Why Dexter Needs to End

Warning: May contain a few Dexter spoilers from Seasons 1 through 6...

You might not know it from most of my reviews this season, but Showtime's Dexter used to be one of my absolute favorite shows. And even with my many gripes this past fall, the scores have been a bit kinder than one might expect because, despite its current failings, it still remains a very "watchable" show. Season 1 of Dexter is one of the greatest single seasons of a TV show ever. I used to give it to people as gifts, regardless of their affinity for morbidity.

But now the show needs to die. It needs to give us its endgame and sign off. Truth be told, it should have already ended, probably back in Season 5, but since it will now be definitely back for two more years (and hopefully not more), it's time to take an honest inventory of everything that's gone wrong with the once-great series. Yes, it seems strange to run a feature like this about a show that probably will end in a couple seasons, but the case needs to be made. For those of us who suffered through the brutal, barbed attack of Season 6 and lived to tell the tale.

TV shows do not age well. I don't have any graphs or spreadsheets to prove this to you, but most shows start to show signs of crumbling after four or five years. Seasons 2 and 3, and sometimes 4 (as in the case with Dexter actually), are usually the place where most series find their sweet spot and hits their creative stride. After five years though, you're pushing it. Especially if a series is desperate to maintain a "status quo" of familiarity with its characters. And you also have to consider, as with Dexter, that the original showrunner of the series (Clyde Phillips, in the case of Dexter, who left after four years) will probably have checked out and gone on to other projects. So until the network/producers finally decide to wrap things up, you're going to get a lot of plotlines that are meant to stall and take you around in circles. American TV is designed to run until people don't want to see it anymore. You start with a premise and then…you're off! Out of the gate with no idea how long you're actually going to run. You can contrast that with, say, most U.K. TV, which is designed from the get-go to tell a set story with a beginning, middle and end.

Then there's American pay-cable. Short seasons. Critical acclaim. Not many viewers. Except that word of mouth spreads. People tell their friends "Oh, you have to watch this show." And the seasons are shorter so people can catch up. And every new season brings in more viewers and better ratings because, year after year, more people have caught up. So you get to the point on a show like Dexter where Season 6 gets the best ratings the series has ever gotten despite being at an all-time creative low. So when the time comes for a cable show to naturally end it's usually pulling in better numbers than it ever has and the network is now hesitant to pull the plug. Rita's death at the end of Season 4 could have set us up for a fantastic final season, save for the fact that "Deb finding out Dexter's killer secret" is something that also needed to happen. So Season 5 of Dexter should have ended with Deb discovering Dexter's killer secret and Season 6 should have been the end. But they pussed out and wound up dragging things out for an extra year.

Dexter is a show that has both a voice-over narration from its main character and an imaginary character for him to talk to in order to get all his thoughts out to the audience. And while it was once cool to hear everything from Dexter's point of view (especially when he was more sociopathic) and clever to have him hash things out with imaginary Harry, the entire device has grown sickeningly thin. There are only so many faux-existential things you can say, or write, about fate, choices and destiny and when the episode "Just Let Go" had the gall to open with Dexter giving us the awful "What is it that defines our path? Is it fate or the choices we make?" treatment, I knew the tide was rolling back. Because that's Heroes: Season 3/Mohinder crap.

Likewise, the first 10 minutes of "Talk to the Hand" were so refreshing because there was no voice over. No glib remarks. The fact that Dexter still needs to say everything is unnerving. For example, when Louis was showing Dexter his video game, where you could play as the Bay Harbor Butcher, did we really need to hear Dexter think, "I am the Bay Harbor Butcher?" We know he is. That small moment would have been better if we didn't hear him think that but instead just saw him force a smile. Also, in the finale when Deb was showing the aerial photos of the fire in the ocean to her team and said that the coast guard found no bodies did we need to hear Dexter say "That's because I escaped"? We joked here at IGN that he should have just kept thinking, "Because Travis tried to kill me. Because he had me tied up in a boat. And I dove into the water before the boat exploded. And now I'm here in this room. And no one knows about it."

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More reasons Dexter needs to end, including the storyline that made people want to barf, on page 2...