Dexter Season 8

Good day reader, Dexter Season 8 has just been released on Blu-ray and DVD in box set form, I’m not sure if you’ve seen it yet, or if you are planning on seeing it but it is three DVDs of pure terror.  Do I mean creepy, scary and well-made drama about serial killers? No I do not.  It is the most appalling end of a series I have ever had to deal with.  Yes it was more unparalleled than Seinfeld, yes more soul destroying than Lost, it is terrible.  If you thought the season was good, then you are going to disagree with me on many points, feel free to get angry and email hate mail or whatever.  Though I kind of get the feeling that Mark Twitchell would have thought this series was an abomination as well. Also there will be massive spoilers.

So Dexter, for those unfamiliar, started off in this show as a dark psychopath with a certain amount of morality instilled in him – in that he systematically killed off other killers exclusively.  He had no empathy but a moral code, he did terrible terrible things to people but they were terrible people so it was a good thing.  He was dark, he was sinister and he did all the things that the darker part of your personality wants to do, like disembowelling paedophile priests in a dark room.  

The great thing about Dexter was that it had a very definite end; he would get caught somehow and killed by the Miami Metro Police or another Serial Killer.  It’s really simple and so obvious that you would have to be a self sabotaging, drooling, slack jawed fucking idiot to do something completely different like have him get all emotional, kill his sister and run off and become a lumberjack.  I mean the only good thing about that is it’s a surprise ending. By which I mean so appalling of key that I can’t comprehend it any more than I could comprehend a unicorn sucker-punching me in the gym locker room, screaming quantum physics calculations at me until I shat a rainbow through time and ended up creating the universe we live in. Paradoxically. 

I’ll get back to that momentarily.  The end of the last season involved La Guerta, a major player in the Miami Police Force, figuring out Dexter was a serial killer and subsequently getting shot by Debra with her police issue firearm to stop Dexter being caught. Holy fuck right?  Like how are they going to explain that?!  Well apparently by ignoring it, using the etch-a-sketch version of script writing they basically put it all back to neutral.

How do I explain the confusion and disappointment? Ok imagine you’re a child about 5 years old, you’ve woken up in the afternoon on the sofa. Your mother comes in, sunlight shining in her hair, and you feel comfortable and safe with her. She approaches you with a big smile on her face and asks you if you want to go with her to get ice-cream. Suddenly you start to notice the sun is sinking away, the sky turns to darkness and that this is not your mother in front of you. It’s some amalgamation of all the psychopaths Dexter has dealt with over the years. And it’s dressed as a Nazi. 

You realise there is no ice-cream, just a very unfamiliar hand pushing your hair behind your ears, and as you look pleadingly into the eyes of this abomination in front of you, you feel a thumb applying pressure onto your eyeball. As your eye bursts all over this creatures hand you black out and awaken in a mysterious, unfamiliar room and you have aches and pains all over your body.  Where the hell am I?  What the hell is going on?  Why the fuck has Masuka got a daughter for no bloody reason? 

Ok that last bit was more specific.  On that note though, his daughter gets introduced as a sub plot, which goes absolutely no where, the ONLY reason she seemed to be in the show at all, was because a casting director wanted to film her topless for a few hours. Yes ok I get it – beautiful girls being beautiful on screen, I love it and approve, but not at the expense of any sort of credibility. 

The plot lines are so messed up and confusing that I’m not even going to try to explain them, but the important thing is that they made no sense, no one ended up catching Dexter, he killed his sister and he abandoned his child with a different serial killer.  He then sailed off, committing suicide by sailing into the depths of a storm that was threatening to rip Miami open like a Satsuma.  Oh wait no, he survived and moved to Canada.

The worst bit is the original show runner had a much better idea for the ending, and the ending they went with has actually ruined the show for me as a whole.  A bit like finding out your girlfriend had been cheating in you for your whole relationship. It’s just pure, horrible, betrayal.

In short Dexter went from this:

To this:

Very suddenly.

So my ‘review’ had originally ceased here and you can stop reading now if you want but if you want to see me surgically kick the shit out of Dexter Season 8, read on.

Dexter Season 8 elicited the same amount of disgust from me as watching a post apocalyptic circus clown rape a puppy.  In no particular order here is everything wrong about it that I can think of. All right Dexter Season 8 you and me are gonna spoon, now bend the fuck over.

Shaggy Dog Story Sub Plots

So in the end of the last season Debra kills La Guerta, she feels really bad for it and goes a bit off the rails. Which basically means having sex with people, drinking beer, and leaving the police force where she works for a private detective agency for about a month.  She then gets over brutally murdering a superior officer and trundles back into work no longer annoyed at her brother for forcing her hand and essentially disregarding everything interesting about the show with a one half-mouthed strokey smile.

Also Masuka gets a daughter who, as I mentioned, was brought in as a sub-plot. She gets hired to work in the police station, and that’s it… yeah I don’t know what to say; she was about as pointless as me putting a random noun in at the end of this sentence. Tyre.

Dexter at one point decides to take on a wee child as a trainee serial killer, to which I thought was a shit idea but at least one that would leave his legacy in the hands of another, but just as everything is getting sorted some random OTHER new character comes in and rips his skull open.

Quinn, who has come back from the previous season looking like a love child between Jennifer Lopez and Skeletor from He-man, has used his newfound powers of anorexia to make every scene very uncomfortable.  Primarily because nobody seems to have told the costume department not to make him look like a piece of linguini with a fake tan and a napkin hanging off it.  His main role, in relation to our topic, was that he was going to go for a promotion, it was between him and some random woman. Angel pushes for Quinn to apply, and considering he is making the decision on who gets it Quinn feels quite confident.  But he didn’t get it.  The other woman did, and she runs off with Lord Lucan and is never heard of again.

Hannah Mckay

What the actual shit.  Hannah McKay comes back from the dead, walks in to Dexter’s life and semi murders him and his sister, all this after trying to murder his sister last time.  She murders her husband, tells Dexter she was gonna murder him, says “oj, jk totes love you”, and they start dating again.  Now she has quickly become the most wanted woman in the state and her ability for indiscretion far out ways my own. Instead of cutting/dying her hair, she seemingly gets a her wanted poster and makes sure she looks exactly like that all the time, hovering around areas where there are nothing but traps and police. I can’t even talk about this she is a painfully badly written character. 

She poisons EVERYTHING she meets, and after an apology, a hair flick and some boobs she’s put in charge of cooking for the entire main cast.  That’s like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of randomly thrusting a knife in your living room three times a day.

‘I promise not to try and kill you again.’ Says Hannah despite doing that every time she had a chance. 

‘It’s ok Hannah you fucking lunatic, I believe you now please look after my infant child as I go and destroy the integrity of this show.’ says Dexter, defecting onto Jeff Lindsay’s face.

‘Anything I can do to help?’ asks Hannah, trying to decide between sea salt and arsenic for tonight’s dinner.

‘You’ve done more than enough already you crazy pointless, pointless bitch.’ Says Dexter with love and empathy in his eyes like no serial killer ever.

Dexter’s Dad

So Dexter has been a terrible person, his father existing solely as a hallucination to protect Dexter from doing wrong, he even decides not to kill someone, which leads directly to Debra getting shot.  Because Dexter got over his urge to kill, because of the love of a serial killer who can’t be trusted, his Dad disappears into heaven like something out of fucking Quantum Leap.

Angel is a Useless Bastard

Three of the best detectives in Miami Metro in the past 8 years namely, Quinn, LaGuerta and Doakes have thought that Dexter was a serial killer. Angel has been handed evidence on many occasions incriminating Dexter, which in this series he literally tears in half.  He actually watches Dexter brutally murder someone and because he didn’t like the victim, let Dexter go. It’s almost as if they have been taking DMT and suddenly have realised that they are in a TV show and that it doesn’t really matter what they do.

Debra’s Bloated Defaced Corpse

So Dexter kills his sister so she doesn’t have to live as a blob of meat wrapped in a bed and marinated in her own piss. He then walks out of the hospital and drops her in the sea (because this hospital is on a beach), all emotional and beautiful and symbolic.  However given that he didn’t weigh her down and simply covered her up with a cloth like he was protecting a trifle from flies, she is going to wash up on the beach in about two days half eaten by sharks, and all waterlogged and bloated looking like Gary Busey on an average day.  

The US Marshall

So this guy right, his job is to catch killers, it is his JOB to hunt killers.  Despite being in the same building as Hannah who he’s after he also has had a conversation with Saxon, the most wanted man in the city, without having a clue who he is.  Somebody somewhere is bound to have told him. What the hell is with Hannah, is she a fucking siren or something? Sucking the cock of cleverness until all intelligence that any man once had has been ejaculated into the ocean of awful plot lines?  Argh!

So there are those things, and still a world of unanswered questions about Astor and Cody, and why no one seems to give a shit that Harrison has been kidnapped. Loads of the new characters could have had their plot lines given to characters already present, and weirdly the one time they did reuse a character was the most far-fetched thing I’ve ever seen.  So if you do watch it, do it before you meet someone for a fight or a cry because it will inspire no other emotions.  Way to ruin a good show, you fucking idiots.

Dave Roberts

Dexter at CeX

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