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What do I know about this series going into it?
The titular Dexter is a serial killer. When he was a child, his adoptive father realized he would be irredeemably murderous, so he gave Dexter rules (called the “Book of [something]”) about who he could and couldn’t kill, mostly other serial killers. The now-adult Dexter works as a lab tech for the police. His mortal enemy is played by John Lithgow.
Previously On
Dexter can’t kill a woman because she doesn’t fit “Harry’s Code”.1 Another woman was going to shoot Dexter but shot somebody else instead. She’s in love with him. The evil brain surgeon is named Daniel, going by the pseudonym Oliver Saxon, and is the son of the woman Dexter couldn’t kill. Dexter and his girlfriend are going to move to Argentina. Things are happening too fast for me to keep up. Daniel kills his mother, Evelyn. Dexter has Daniel tied to a table but isn’t interested in killing people anymore. A cop finds Daniel, releases him out of ignorance; Daniel stabs the cop and shoots Debra (Dexter’s girlfriend, I think).
Recap
The opening credits imply that Dexter is a cannibal.
Dexter and his son(?) are in the Miami airport. They’re to meet “Hannah” at the gate, but she’s trapped, hiding in the women’s room from “Elway”. Dexter buys a backpack, an alarm clock, some alcohol, and a bunch of other stuff. He leaves the bag someplace suspicious, then approaches the gate attendant, flashes his police department credentials, and says a suspicious man left this bag over there…
Elway, who was making phone calls to prevent Hannah from fleeing the country, is taken away by security. Unfortunately, Dexter has created a new a problem: the airport evacuates the terminal and postpones all flights.
Elsewhere, Debra is being loaded into an ambulance; the cop who was stabbed in the heart is dead. The other officers – Nondescript White Guy and Panama Hat Man – are going to call her brother (possibly Dexter), but Debra refuses to allow it. Her brother is “leaving with Harrison” and she doesn’t want to bother him.
Now, I’ve forgotten Hannah’s last name, but it wasn’t Harrison. So I think Debra knows Dexter is fleeing the country and gave them a plausible lie.
In the ambulance, Debra confesses to her SO that she’s “done shit she’s not proud of”. He assures her she’s a good person, but she doesn’t really believe it. When they reach the hospital and take her into surgery, she says, “I love you, Joey”, but his expression says his name isn’t Joey.
“Matthews” – possibly the police chief – calls Dexter against Debra’s wishes, telling him that Saxon escaped and shot her.2 So Dexter tells Hannah to take his kid to a hotel and hide out there, while he visits Debra in the hospital. He also tells her not to fly straight to Argentina, because Elway will be checking those flights, but rather use a stopover. But the flight will have to wait; the terminal isn’t reopening even after the bomb scare, because of the hurricane.
Meanwhile, Saxon stabs somebody in the face and steals his pickup truck.
Back at the hotel, I learn that Harrison is Dexter’s son, so Debra wasn’t lying – at last not entirely.
Airport security releases Elway. He resumes making phone calls in his hunt for “McKay” (I assume Hannah), but is informed that “Clayton” was killed in the line of duty. I assume Clayton is the cop that Saxon stabbed, but if Elway is his partner or subordinate why did it take security so long to release him? Couldn’t he have just flashed a badge and told them the false alarm is obviously his fugitive’s doing?
Debra wakes up. Dexter expresses regret at having left Saxon alive, and their conversation establishes that she knows he is a serial killer, with an implication that she learned about it sometime in the middle of the series (rather than my assumption based on her conversation with her SO, which was that she had always known). “You were meant to be happy,” she says, a curious thing to say to a serial killer.
A doctor comes in and examines Debra, in a scene that feels very unnecessary; either it’s just there to give us exposition, or the doctor is secretly working for Saxon.3
After the doctor leaves, Debra and Dexter talk about Hannah. Debra regrets being the reason Elway is hunting for her. She calls him “That rat-faced fuck”, even though he’s presumably just doing her job and has got a good reason to hunt Hannah down.
There’s a flashback to just after Harrison was born, with Dexter and Debra entering the hospital nursery for the first time. Dexter’s wife was named Rita; Harrison is named after the Harry of Harry’s Code. Debra asks Dexter which one is his; he must have neglected to memorize his kid’s face in the delivery room, because he needs the nurse to point him out. Debra picks him up, despite Dexter’s objections that Harrison is asleep.
Back to the present, Elway arrives at the hospital and confronts Dexter: I know you and Debra are helping Hannah McKay, and Clayton knew it too. He was following Debra, which is why he found Saxon and died, and it’s all your fault. Dexter shoves him away.
Meanwhile, Saxon enters a vet clinic, points a gun at the vet, and orders him to stitch him up. But thanks to a convenient news broadcast, the vet discovers who his patient is. Saxon tells him to get his car keys.
At the last minute, just as Hannah and Harrison and Dexter are about to get on one of the buses evacuating people from the hurricane, Dexter stops: I need to make sure Debra is safe, and that means stopping Saxon. You go ahead, I’ll catch up.
The vet drives Saxon to the hospital. The vet promises he won’t say a word to anyone – a stupid thing to say to a serial killer with a literal-minded sense of irony.4
Dexter enters moments later, recognizes the distraction for what it is, and rushes to Debra’s room, making it there just in time to confront Saxon at the entrance. But he needn’t have worried; the uniformed cops stationed to guard Debra’s room were lying in wait and take Saxon into custody. In fact, they had moved Debra to another room without updating the patient roster, just to set this trap.
Or maybe not. Dexter soon discovers that Debra was moved to the ICU. Even though all seemed well, she had had a blood clot after the surgery, which led to a stroke and brain death. Nondescript White Guy, who I think may be Debra’s husband, is in denial at the news, but Dexter has his “I am resolved to a course of action” face on.
Flashback to when Debra hands Harrison to Dexter for the first time. She talks about how he explained to her what shadows were when she was a kid so she wouldn’t be scared.
On the bus, Hannah talks to Harrison until the latter falls asleep. Which is Elway’s cue to grab her arm; he tracked them onto them onto the bus. As soon as we reach our destination, he says, I’ll turn you in for the reward. Aha, that explains why he couldn’t flash his badge at airport security earlier; he’s a bounty hunter, not a US Marshall.5
Oliver Saxon/Daniel Vogel is taken to an interrogation room by Nondescript White Guy and Panama Hat Man. They demand that he admit to killing Cassie (I assume this is his mother) and Clayton and shooting Deb. Saxon asks who Deb is, which triggers a ballistic reaction from Nondescript White Guy, whose name is finally given as Quinn.6
Dexter watches all this from behind the mirror, pondering. He can leave, go to Argentina with Hannah and Harrison, and wait for Saxon to be given the inevitable death penalty. Right?
On the bus, Hannah offers Elway some tea. He rolls his eyes: “How stupid do you think I am?” That moment of distraction is enough for her to inject him with the horse tranquilizer that she has on her.7 Hannah and Harrison will disembark at the first stop while Elway rides on to the next one, asleep.
It’s later, and Saxon is in his prison cell. Dexter enters, using his lab tech credentials to claim that he’s going to do some kind of test on Saxon. The two talk needlessly for a minute, with Dexter claiming that Saxon made him realize he could never have a happy life. So he’s here to kill Saxon “with that pen”. Saxon grabs the pen and stabs Dexter with it; Dexter pulls it out and stabs Saxon in the carotid artery. Saxon collapses, and Dexter calmly and clinically presses the emergency button to call the guards in.
Watching the security camera footage, it is instantly clear that Dexter set the situation up deliberately. Well, clear to Quinn anyway; Panama Hat Man seems to be a bit of an idiot. Dexter doesn’t care either way, but Quinn prods things in the right direction: “It’s obviously self-defense.”8 They might have had to discipline him, but he’s already leaving the police department at the end of the week, so who cares?9
Dexter goes to visit the braindead Deb. He cries at her bedside and apologizes to her for what he’s about to do: turning off the oxygen machine and removing her oxygen mask. There is no gasping for air, just a silent, motionless wait until she dies. He then escorts her body out of the hospital on a gurney, and carries it down a gangway towards the ocean.
Ah, he’s not dumping it immediately (which would be stupid); he’s taking it to his boat, then driving towards the hurricane. But before the hurricane arrives, he calls Hannah and Harrison, who are boarding their flight. He lies and says he’s leaving Miami soon and will be on a later flight to meet them in Argentina.
Dexter tosses first the phone, then his sister, into the ocean. He then drives straight into the hurricane, explaining to the audience that he has to protect Hannah and Harrison from himself.
Some time later, the coast guard finds a piece of Dexter’s boat. They call Panama Hat Man, whose name is finally given as Batista; Hannah later finds out by checking the news over the Internet.
Fade to black.
I was sure that was the end, but just to prove my joke correct we fade back in to a logging community where Dexter is now living and working. Slow zoom on his face as he stares sadly into the distance.
Unresolved questions
How did Dexter survive?
How long until the logging community notices there’s a serial killer in their midst?
According to Dexter, Elway knows that Hannah was headed for Argentina, with whom the US has an extradition treaty. How long until Hannah is taken into custody?
Will Dexter’s previous murders ever come to light?
We saw Quinn express denial at Debra’s prognosis, followed by anger. Is he going to go through the other three stages of grief?10
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 5/10. A typical episode of television, hitting many of the standard beats one would expect. Of course the serial killer is not going to keep his promise not to hurt the veterinarian. Of course Dexter is going to give up his happy ending to get revenge. Of course he’s not dead until they find the body.
The only true surprise was Deb’s out-of-left-field deterioration, which was not handled well. Even though it came halfway through the episode, and was therefore part of the plot rather than part of the resolution, it still felt like an unnecessarily cruel diabolus ex machina that was tacked on because the series needed to come to an end.
Writing: 3/10. “I’m not going to tell anyone,” says the veterinarian. “No, you won’t,” says Saxon. That’s the level of writing we’re working with throughout the episode: not infested with cliches, but certainly tainted by them.
The narration really bothered me, because the writers used it as a crutch. Michael Hall has an expressive face, and yet he was told to read out voiceovers (e.g., “All eyes on the victim, the perfect distraction. Saxon.”) that we could plainly see written in Dexter’s eyes.11 Other voiceovers were equally unnecessary and even jarring; they described the action that we were already seeing (e.g., “I’ll check on Deb, then I’ll deal with Saxon.”) and thus took us entirely out of said action.
Production: 4/10. I’ll start with something that seems at first like it doesn’t belong in this category: Dexter’s overly-clinical demeanor and tone of voice. I went back and forth on this over the course of the episode. Was it a deliberate character trait (see Characterization below), or was it the result of bad acting/bad direction, i.e., a production issue? Some combination of both?
Over time, the picture became clearer. I saw (as described above) just how expressive Michael Hall’s acting was, and I noticed individual lines delivered by other actors in a very wooden fashion. That implies a combination of two effects: Dexter is supposed to be wooden, clinical, off-putting; but the director wasn’t good at bringing expressiveness out of any of the actors.
There were other minor issues here and there. A jarring mistake in an ADR line, where Dexter was speaking when his lips clearly weren’t moving; the occasional questionable editing decision.
So despite Hall’s good performance12, the problems with the direction take this to slightly below average for television.
Characterization: 3/10. It's a real shame to give a score of 3 in this category, but all of that is Dexter. He provides an enormous amount to chew on, where nobody else provided a thing. Being a naive idiot (Batista) and dropping the word “fuck” into every other sentence (Debra) is not a character trait.
I want to comment on one aspect of Dexter’s personality, and I don’t know how intentional it is: he’s terrible at thinking through the consequences of his actions.
The instant Dexter made the bomb claim to the gate attendant, I asked myself, “Won’t they evacuate the terminal?” How stupid is Dexter that he didn’t see that coming?
But even if they hadn’t, his plan was destined to fail. Consider: he collects bomb-adjacent items (alcohol, an alarm clock, etc.) in a backpack, which he leaves in an airport terminal. He then in person, showing his ID badge, accuses somebody else of planting it.
If he had filled the backpack with clothes and snacks, that would be one thing: “okay, that guy clearly just made a mistake, no harm done”. But when they discover that the backpack was deliberately filled with items designed to create anxiety, they’ll investigate. And it’s easy to track Dexter down: video surveillance of the airport terminal; testimony by Elway, who knows who Dexter is and what he meant to accomplish with the attempted frame-up; testimony by the gate attendant, who knows where Dexter works, saw his face in person, and might have read his name off his ID.
Even if he had boarded the flight, it still wouldn’t have worked. A flight from Miami to Argentina takes nine hours! That’s nine hours in which air traffic control can order the pilot to make an emergency landing so Dexter can be taken into custody.
Similarly, when Dexter enters the jail cell to murder Saxon, he looks straight at the surveillance camera before setting up the scene. Yet he makes no effort to even act like he didn’t go in there to set up a homicide-by-suicide-by-cop.
It’s probable that by that point, knowing Debra was brain-dead, he was in despair and had something of a death wish. She may have been his tether to humanity. (I want to know more about their relationship.) But in light of his behavior at the airport, I’m curious. Has Dexter always had this death wish? Or has he always been sloppy? If so, how has he remained undetected for so long? Is Batista’s naivete typical of the entire Miami police department?
Accessibility: 9/10. I wonder how much less clear things would’ve been if I didn’t already know Dexter was a serial killer. With that knowledge in hand, the plot was bite-sized and straightforward. The only lingering question is whether Hannah was truly or falsely accused, and of what.
Closure: 4/10. Dexter fakes his death and goes on to a new life. That’s usually plenty closure: you can’t have a TV show about a serial killer lab tech in the police department if he no longer works there. Great.
The trouble is that it’s not an ending that matches anything we know about the character.
How does becoming a logger resolve anything? Dexter won’t be happier than he would have been with a wife and child; he won’t have a healthy outlet for his murderous impulses the way he did with the Miami PD; and he’s certainly not rid of his death wish. He declares that he needs to “protect Hannah and Harrison from myself”, but… why? I saw no sign that he was ever going to kill them, nor that he actively attracts other serial killers in some mystical fashion.
The other issue was how the episode dealt with its subplots, Elway and the hurricane13. Both just petered out instead of coming to a climax. If I had to guess, I’d say the series cancellation was announced shortly before the episode was written, and they came up with all of these unsatisfactory conclusions at the last minute.
Do I want to watch the series now?
No. It’s a typical television show, in the sense that I might sit and watch if it happened to be on. But nothing jumped out and said, “I am worth an eight-season investment”.
Guess it wasn’t the book of anything.
This didn’t occur to me until editing my notes after the episode, but what does Matthews mean when he says “Saxon escaped”? Did he know that Dexter was torturing Saxon tied to a medical chair in what looked like an abandoned building? Or have I fundamentally misunderstood the Previously?
Turns out it was just exposition. And deliberately incorrect exposition at that.
Which, if television is to be believed, is every serial killer.
Surely the third thing you learn as a bounty hunter is how to deal with the classic “that guy is following me, please help me officer!” trick.
If he really is Debra’s husband, he really shouldn’t be involved in handling this case.
Who among us doesn’t?
I’m surprised that, in eight seasons of secretly murdering other serial killers, Dexter has never resorted to pulling this type of stunt before.
How much do they know about his plans? Did they ask him anything at the retirement party? Do they know he’s moving to Argentina? Do they know of his involvement with a wanted woman?
Yes, yes, I’m a hypocrite.
Paul Eddington, star of the British sitcom Yes, Minister, was similarly talented. The writers of that show supposedly used to mark lines in the script with “Paul doesn’t have to say this line if he doesn’t want to” – knowing that Paul had the ability to get the point across without using a single word. Sadly, the writers of Dexter had no such confidence in their lead actor.
And Harrison’s, who was well above average for child actors.
Also the name of my favorite 80s rock band.