Dexter finale: a betrayal of the characters we knew

The final season was patchy, but at least the Dexter finale would be worth the wait, right? Wrong: the show fell apart

Dexter Morgan and Hannah McKay in the Dexter finale. Photograph: Randy Tepper/Showtime

SPOILER ALERT: This blog contains details about the last ever episode of Dexter.

When it was announced that Dexter's eighth season would be its last, the news was not entirely unwelcome. The show had never fully recovered from the devastation wreaked by season four's main villain the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow), and this final run has played out that inferiority, being patchy, unfocused and, at times, sloppy. Yet for all its flaws, I stuck with it, and hoped the series finale, at least, would be worth the wait. It wasn't. And I'm disappointed. It all fell apart completely in the last few minutes, with Dexter making two boneheaded, un-Dexter-like decisions that wearily knocked the final nails into the coffin that season eight built.

Our protagonist sailed his boat, Slice of Life, into a hurricane, and was pronounced missing, presumed dead. His fugitive girlfriend Hannah choked back the tears in a cafe in Argentina and took Dexter's ever-irritating son Harrison for ice-cream, presumably to soften the blow of his daddy's watery death. But Dexter wasn't dead, after all! He swam like a greased porpoise away from a deadly hurricane and ended up in Oregon, where presumably he will live out his days chopping down trees and tending his awful beard.

Dexter survives eight seasons of hacking and stabbing, leaving "a trail of blood and body parts," and yet viewers don't get to see him caught or killed. In fact, it was his foul-mouthed, grumpy sister Deb who died, without getting the heroine's death she deserved (though she wobbled, she was the show's moral centre). She ended up in a vegetative state, having been shot in the stomach by Oliver Saxon, Dexter's last-minute nemesis and the son of his mentor Evelyn Vogel, at the end of the penultimate episode.

So Dexter switched off her life support and dumped her body in the ocean, where the bad people go, then sent his son to live with Hannah, who, despite seeming quite nice this season, might conceivably poison him at some point in the future.

This whole final season has been shot through with the sense that Dexter is not as smart as he seems, and that is a betrayal of the character we spent seven seasons getting to know, as monstrous as he may have been. He made bad decisions repeatedly, negating the idea of any extraordinary intelligence, which was the one unshakeable truth that held Dexter, as a series and a character, together for so long. With a terrible beard, a boring job and a dead-eyed stare, Dexter is no longer the monster we were introduced to seven years ago.