Dexter

[estringrose]

I miss the first and fourth seasons. This one is pretty awful.

[onthewall2983]

I haven't seen one episode of this season and don't care to, but I am curious about what's happened. Is there someone that can do a summarization of the season up until now for me?

[Broadbent]

I haven't seen one episode of this season and don't care to, but I am curious about what's happened. Is there someone that can do a summarization of the season up until now for me?

Deb Quit the force then rejoined. She's back with Quinn. Hannah Mckay escaped from prison, and stole a bunch of money. She's hiding out at Debs for now, and then her and Dexter are going to flee to Argentina. But Dexters gotta kill this dude first. There's also a federal marshall hunting Hannah and is on to Dexter. That's about it.

[r_z]

Some guy on reddit did a pretty good write up of what's happened so far:

• Batista is back at Metro for no real reason and Deb quit and is now Deb the bounty hunter, and she's doing coke now and banging the guy she's hunting until Dexter just straight up kills him while Harrison's in the car.
• Meanwhile, there's another new serial killer in Miami who does artsy shit with corpses. This brings us Dr. Vogel, who they introduce at Miami Metro just so you'll think she's a threat to Dexter for a minute, but really she just needs his help killing the Brain Surgeon, who she doesn't know is actually her own son who faked his own death a long time ago.
• The Brain Surgeon has traveled back to America in his mid 40's and is killing his mom's old patients and leaving her brain chunk valentines instead of just calling her.
• Dexter can't find the Brain Surgeon, but kills 2 of her old patients along the way, one of whom is a cannibal and the other one is a serial killer, who got so mad that Dexter was following him, he kidnapped Vogel and almost cut her toes off, but luckily Dexter killed him with his mattress spear right in front of Deb and Vogel. He also had a fucking scar on his head that matched the Brain Surgeon head cut thing. Why not.
• Quinn's still around, but now he's banging Batista's sister. He's also on the hunt for a new murderer in Miami, this time it's a mini Dexter and also happens to be one of Vogel's patients, Zach Hamilton.
• Deb spirals out of control and drives Dexter and herself into a lake and decides to save him. We never see any consequence for this action.
• Dexter starts hunting Zach at the same time as Quinn, and they even catch each other stalking him at the same time. Dexter is about to kill Zach but then decides instead of killing him, he'll teach him his fucking code and they'll be little killers together. He spends about 7 minutes a year with his real son, but why not take on this little Zach guy. It'll be a fun little side project.
• There is also a multiple episode arc where Masuka has a long lost daughter from donating sperm and he does a background check on her, she finds out, he sees her tits, she calls him 'dad' and he gives her a job in the lab.
• Deb and Dex reconcile, and eat some food together. Food that has been poisoned at some point by Hannah McKay.
• Hannah is back in Miami, she wants to make sure Dexter won't turn her in, and needs Dexter's help but instead of using words, she drugs Dexter and Deb and dumps him on the side of the road, naturally.
• In one episode, we learn that Hannah is now not only out of prison, but married to a millionaire. She kills him in the same episode and Dexter helps her dump the body. Oh and Deb saw them.
• Back to the Brain Surgeon, Vogel's son. He's been stalking Vogel and Dexter, in whatever free time he has from working and trying to seriously date Dexter's neighbor Cassie only to end up killing her. Someone also took the time of putting Zach Hamilton's blood under her nails which they collected from his door handle.
• Dexter and Hannah are now totally in love again even though she wasn't really mentioned in any of the first 6 episodes. They go on a little getaway to find Zach. It turns out Zach's innocent.
• Deb followed them on that journey to arrest Hannah. She finds them in a plastic covered room with Zach Hamilton. Hannah tells Deb, who she poisoned a few days ago, to go away because she loves Dex. Deb just decides 'fuck it' and bails.
• Dexter, Hannah and Zach go have dinner with Dr. Vogel. Dexter takes Hannah home, bangs her in his socks and then returns to his apartment where he finds Zach minus some of his head. Vogel's son did this in keeping with his "saw off part of my mom's patients' heads" gag that he does. He left the corpse in Dexter's apartment because he hates Dexter for some reason.
• Hannah and Deb are BFF's now and Hannah is hiding in Deb's apartment of all places while Deb's boss is hunting for Hannah. Makes sense.
• Whenever the Brain Surgeon came to kill Zach, during the struggle Zach managed to somehow meticulously place a large chunk of DNA right under his desk. Dexter places the DNA in his computer, types 'enhance' and we find out that the Brain Surgeon is Vogel's son. Now Vogel doesn't want to kill him, she wants to meet up with him and hang.
• Dexter decides he wants to move away with Harrison and Hannah, but he's gonna kill Oliver Daniel Saxon Vogel first, who is chilling at home with Vogel now.

• Vogel and her 'perfect psycopath' (full body cringe) son the Brain Surgeon have breakfast and she's trying to get sentimental with him but he's all mean now because he's gotta stay scary. I thought that was weird. He was all creepy and 'mommy' at the end of the last episode, but now he's shifted. He needs her help to make him like Dexter. Even though he hates Dexter. I think. Oh fuck who cares.
• Masuka's daughter is getting high. It's the third to last episode of Dexter and they're throwing in pointless dead end sub-sub-subplots. Maybe there will be an intervention in the next episode and she'll go off to rehab for the finale. Predictions?
• Dexter quits Miami Metro in an anticlimactic soft fart of a scene and Batista is your typical Batista in it and he's like 'door's always open bro' fedora hug
• Dexter tells Deb he's moving away and that's another big whatever scene. Deb makes a weird slanted Deb face in it though and I laughed.
• Then we find ourselves in the scary Brain Surgeon's secret lair so we can showcase how super scary he is. They're really shoving the 'hey mom I'm going to kill you very soon' thing into our face.
• Quinn and Jamie break up because all she wants to do is ride his boner and make him food.
• Then Dexter the super hero uses his most useful superpower, his ability to make whatever convenient information he needs appear on a computer screen. Harry reads over his shoulder and makes sure the viewer always knows exactly what's going on.
• Dexter's Ghost Dad who killed himself when he realized what his son had become, is still persuading him to kill people in his miserable afterlife.
• A new character is looking for Hannah. She is inside doing dishes with all the windows open.
• Hannah takes Dexter's human bourdon to the hospital in her regular Hannah gear and no disguise whatsoever even though she knows she's a goddamn fugtive and is actively being closed in on.
• The Brain Surgeon is having tea with his mom who is luring him there so Dexter can kill him. At first she wanted to be a mommy, but then she saw a video of her son doing what she already knew he did to Zach so she's now ok with him dying.
• She invites her son over for tea and lights the room up nice and scary for the viewer. A single spotlight glares down on her little tea set. It gave off an Are You Afraid of the Dark vibe.
• The Brain Surgeon, who we are supposed to believe harbored hatred for his mother for most of his life, has gone through incredibly elaborate schemes to fuck with her, basically slits her throat without a second thought and uses her as a scary prop so he can fuck with his real target, a guy named Dexter he doesn't know at all.
• Dexter runs in and the other guy does a ninja vanish, or just kind of watches and snickers while Dexter hugs the dude's dead mom.

[onthewall2983]

I got confused reading that but thank you.

[M1ke]

I got confused reading that but thank you.

That's fine, the rest of us got confused watching it.

[OSLIN]

Early prediction, Dex ends up on the table.

[onthewall2983]

That's fine, the rest of us got confused watching it.

My sympathies.

[Archive_Reports]

Fuck this show. What a waste of time.

[estringrose]

^ My thoughts exactly.

[OSLIN]

1000 ways to end this show and this is what you decide. So I'm confused, the best thing for your child is to abandon him in a foreign country with a fugitive serial killer. Good one.

[OSLIN]

Also, aren't people gonna wonder where Harrison is? Like he's brother, sister, grandparents. Worst writing on a series finale ever.

[M1ke]

[thevoid99]

So that's what the show's come to.... FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!!

[RJK]

Complete cop-out ending. Super lame.

This show should have ended after season 4. That season was amazing, everything after has been bullshit.

[JessicaSarahS]

Pathetic and uninspired ending. What a waste.

[DVYDRNS]

ugh. this was not what i was hoping for...

[spiralout]

Im with everyone else....what a bullshit ending that was. What a bullshit season that was. What was the payoff? Deb dying? Only to be carried off in front of everyone, by her brother that just killed someone in a police station, onto a boat and dumped in the ocean. Then he becomes a lumberjack?

Fuck.

[oldschool]

I actually thought the finale was a step above the rest of this season.

By no means was it good or a fitting ending for where this show was at years ago. But given the ultra low bar it had set for itself in the last few weeks/seasons, this episode was at least an OK ending.

It's so clear the show's producers lost the plot a long time ago. Scott Buck's been the show runner during the show's decline. Every time I read an interview from him, I'm left saying, "This guy doesn't get it." I think he was creating a very different show than the one we thought we were watching.

For example, he once said Deb falling in love with Dexter was something they had been leading into for a long time. Ummm ... no.

Anyway, his interview with Entertainment Weekly on the finale is interesting, if not sometimes infuriating.

Take for example this response:

Have to ask: How did Dex get from his boat to the shore in the middle of a hurricane?
BUCK: Hopefully it’s not a question that will be examined too closely. The show has always been a half step away from reality; it’s a hyper-reality. We established there is an emergency life raft with an outboard motor on the boat. He could have gotten in the raft and made it safely to shore.

Now look, I'm OK with a show like this existing as fiction. I'm OK with some small holes and reality being stretched. But this show has become just riddled with holes in recent seasons. It's really hard to accept that your entire show that has been building up for eight seasons turns on something you say hopefully doesn't get examined too closely.

WHAT?

Do you even want people to think about your show at all?

I don't care that they did mention the emergency raft earlier. It's not like it was something worth noticing. I pay attention to the details in Breaking Bad because we as an audience have been trained to believe that they matter. Dexter lost that a long, long time ago. How many worthless characters (Louis Green, Mike Anderson) have come and gone from the show while adding next to nothing to the overall plot. How much time have we wasted on Quinn's romances or Masuka's daughter with no payoff?

Sigh ...

[JessicaSarahS]

Uuugh, the earlier seasons were much better because they were grounded in reality.

[ChasingTheGhost]

I can't fucking believe they did that. I'm just gonna imagine season 8 never happened.

[Deepvoid]

I have to admit that I was actually disappointed with the ending. This is definitely not the type of closure I was looking for. Wondering how Michael feels about it. He can't be blown away by how things ended.
I actually almost stopped watching before the lumberjack scene. I thought the suicide ending would have actually been better.

Still I have to agree with OSLIN's post above. The best idea he could come up with was leaving his son with a fugitive serial killer?? Gee ...

[imail724]

So Dexter drops that backpack in the airport and nobody sees him do it, nor do they have any security cameras showing him do it.
Saxon kills that guy in the middle of a populated parking lot and steals his truck, plenty of people walk/drive by, nobody sees him do it.
Dexter turns off Deb's life support, staff aren't notified that there is a patient flat-lining.
Dexter carts a dead body out of the hospital into another populated parking lot, picks her up off the stretcher and carries her body to his boat where he sails off, nobody saw that; its a good thing Dex made sure to wear his kill shirt for that one.
Dexter sails his boat right into the heart of a deadly storm, yet manages to make it back to shore perfectly fine. Way to go, Batman!
Grade A writing here, people.

[johnhenry]

Hi, I'm Hannah McKay, super-hot blonde who's also wanted for murder and has a $250k bounty on her head. You'd think I might want to cut and dye my hair before I go out in public, or maybe put on a hat and some sunglasses, or at the very least NOT wear bright, skimpy, runway-ready dresses whenever I leave the house. But you'd be wrong... have you met any of the cops in this town?

[gorny540]

I just wish they didn't have the second ending, was lumberjack Dexter really necessary? It was just a show that went a season or two too long, but I'm going to rewatch the best ones soon (1,2,4) to remind myself why I watched the last 2 in the first place.

[Self.Destructive.Pattern]

This season opened up so promising. Vogel showed to be very mysterious and creepy and set a really good vibe for the new season until she became Dexter's Robin. This could have been a wonderful season if the writers used what they had in their hands.

Introduce Saxon a little earlier in the season. Having him and Dex go at it all season would have been a pleasure to watch after getting a slight glimpse of that when they were about to go at it in the hospital.

Keep Zack in the picture. I didn't know how to take it at first when they were talking about training him to use the code, but I really started warming up to the fact that it might actually work, and the chemistry that started forming between the two was really enjoyable for me when they found Zack's kill room at the motel. But of course... the writers kill him off like they do with every character that is introduced to this show.

KEEP HANNAH THE FUCK OUT. I literally rolled my eyes when she came back and drugged Dexter and Deb. The writers couldn't come up with anything better than bringing her back and making Dexter look like a little bitch??

The whole thing with Deb was a big cop out and so predictable, but I still teared a little bit when the doctor was telling Dex and Quinn about what happened. The only thing that really made any sense to me was when they showed Dexter at the very end. When Deb was talking about wanting to go Hiking in the mountains, I think that clicked something in Dexter's head at the time and now he is living in the Mountains, blending in and being the person he always was.... a killer. He's alone, no one knows who he is, and the last look he gives to the screen when he opens his eyes is the dark passenger looking at us, not Dexter. So it looks as if he is starting the cycle all over again.. I didn't hate it.

Dexter can act on impulse sometimes until something inspires him to change his mind of have a different take on what he did. He thought that his family would be much better off without him so he did what he did. I mean, Hannah is a fugitive.. but I would hope now with Harrison she will smarten up and not be so obvious like she was in the hospital. I think Dexter will lay low for a while and let them know somehow that he is alive. I don't see him just abandoning his son like that. But happy trails Dexter... it's been one hell of a ride

[bruised]

Father of the year.

[johnhenry]

I'd say the real Miami Metro has standing for a class action suit if their actual murder solve rate wasn't ~30%.

Maybe the last couple of (awful) seasons of this show were really a cutting indictment of Florida's broken criminal justice system. Subversive!

[johnhenry]

ok, now I'll stop.

[r_z]

This interview oldschool linked to made it perfectly clear how the producers didn't had a fucking clue on what to do with the show. After season 4 it turned into this meandering, uninteresting, forced thing totally lacking any sense of tension or suspense, full of the biggest plotholes ever seen on television. It's infuriating how they were insulting the viewer's intelligence on a regular basis.