About Last Night: Dexter Season 5 Finale

Hey, so there's this show on Showtime called Dexter that had a season finale last night.  Perhaps you've heard of it? Obligatory spoiler alert! Now read Butler's thoughts!

I'm not going to patronize you, our dear readers, by going in to detail again on my thoughts on Dexter as a show.  You can find those thoughts here and here, and there's no reason to repeat them.  I am in fact going to make it my mission to attempt to approach last night's episode from as levelheaded a perspective as possible.  And you know what? Without getting ahead of myself too much, I think the season 5 finale is not going to make that a difficult task.  Oh, don't mistake this for a reprise of my take on Lost, where a show I have been heretofore gushing about becomes the single largest betrayal I have ever encountered from my entertainment.  But rather, this season was perhaps too awesome to have a finale that would live up to my unrealistically high expectations.  Especially given the way last week's episode ended with about a million dangling threads that poor dexter was going to have to tie off, all while planning a birthday party.  But dwelling on the distant past (of one week ago) is for chumps and suckers, so let's start start talking season finale.

I've always kind of felt that shows that run on networks like Showtime or HBO put more effort into making the penultimate episode of the season the one that makes your adrenaline grands start firing at full force, while the final episode is the one that starts to set up the bridge between that season and the next.  True Blood does this a lot, as did Six Feet Under and The Sopranos.  I tended to think that Dexter was kind of immune to this phenomenon, but the season five finale seems to be setting the show more into this comfortable routine.  That isn't to say that the first half hour of the episode wasn't full of twists.  Watching Dexter hunt down Jordan Chase as Lumen tried to find any opportunity to escape from reliving her torture-rape horror was absolutely insane and I think my house was dead silent for the entirety of the sequence.  It did take them kind of forever to kill Chase once Dexter managed to get the upper hand, and all I could think was "haven't you assholes seen a James Bond movie? Stop gloating and explaining yourselves and just kill this human garbage!"  But right as I finished forming that thought, Lumen stabs Chase in the chest.  And that's that, I guess.

Hope your chiseled features serve you well

in HELL, Sickboy!

OK, well that's not entirely that, as there is the pretty intense moment where Deb shows up, catches the two of them in the cleanup process and lets them go (seriously, if you didn't read the spoiler warning, it's your own damn fault).  I realize that Quinn was in lockup (more on that in a moment) and she was partnerless, but I did find it incredibly contrived that she showed up to the scene of what is such a potentially huge case without a lick of backup.  Also, how did she miss the crashed car on the road from when Chase flipped Dexter's car?  I realize these are trifling complaints, but it did make certain aspects of the scene weaken Deb as a police officer, and I'm sorry, but she doesn't need even a little bit of help in that department.  As much as I'm willing to pledge my undying love to Jennifer Carpenter, Deb is probably the worst cop in the world and would not have made it out of the academy in the real world.  The notion that this emotional wreck would ever be deemed fit to hold a gun (especially after pulling one on an unarmed 12 year old in season 2) is absolutely laughable, so I find it hard to believe she'd be allowed to go out unaccompanied anywhere these days.  Especially on a case where the suspect may have been complicit in the rape and murder of 13 girls.  I just don't buy it.

But let's return to Quinn for a moment.  I mentioned in my assessment of the premiere that I was skeptical, but intrigued by Quinn assuming the de facto role of James "watchin' you mothafucka" Doakes.  We saw pretty quickly, however, that he did not have even a quarter of the testicular fortitude to fill Doakes' big black shoes, so they had no other choice but to call in the motherfucking Robocop (Stan Liddy, played by Peter Weller, who played... do I have to spell it out for you?).  It is, in fact, the plot line spawned by the Robocop with which I take the biggest issue.  As we saw Robocop (I never call him Liddy) get more and more obsessed with tracking Dexter, the show's tension built to insurmountable levels.  When Dexter finally killed him last week, my chief concern was not about him and Lumen or Chase, but what would happen when he killed a goddamn police officer in an act of survivalist desperation.  Yet a little suspicion on Quinn followed by one fudged blood test and all is forgiven.  No one even mentions the case in the last 20 minutes of the episode save Quinn thanking Dexter for clearing him.  I mean, seriously, what the hell?

Perhaps the ONLY recourse for progress on this case is that 

which Dexter already killed.

Lumen leaving Dexter felt contrived and sudden at first, almost as if they realized at the very last second that having Mr. and Mrs. Dexter plot their evening kill over their morning cheerios would get stale really quickly.  And I agree that she had to go, and killing her would have simply been Rita all over again, but I don't know... There was an interview with Julia Stiles after the show where she pointed out that her accepting Dexter only to reject him after knowing what he is makes it a much more profound rejection, and that did make me more satisfied with how things played out, but I resent that it essentially took Julia Stiles sitting down to explain it to me bit by bit, and that is simply not acceptable for a show as good as Dexter.  My biggest concern at this point is that because the season ended with things so neatly tied up, they may be scrambling for ideas.  Realistically, they only have one season left in them anyway.  The aforementioned Six Feet Under and Sopranos knew when to call it quits (5 and 6 seasons respectively) and I just hope that the crew of Dexter shows the same prescience when deciding where to take their show.  Dexter, I love you, but you're worrying me.  Obviously we've got a wait and a half until Season 6 gets started, but I am concerned that rather than letting a good thing die, they may try to milk this show to oblivion.  And that would make me a sad, sad panda.  But enough about me.  What did YOU think?  Worthy finale, total flop, kind of enh, or viewpoint that I didn't just list?  Lay it on us, Internet!