tv: Way back in season one of Dexter certain things about the show were made clear that continued to hold true. As his character is laid out there was a clear division. There was the man lead by his dark passenger to kill. And in killing he followed a code: only kill bad people. There was also his other life. Where he had his job as a blood spatter analyst for Miami Metro homicide, his sister Deb, and his girlfriend Rita. These two lives were separate and never equal. While Dexter was willing to fight to save Deb or Rita if their lives were ever in danger, he was doing it more because they were good people who didn't deserve to die rather than because he loved them or cared about their actual fate.
The template for how fans would come to describe the show was laid out from the beginning as well. The show would be described in terms of its villains. From season to season the descriptions were always in that vain; the ice truck killer, the bay harbor butcher, Jimmy Smitts (sorry I can never remember his characters name), trinity, Jordan Chase, and the doomsday killer. As these villains were introduced and dispatched of, they all offered Dexter something he could learn about his two separate lives and how he could live within in them on their own separate terms.
In season seven the show broke format. There were bad guys, but none of them were the central focus of the season. Ray Stevenson's Russian gangster out for revenge was a bad ass to be sure, but was not the goal of the year. Instead the show decided, off the heals of their awesome season six cliffhanger where Deb finds out the truth about her brother, to do a lot more examination than they have before. And in doing that all of the walls around the show and its main character began to crumble.
Now that Deb knows who her step brother really is, the facade of a relationship between the two of them is gone and her promotion to lieutenant at their work means that his killer self will now bleed (sorry I couldn't avoid that pun) into that fake space of his as well. Then something even more remarkable happens. Dexter meets Hannah McKay, a femme fetale poisoner with whom he forms a relationship As time goes by Dexter and Hannah become familiar with what each is capable of. The honesty and acceptance of that for both of them turns into a genuinely sweet, albeit twisted and untrusting, relationship and even to real love that is born out or that ability to be able to not have to lie and still be cared about. As these scenarios compound, Dexter is forced out into the open by these two people he truly cares for, we see the division of his two worlds, the killer and the "regular guy" start to begin to crumble.
Then Dexter has an internal revelation. He tries to describe his dark passenger, the name of his urge to kill we have come to know throughout the years, to Hannah and she literally laughs. Over the course of time Dexter finds the acceptance within himself that he found in Hannah and Deb. That there is only one person or thing pulling his strings. He is one man. There is no Dexter by day and dark passenger by night, only him.
It is in the season finale that all of this came to a head. As Dexter is trying to thwart the threat of his past coming back to haunt him, he has a talk with Harry, the final wall yet to crumble between conscience and the father he hopes is still telling him what to do. Harry advises him to run. Take his son and Deb and run. Dexter says he can't. He can't do that to Deb. But he also doesn't want to. He says that his life has come to mean something. His job, his relationship with his sister, he fell in love. The lie is no longer a lie. It is as real as the killer who may have to leave and built all of those other things in order to lie about who he really is.
And in that moment everything changes. The two lives merge into one. There is no by day or by night. No one can be spared, his two selves or those around him. The damage of his own actions is collateral and not just his own. The evolution towards this moment may have seemed apparent over the years, but to actually get there is a different story. The walls are not crumbling. They have now come down.
And that is what we may have to define this season as. Not the name of a villain, but Dexter merging all into one. The relationships closest to him are where that is most on display. But in the transpiring of the season final, we are given flashbacks of his interactions with Doakes where he allowed too much of his different worlds to bleed into one another, showing why Doakes always thought something was off with Dexter, and that Dexter couldn't hide his two worlds from themselves forever. Then, after seeing him reject the notion of his dark passenger, we see him kill for survival, leaving his code behind. Dexter is told by his victim in that moment that he is finally killing for "normal reasons". Dexter replies that he has never done that. As the flashbacks represented a past that was a display of the self-evident present, those "normal reasons" were Dexter's acceptance of present in the way he saw himself and his rejecting of the past. He was in that moment just a killer. No code, no passenger, nothing but who he really was. Letting truth knock down more walls.
What we now have to look forward to is summed up in Dexter's final words of the season: "Is this a new beginning or the beginning of the end?" The answer is both. Dexter may be approaching its final season, but it certainly is doing it in a way that is new for the show. It has stepped outside itself. Gotten away from the simplicity of its anti-hero allowing his dark passenger to rid the world of worse evils. Now we are left with Dexter, killer, man, lover and brother all wrapped into one and dealing with the fact that being all of those things at once is very messy. And that level of messiness almost never leads to a clean answer. Dexter dies or gets caught and goes to jail. Those are the clean thoughts of a simpler show that has since succumbed to the show it has become as Deb did making her choice in the shipping yard. Now we face a messier ending, a new beginning right at the end. And that end I have no doubt echo the title of this seasons finale: Surprise Motherfucker!
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