling and then mostly back to normal.
Surprise Mothafucka!He was the true hero of the show.
killing Doakes was in the bookand it was worse: he had his eyelids removed, a mirror put in from of him and was dismembered while alive in the show he got blowed up
Presumably the new series will explain how he leaves the lumberjack trade, infiltrates a suburban family, and starts a laboratory in his bedroom.
And then Scott Buck, the showrunner for those horrible final three seasons, was given the chance to ruin Inhumans and Iron Fist.Never underestimate a hacky white dude’s ability to fail upward in Hollywood.
Damn Inhumans was bad. I fast forward watched just to complete it after it kept getting worse and worse.
It’s a crying shame, because they might not be my favorite Marvel characters, but there are certainly more bones in there for compelling stories than the friggin Eternals, and the opportunity was squandered.
Inhumans was impressive simply for having the power to make every one-hour episode feel like it took six hours to watch. It warped time and space and I’m pretty sure those eight hours took up most of my 30s.
The Absorbing Man was done correctly however
I liked the first season of Iron Fist better than the second, honestly, but I think they were trying to do a more cerebral thing when people really wanted kung fu. The best thing about season 2 was the ending with Danny and Ward in the bar, I wanted to see THAT story not Colleen yelling at Danny for using his fists to solve all the problems and then turning right around and doing the same exact thing.Inhumans was garbage, the only good thing about it was Lockjaw making an appearance and the Black Bolt FX.
Season 2 was all over the place but at least it was fun more often, and I had a lot of goodwill towards it for the out of left field Typhoid Mary storyline. But hard agree on them ending the season with a nod to the best run of the Iron Fist comic and then stopping before we got to see it.
The less fun thing is one of the reasons I liked season 1. It’s not often a super hero story goes with ‘Dude has horrible PTSD from watching his parents die and being tortured by crazy ass monks for a decade. Dude finally escapes said crazy ass monks only to find that the people he thinks of as family have totally screwed him over.’Season 2 didn’t have as much of the emotional heft for me. And yeah ending it on that just made me go ‘Holy shit why didn’t we get to see THAT instead of all this bs?’
To each their own, of course, but I found the first season boring and repetitive. Neither season is good in my mind, but I’ll take goofy pulp fun over boring any day.I’m legit glad if you did like the first season, it’s always great to learn that someone was able to find joy in something I didn’t. (Unless it’s, y’know, bigotry or Duke basketball.)
I’m still mystified as to why they didn’t cast an actual experienced martial artist (and preferably with stunt experience too) as Iron Fist. There had to be at least one who could also act well enough. Would have saved a lot of time for starters and yes, the actor did his best I’m sure under the circumstances but let’s face it, someone with years of experience as opposed to cramming it in a rush would have looked a lot better.
Finn Jones was definitely better with the martial arts aspect in Season Two. I also felt he had a better handle on the character rather than ping ponging between “naive” and “constipated.” I still feel he was used best in Defenders, even if that was the worst of all the Netflix shows.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if all the hacky White people got raptured, whether in entertainment, media, and/or gov’t.
i remember turning off dexter in the very first episode when he looked down at an empty box of donuts and went ‘empty, just like my soul.this article makes me very wistful for the pop culture writing landscape of 7 years ago. bring back disqus and pay more writers to write more articles instead of just snarky newswires, he said, to the void.
“pay more writers to write more articles instead of just snarky newswires, he said, to the void.”A fuckin men, brother.
Sounds like you and I both checked out of Dexter over doughnut scenes. At one point, the annoying Masuka(sp?)(who cares?) is eating doughnuts and Dexter sees jelly ooze out and it flashes back to his blood collection or some nonsense. The writing, casting, acting, set design, pace and overall vibe of the show was always garbage masquerading as HBO goodness. tl;dr – rabble rabble rabble
The Void is where us greys live.
That hatred was perfectly justified. That goes double for ‘True Blood’, and triple for ‘Sons of Anarchy’.
While we’re at it, fuck How I Met Your Mother too.
How I Met Your Mother is the Dexter of sitcoms.
HIMYM would’ve been much cooler if it ended like Dexter.
There are three series that I vehemently complain about the endings of for the better part of the last decade: Dexter, HIMYM, and Bleach. But at least for Dexter and Bleach, the overall series quality had been going downhill for me, and I had basically hate watched/read it them until the end. HIMYM’s bad end was due to an ambitious but misguided goal of committing to an end they had wrote/filmed before running for 8 seasons.
That’s exactly the problem. It hadn’t been at its best since season 5 (was Jennifer Morrison season 6? That’s when it starts to drag and every new renewal felt like a kick in the balls) but it would still pull out the occasional episode to remind you what it was capable of – Robin’s children “flashfoward” for example. But otherwise all the characters were turning into cartoons – at one point we were being told Robin actually went out and fought crime? But the idea of a pre-planned and semi pre-filmed ending was intriguing – except that the series had naturally evolved along a different path over the seven years since they decided it. By the end the Robin and Barney stuff was what was keeping the series together – to the point where the whole final season was set on their wedding day – and then, twenty minutes into the finale, that was tossed aside, they were divorced and the show skidded awkwardly into the Robin and Ted storyline everyone had moved past half a decade earlier. Also, a lesson to other showrunners – don’t mock other endings to hype up your own. Lost’s showrunners made fun of The Sopranos’ ending (something like “Ours won’t fade to black!”) and then landed their finale with a fan thud. At which point the HIMYM guys stood on the Lost corpse to announce that, unlike that one, theirs would be great because they had the ending planned from the start. Nowadays The Sopranos is held up as a classic and iconic finale, Lost’s is at least still debated – though “mixed” is probably the overall feeling – and HIMYM seems to have dragged the whole series down with it and now only comes up when people want to discuss how Barney wouldn’t be allowed on TV in this era.
I’ve mentioned this before (and possibly it was a reply to you!) where quite by chance a UK show coincidentally beat Lost by two days with a thematically a very similar finale except the light of the beyond that they got to pass into was a very nice pub entrance and the lead character even got to headbutt the Devil in the face! Loads better all up.
If it wasn’t too me then I definitely remember replying! For a show that took a while to find its feet, it managed to pull off a stunning finale – that it did so with similar themes and reveals as Lost and with much more impact is even more impressive. (I’m intrigued by the news there’ll be a new ‘final’ series of the parent show, considering how well this one wrapped up the mythology)
yeah, when he made QUICK TRIP to Europe to inject herthat was a SHARK JUMP
Not only that, it would have been SOOOO EASY to not make that mistake… literally just don’t film the last episode and call the second to last episode the finale, clock out early and have a beer! Some of these other shows were backed in a corner narratively but HIMYM actually pulled it off by wrapping up the major arc of the show elegantly earlier in the final season (when what’s his name finally gets over the other one that he loved the whole time or whatever, I’ve kinda blanked that stuff from my brain).
I rewatched HIMYM, but with my new head canon that Ted is a serial killer that kidnapped those children and has been regaling them with stories about how he met their “mother” for the past eight years.
Wait really? It never fails to boggle my mind how many people couldn’t see “the Mother is dead” from at least a few miles out.
The show spent the entire run telegraphing it! I swear, they couldn’t have been more obvious if they had Neil Patrick Harris hold up a sign that said “She’s dead” during the Super Bowl.
I for one was fine with the Mother being dead.
Mostly I thought it was really misguided to spend multiple episodes in earlier seasons exploring why the narrator and Robin aren’t a good match and then more episodes showing them getting over each other then in the finale blowing up her relationship & going “Robin & Narrator forever!!”
The mother being dead is the least of my issues (you’re right, it had been an obvious twist for years), though the off-handed “Eh, fuck it, get that bit over with and let’s get on with it” attitude towards it was definitely more of an example of the writers sticking to decade-old plans regardless of what the show had become (similar to “fuck it, Barney and Robin are divided now! Move on!”). That was something that needed to breathe a hell of a lot more.
I have multiple incantations in place to push it out of re-entering memory at all times. I don’t even know what we’re talking about! I’m happier this way.
It’s interesting because there are bad endings that are terrible, but I can happily ignore to still enjoy the earlier good elements. And then there are the bad ones that retroactively ruin any enjoyment I might have gotten…
By the end, I was just hate watching Sons of Anarchy. That show went so far off the rails, but by that point I was too invested to just walk away.
I ask every person I meet who is rocking some SOA imagery if they’ve actually seen the horrendous ending…few have
True Blood is baffling, because while the books jumped the shark with the fairy shit too, at least where Sookie ends up makes sense.
You know what show was damn near perfect the whole time? Justified.
This is true. There may have been a handful of dud episodes, but they didn’t ruin the seasons they were attached to.
There was a Youtube video about why so many series have bad endings and it was interesting what they decided was the cause. The theory is that a long running TV show ending was basically a breakup and the best breakups end with closure. Sadly so many ends of series don’t give good closure and remembering the good times. They also contend that the twist ending(which is popular in movies) hurts TV because its a much bigger betrayal to the audience if the twist wasn’t setup well over 5+ seasons.
Also, television in the US is basically a finance-driven model. If something sells, the network wants to keep it on the air, and the writers have to keep throwing chum in the waters to keep the audience’s attention. By the time the show gets low enough in the ratings to be canceled, the writers have either run out of ideas or departed for other shores, leaving other, usually less-talented people to pick up their slack. Compare British TV where shows often make their point in a couple of seasons and get out, Who and Vera notwithstanding.
And on the opposite end of it sometimes shows getting cancelled brings out the best in them. Nobody would say Dollhouse is a good show, but because they knew that they weren’t going to get a third season they crammed all the best ideas they had planned to use over the next five years into season two creating a show that was at least pretty interesting
Even earlier than that, when they didn’t think they had a second season of Dollhouse, they did that season finale that blew up their show’s whole world in the most satisfying way possible. I loved how season 2 just seemed to speed up exponentially as it went along. Wasn’t there also a sitcom where they ended up doing a lot of really crazy stuff after they realized that no one at the network really cared what they did?
A sitcom doesn’t leap to mind, but it’s similar to the story of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension—early on in production, they got constant studio notes regarding the daily footage turned in. As it went on, they got less and less feedback. After it had been quiet for a bit, they went out to a market, bought a watermelon, stuck it in the middle of a scene for no reason, and had a character comment on the random watermelon. When the studio didn’t respond to that, they knew nobody was watching them and they could make whatever they wanted.
Nobody’s watching: The strange genius of the fourth season of From 2010!Also, check out the byline. Have Nussbaum and VanDerWerff merged into a single preternaturally verbose uber-critic, so as to engage in one endless Crosstalk? ‘Cuz I’d love that.
That’s the one! Thanks! 🙂
and really, Doctor Who changes its cast quite a bit though, so it sort of feels new when the new showrunner starts
That’s why my favorite TV show finale is… *drum roll*…
Monk
Community had an excellent final episode, I was almost mad at it for capping off the series so well because I truly knew it was the end.On the other end of my personal spectrum, Battlestar Galactica went from my favourite ever season of television (Season 1) to plunging into the absolute depths. Season 4 was horrendous (though if the writers strike had ended it on that beach in episode 10, that would have been OK in retrospect given what came next) and the last 10 episodes were abysmal leading to finale that was an abomination.
I think my favorite season finale is Angel – dark, but satisfying, which was fitting for that show. Or maybe Legend of Korra? There’s lots of animated shows with good endings – Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Avatar, etc. My least favorite finale (since I didn’t stick things out til the end with Dexter or GoT, never watched Lost) is probably Battlestar – they just had too many ideas they’d thrown in there with no actual plan of what they were going to do with it all (which was ironic given their “they have a plan” narration that opened each episode – near the end I’d shout “no they don’t!”).
I think ending a series is hard, regardless of the medium – some people go into things with some idea of where the total arc is going, but the ones who don’t aren’t always good at figuring out how to wrap stuff up. That’s why they stall out later in the series (*cough*George RR Martin!*cough*).
Oh! For favorite series enders, can’t believe I forgot The Good Place – now that was a show that managed to have constant twists and major paradigm shifts without ever losing their narrative thread. Such an impressive bit of long form storytelling.
The Good Place’s ending was both perfect but I don’t think I can rewatch it any time soon. Its the ultimate closure and super sweet but I can’t deal with the emotions of Chidi’s “Waves returning to water” speech right now.
As someone who was a Dexter fan I wouldn’t call it prestige TV but a fun crime show that sometimes thought it was more clever than it actually was. I will defend those first four seasons but once you got past the season with John Lithgow the show takes a massive drop in quality. I don’t think I even bothered watching the last two seasons.
I think Showtime gets lumped in with ‘prestige TV’ just because they are a cable network but I’m not sure they’ve ever had a show that really qualifies for that label. Perhaps if they didn’t drag shows out way past their expiration date. The first three seasons of Homeland are probably prestige TV but the rest of the run taints it. Shameless, Weeds, Ray Donovan.. all have the same issue. It’s probably for the best that Kidding was canceled before overstaying its welcome.(I’ve never watched Billions so I can’t speak to whether it deserves the ‘prestige’ label.)
I forgot about Shameless and now I’m sad. Loved that show so much I stayed on way past when I should have called it quits and that was like five seasons ago.
Billions tries to be an HBO show but really only copies the aspirational lifestyles and hokey celebrity cameos of the likes of Entourage and The Sopranos .
Oh man, the cameos. So many cameos.
I think that Showtime just has a weaker library. Once they have something that clicks, they run that shit into the ground. I can’t think of a Showtime series that I didn’t just watch the last few years out of curiosity, not fascination.
I remember watching in horror as Weeds jumped the shark immediately in season 4.
In 2020 people really really hate the Dexter finale.
To be fair I definitely hadn’t thought about it for years until the news about the show coming back. It reminds me of how bad everything post season 4 sucked and all the time I wasted watching the show during those years.
Like everything before 2020, I will have to recalibrate the suck-o-meter on things I judged harshly before this year.
Why isn’t Treadmill a collective term like jumping the shark? I still stand in awe that such a scene was approved.
Dexter jumped the shark like 4 times, it’s hard to pick the treadmill as the standout one.It’s hard to believe a number of people thought the scene was good enough to film though.
The contrast between Dexter and Breaking Bad’s final seasons, which were running at the same time, was amazing. For reference, Dexter’s finale came the week after Ozymandias.
Ozymandias is the true Breaking Bad finale. The last two episodes are just epilogue.
To this day I’m still not a fan of the Breaking Bad finale, but I’d have to watch it again to try and figure out how much of that is actual issues with the finale itself and how much of that is just that Ozymandias was so tremendous that it was impossible to follow. Aside from needing to provide a proper ending for Jessie, I feel that Ozymandias could have been a perfect ending on its own.
Okay, I admit I watched it all the way through last year once I got Netflix. I watched a season or two on whatever premium channel it was on originally but dropped it when I dropped that channel.I guess I got a bit compulsive and just had to go all the way. Despite reading the reviews here as I went along. So yes I was warned.Two things stuck with me.1. They ruined “Venus” with the season with Lithgow. And almost ruined “Make Your Own Kind of Music” and I like Cass Elliot.2. That look on his face in the final scene of the last episode. I thought “That is one angry dude.” So I just had a feeling that he was not going to stop even if there was never going to be a sequel.
I recently watched the entire Dexter run after never even seeing an episode, and I thought the finale was … fine. I think it’s the difference between watching a show week by week — dealing with your own expectations for where YOU would take a story — vs. watching it like a really, really long movie that you don’t know much about and are interested in just seeing where the plot takes you.
This has nothing to do with how sloppy the final season might have been — I could make that case for ANY of the seasons. And I thought the idea of sending someone like Dexter into the Pacific Northwest with absolutely no connection to humanity — or possibly his code — and letting him “just live” was frightening. The final shot of him staring blankly into the camera I took to mean that Dexter did die in the hurricane, and the guy living alone in an area where people can disappear and no one would ever notice is just the dark passenger doing whatever the fuck he wants. It makes you realize, wait, I’ve been rooting for a serial killer, and that’s kind of horrible.(PS I don’t get a shit about his kid. “He gave him to a serial killer.” You mean the serial killer gave him to a serial killer? OK. The kid is better off without him. And while I wasn’t too crazy about his sister, either, I agree her death was not handled great from a storytelling POV. But I kind of wish they’d both had been written off sooner, because Deb was a bit of a drag for most of the show.)
My son is named Dexter (born after season 6, I am compelled to point out) so a small part of me was relieved the show ended as badly as it did, to save him from being asked about it.I gave up hope early in season 8 and just watched out of obligation, but my wife held on to the bitter end, and her utter disgust afterwards was sad to see (yet entertaining).We are cautiously optimistic for the revival ONLY because Clyde Phillips is involved.
Saying people “hated on” it implies that was an incorrect opinion.
I never understood how people were disappointed by the finale, when the entire show had been shit for years. Surely no one was genuinely expecting they could suddenly pull a decent episode out of the bag at the end?
That’s why I legit loved the last episode – it was always going to be bad because it was an episode of Dexter, but it was so incredibly bad that it was hilarious, which was the perfect way to go. A “good” ending would have been undeserved.
Season One of Dexter was awesome from beginning to end. It was a daring premise and a great story well told and well acted; some of the best television I’ve ever seen.Every subsequent season is a decline in quality.Really, the only part of Dexter worth watching is S1, and I consider S1 a must-watch. Watch it. Ignore all the rest because watching the rest only ruins the greatness of that first season.
Yeah, exactly correct.
I never watched the series, but your description makes it sound like it should have been a limited series. A lot of shows that would have been great mini-series/limited series crash and burn because they keep on going.
I would generally agree, though the next few seasons after that had interesting ideas (what if someone who really hates the shit of Dexter also almost catches him; what if someone catches him in the act but then wants to join him [the Smits season]; what if John Lithgow is awesome at playing a serial killer) but it crashed into a wall after that. So I would say watch season 1, and season 4, and get outta Dodge afterwards.
“it’s also noteworthy how much of what makes the ending lackluster was set in motion well before this episode brought it all home.”
I guess it’s noteworthy if you didn’t experience the three years of absolute garbage that preceeded the finale.
Hell, we here at The A.V. Club hated it so much (“what was intended to be a gut punch felt more like a slap in the face”) that we ran a second review the day after the firstAnd now you’re running a new thing, 7 years later, which says the same thing once again!It’s the gift that keeps on giving!
Since the show got bad partway through the second season and got boringly bad early in the third, mainly what I remember about it was that it was obvious Dexter’s sister was in love with him, that it was clearly in the heads of the writers at all times, and when I heard about the last episode and people flipping out about it, I realized for the first time, in my young and naive mind, that TV viewers were never going to detect subtext.
Okay, partially minority opinion here. I was okay with Dexter becoming a lumberjack. I don’t think that he deserved a happy ending, he was a serial killer and had done a ton of bad shit, even outside of his code. Now, everything else, yeah, it was crap.And seriously, killing of Doakes was awful. He was such a good character.
I dunno… I may be too sentimental to hate it too much… Dexter and True Blood (I can’t decide if True Blood was worse overall than Dexter, or if its campiness and huge cast of super hotties keep it just ahead) were two shows that my best friend and I would watch together. She passed away from complications from MS a couple years ago and I remember the time we spent together watching those shows fondly, so I can’t hate either of those shows too much. I won’t say it was a good finale, but I didn’t hate it as much as I hated the last 3 seasons of Game of Thrones, which I did NOT watch with my friend.
The worst last episode of a TV show was the HIMYM finale. I’ll never watch the last 5 minutes of that show again, and I’ve watched the entire rest of that show at least 15 times.The best worst last episode is the finale to Lois & Clark, which was totally baffling and I think I’m still kinda laughing about it.
I haven’t watched any of HIMYM, but doesn’t the ending taint it for you? I haven’t gone back and watched Dexter since the finale, and won’t ever watch another second of LOST for the same reason.
I only watched the ending the one time, and since it finished airing 6 years ago I have mostly been able to put it out of my mind. I probably stayed away from the show for about three years after the finale, but that show is deeply ingrained in me as a comfort show so I have since returned to it. I think it is a little bit different from Dexter or LOST in that regard, there probably aren’t a ton of people putting on LOST for cheer in the background while they fold laundry or fall asleep.
It doesn’t for me. It’s not a grest ending but i don’t think it’s bad so much as misguided. They were committed to the ending they partially filmed and chose early on but hadn’t realised the surprise renewals had moved them past that years before. There is too much genuinely enjoyable material throughout the show to let a few minutes spoil that.
He’s a lumberjack, and I’m not OK.
Just discovered Dexter is on Netflix and I’ll probably have to do a quarantine rewatch of the first four seasons. Help.The last few seasons did Deb dirty in so many ways, not the least of which the quickly dropped plot thread of her wanting to bang her foster bro. I always thought Dexter should have brought Deb into the fold, considering her character seemed to be trending that way, anyway. At that point, having Deb get killed or caught would have actual dramatic weight.
I stuck with it all the way down the hill after S4, in the hope that he would get caught and we’d get to see the people he worked with have to deal his deceiving them for so long.
And then seeing how the media and public reacted to the idea of serial killing serial killer.
The fact that they could do that with the revival rekindles a spark of that hope.
Based on the discussion around the Dexter revival, I don’t think any of us have forgotten how terrible the finale was. (And also the last four seasons)
One of the greatest stretches of AVC reviews that last awful season.
I read somewhere that the writers wanted to kill Dexter – having him visited by all the people he killed (or as many as they could cast for the finale) as he was being strapped to the gurney and getting the lethal injection – and hence losing consciousness as he saw them.However, the executives forbade them from killing him leading to … well, what they ended up doing with lumberjacks and all that.
Right after I finished this article I started learning about Node.js middleware including a logger install called “morgan”. I think they nailed the documentation…
You people have it all wrong. Dexter’s finale is actually a subtle work of genius that ties it in with another famous serial killer show creating a shared universe that we unfortunately never got to see due to cancellation.As we all know Dexter survives a hurricane and moves to the Pacific Northwest to work as a Lumberjack. Now thanks to a famous Monty Python song we all know what Lumberjacks like to do when off-shift, ergo Dexter was actually set up to be Hannibal’s Buffalo Bill!
That this stupid show gets another season and not Hannibal is an unforgivable travesty.
I wonder how the size of the audience compared. I mean, no one has Showtime, right? So a NBC show with awful ratings probably still had more viewers than Dexter. (Also, I agree)
Bryan Fuller’s epitaph will hint that season 4 is still a possibility just to fuck with us all.
I still can’t believe that show was on NBC primetime. Easily the most gorey and violent network show of all time.