Well it's good you don't care about spoilers, because you just watched the final scene of the series.

I didn't think the ending was so bad. I get that audiences like closure, and I get why many people felt cheated by this. But I don't think I would have liked an ending where Dexter lives happily ever after, or an ending where Dexter got his comeuppance. I'm not going to say it was a particularly brilliant piece of cinematography, and I felt that his complete breakdown - the transformation from Dexter the Daddy back to Dexter the Guromonster - was a bit rushed. But the idea was good.

It's like the way they ended The Wire, only less competently executed. There are no grand lessons learned here. Some characters wind up dead, other characters simply throw away everything they've worked for at the very last moment. There is no closure for anyone, because closure never actually happens, not in real life. Life goes on.

I guess what I'm saying is, think of Dexter as Dookie.

The ending didn't make much sense to me.

I get being fucked up about Deb and feeling guilty, but there was no reason to abandon his son and the woman he loved. I mean Hanna would have helped him through the grieving process.

Dexter was mostly cold, logical, rational, and even this new flood of emotional turmoil wouldn't override his basic beliefs about how the world works. He wouldn't have actually believed he was "bad luck" because knows luck isn't really a thing that exists. He's beyond that.

I didn't like getting beat over the head with the hurricane being a symbol of the emotional storm within, but honestly, Dexter was never that clever of a show. Most of the apparently interesting conflicts were red herrings. They had two brilliant seasons with Jimmy Smits and the Trinity Killer, and it all kind of went downhill from there. That Lumen garbage, the weak apocalypse killer storyline... sigh.

Here's how shit should have gone down.

Season 1: Brian gets away. He was too interesting.

Season 2: Dexter dumps Rita because he's just not feeling it and shacks up with whatshertits, the sponsor, and they become like a killing duo.

Seasons 3 and 4: totally cool with it, probably whoevershewas could make things a little more interesting with messing up a little and Dexter has to clean up - maybe she gets killed instead of the blonde one.

Season 5: Anything but that Lumen bullshit. Kill Deb off. Fuck, she was annoying as it was.

Season 6: Brian returns, hijinx ensue, Brian dies.

Season 7: The hispanic broad figures out who Dexter is, people believe her, Dexter goes down. Keep the whole Hanna bit.

Season 8: Everyone Dexter ever knew is completely horrified, Dexter has to deal with being revealed as a monster, has to try to survive in prison, where some of his victims had friends or family, and some deify him like a kind of god and want to follow in his footsteps. Copycat killers emerge on the outside and he's powerless to do anything about it. Dexter manages to make tensions swell and escapes in a prison riot. The world will never be the same.

Then Hanna kills him.

I stopped watching dexter around season 3 but I like that, even if badly done, someone had the balls to end a murdering protagonist series without a family council approved Ultimate Justice Win.

The significance of this is they leave the door open for spinoffs with him still alive and away from all the action.

That was my reaction to it: the returning to it in some way later on, most likely a Showtime exclusive movie, like The Big C.

This show was pretty bad by the middle of season 3 and not exactly brilliant before that, but I always enjoyed it in a "what ridiculous crap are they going to pull next?" way. This episode just felt like a rushed mess though, complete with bad, late 90s CGI in the storm scenes, but at least they didn't try for a happy ending.

The writing and characterization was just shit all season, even compared o the couple of seasons before that, and it was shot like a Lifetime movie. I still enjoyed it though but I went into the whole thing with the realistically low expectations I have for any TV drama that isn't Deadwood or Breaking Bad. Aslong as you don't expect it to transcend the medium, this stuff can be fun, jut like a lot of music is good if you don't care about lyrics (which, ifI really cared about them, would limit me to maybe half a dozen bands since most lyrics are absolute shit).

Moreover, this last scene emphasizes one of the show's crippling flaws: That the creators don't understand that Dexter is, at best, a barely restrained lunatic, and at worst a mass-murderer. Instead, they see him as some tragic superhero whose only flaw is not believing in himself enough.

By the last season, nothing went wrong for Dexter. He moonwalked his way through every conflict. And in the show's final moments, it got so bad that when he tried to kill himself by driving into a hurricane, his only punishment was a wispy pube-beard.