Final Thoughts on Dexter
Well, we finally have our conclusion. DexterÂ’s son and girlfriend are safely planted in Rio, Deb is feeding the fish in Miami, and Dexter has apparently faked his death successfully and transplanted himself to a logging camp at an unknown location, where he will presumably live out the rest of his days as an anonymous, harmless, boring recluse.
All in all, there are no loose ends – he has no one who will miss him terribly in Miami, he was never found out by the authorities as a prolific mass murderer, so they are not looking for him, and there are basically no characters remaining that we would care about in the future. The possibilities for a sequel or a Made-4-TV follow-up movie are preserved. But that would depend on future demand and Michael C. Hall’s availability; plot lines would be potentially endless. I don’t think the public would accept anyone else playing Dexter in the future.
Fans of the show (I confess, I are one), had to accept a lot of improbable realities, some of which became difficult to swallow at times. Dexter was able to miss days and days in the office, and no one ever complained or docked his pay. He could go without sleep for weeks at a time – especially during his marriage to Rita - with only minimal effect. He found (and took advantage of) the most flexible and accommodating babysitter since Mother Teresa. He could (apparently) pick up and carry dead or incapacitated victims weighing well-over 200lbs, off camera, with no apparent problem. After killing them, he would cut them up and place them into bags that had to weigh at least 50 pounds each, then toss those plastic bags around like they were beachballs. He could set up a “kill room” – a scene that in my experience would take a small crew of grunts at least a full day – in a matter of an hour or so, and clean it up in minutes (including packaging up a mountain of plastic sheeting), leaving no trace of his activities anywhere. Dexter did not live an opulent lifestyle (with the possible exception of his boat), but seemed to have unlimited financial resources.
More relevant to his evil personna, he came up with an injectable chemical that could render a 250+ pound man totally inert and helpless INSTANTLY, with a quick shot to the neck. He was virtually unbeaten in hand-to-hand combat, regardless of the size or athleticism of his foe, or what weapons he might have. He recovered from physical injuries with incredible speed, seemingly being back at 100% within minutes. He came out of horrific auto accidents without a scratch, and was even drowned with no apparent ill effects. In the final episode, he was stabbed deeply in the shoulder with a pen-knife, and apparently just forgot about it. And ultimately he rode his small power boat into a horrific hurricane, smashing it to pieces, yet survived, again, without an apparent scratch.
Throughout the series, Hall successfully portrayed a person with no emotional reaction to any stimuli around him (until the final season, sort of), looking strikingly like someone who knew he was supposed to demonstrate some emotion, but not sure what it was, exactly, or how to show it. Which was true to the story line.
It was not so long ago that television programs were discouraged from – if not actually prohibited from – showing final endings where the “bad guy” got away with murder or a bank robbery, etc. Dexter could not have been produced in 1965, for this among many other reasons. Alfred Hitchcock occasionally would show the bad guy getting away, but in his final words after the end of the story, Hitchcock would assure the audience that the bad guy was arrested shortly thereafter, off screen.
So the Dexter plotline of the sympathetic mass murderer who is simply doing that the Criminal Justice System seems to unable to do, is a relatively recent one, and one that Dexter’s writers did fairly well. But in recent years, the “honorable” vigilante who kills bad guys and eludes capture by the police has become almost trite.
I would tune into a sequel. “Dexter vs. Sasquatch!”
