Dexter's Dark Passengers: what did you think of the season finale? (SPOILER ALERT)

[yurbud]

I just finished it, and the ending made me feel guilty and ashamed, like I was Dexter and I fucked up and let my wife get killed and endangered my baby.

As literature, this kicks it up to the level of tragedy--Dexter's way of dealing with his dark passenger reaches out and bites his attempt to be normal in the ass. That grows organically, and inevitably out of the character unlike other plot twists this season like Christine being Trinity's daughter, which was a melodramatic soap opera trick (but once revealed, it played itself out in a painfully realistic way).

The scene with Debra when she told him she found out who his mother was seemed anti-climactic (though her acting in the scene was great) like Dex had dodged a bullet again, which made the ending all the more surprising.

Someone wrote a story on Salon.com saying the ending was like a snuff film, having the baby sitting in a pool of his mother's blood. I didn't think of that when I watched it, but after the fact, I can see how that could fuck the kid up. I can remember stuff from about age one and a half. How will the kid process that memory? I suppose the actress would sit up so he could see she was okay between takes, but even sitting in the puddle of blood might haunt you late on.

The other emotional impact of the episode was the killing of Trinity. The show spends so much time with Dexter the family man and Dexter the cop and Dexter doing leg work for his killings that it's hard to think of him as a serial killer. Then as he's about to kill Trinity, he turns the hammer from the blunt face to the claw side, and you feel that ugliness.

Apart from the emotional impact of the episode, it also opens up some story questions: will the police automatically tie this to Trinity? If so, will they ask how he chose Rita? If they consider Dexter a suspect at all, won't that give them an excuse to dig into his ugly childhood and possibly put some stuff together? Dexter will hardly have an alibi--he was killing and disposing of the Trinity killer after all. On the other hand, maybe it isn't Trinity, it's the smarmy suburban neighbor. But that wouldn't be as tight as Dexter's actions, leaving Trinity free and even leading the police away from him, so that he could kill him himself--and even saving him from committing suicide so Dex could kill him in his ritual fashion, and that leading to his wife's death, that's almost operatic.

[Lindsey]

1. Spoiler ******************

After the show there was about a 10 minute segment with Michael C. Hall (Dexter) and John Lithgow (Trinity) discussing the season. John Lithgow said it was Trinity who killed Rita. That final show (and, of course, the final scene) is having everyone thinking and talking. When I got to work on Monday morning the 1st thing I did was go over to my "Dexter" co-workers and we were speculating on next season. Dexter will be changed forever (and probably not in a good way). It's going to be really hard for a lot of Dexter's life to not be revealed. There's no way it won't come to light to Trinity's family that Kyle Butler is actually Dexter. I think Dexter will be able to talk to them and let them know (not that he killed him) that he was on his tail as a law enforcement official secretly. And he still has all of Trinity's money that he'll need to figure out how to give to the family in regards to how the hell did he get the money (that would eliminate the possibility of Trinity fleeing the country considering the money he got from his family couldn't have come to all that much). Man, the writers are going to have their work cut out for them to even equal this season...one of the best shows I've ever been addicted to.

[yurbud]

2. that's when the show is best--when you can't figure out where it's going to go.