Dexter's Final Season Premiere Review - "A Beautiful Day"
"You're lost. All my life I thought that I needed you. That I couldn't survive without you. But it was the other fucking way around." --Debra Morgan
Dexter is an old show. I remember watching the series premiere back in 2006, back when top-tier dramas like The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Shield were still on the air. Back then, this new show about a serial killer with a sense of vigilante justice managed to stand out as a unique, provocative meditation on moral greyness, the effects of childhood trauma, and the nature of empathy. These were the good old days.
Fast-forward seven years, and Dexter is showing its age. Just about every other premium drama that was on the air in 2006 is long gone by now, supplanted by the current wave of high-octane suspense thrillers such as Breaking Bad, Homeland, and Banshee. I feel like I have to preface my review of Dexter's eighth (and final) season premiere with a confession, just as that confession in turn has to be prefaced by my pointing out its surprisingly long lifespan. The confession is this: I haven't much liked Dexter since its fourth season, back in 2009. The quality of the dialogue, seasonal plotting, use of voiceovers, and development of secondary characters have been major weak spots in the series since the third season, but the sometimes cringeworthy writing was tolerable up until about season 5. Since then, the show has been dying rapidly, agonizingly. By the end of season seven, which some (mistaken) fans argued was a return to form, the corpse of the TV show we remember from 2006 has begun to stink. It's unfortunate, but at least the writers have seemed to acknowledge they've run out of ideas, and are making this year's 12-episode offering the much-belated swan song to a once-great drama.
But is their gesture toward final resolution too little, too late? Judging by the season premiere: probably.
Look, I'm not going to write off the whole season based solely on the first 50 minutes, but I gotta admit that, barring the last 90 seconds of "A Beautiful Day", I don't feel particularly compelled to see how the last chapter in Dexter Morgan's story plays out. But hey, I've stuck around this long (albeit to my eternal disappointment), so I guess I can stick it out for another 11 episodes. In the meantime, I'm gonna take this opportunity to continue bitching about how much this show sucks now compared to the glory days of seasons 1-4.
After the shocking (but not really) climax at the end of the last season, the show jumps ahead six months, but you can hardly tell because everyone is still hung up on LaGuerta's murder. It's not that I think the writers should move on immediately from the death of a major character, but for the purposes of realism (look it up in the dictionary, Dexter writers), it's a little odd that literally every conversation the Miami Metro characters have revolves around LaGuerta, after having six months to adjust to it.
But I guess there's not much else for them to talk about; except for Deb's disappearance from the office, it's business as usual in Miami. There's a new serial killer running around town, lobotomizing people or some bullshit, and Chief Matthews brings in a civilian psychologist whose work specializes in psychopathic profiling to help the bumbling Metro cops solve the Case of the Missing Frontal Lobe, or whatever. The addition of Dr. Evelyn Vogel is one of many indicators that the writers are running out of steam, creatively speaking. Vogel acts basically as a female version of season 2's Agent Frank Lundy, whose own work specialized in--wait for it--psychopathic profiling. Meh. This time, though, the writers at least introduced a twist at episode's end that suggests Dr. Vogel knows more about Dexter's dark hobby than anyone else in the show, except Deb, of course.
Speaking of, Dexter's sister ain't doing too well after, y'know, being forced to execute a fellow police officer to save her mass-murdering brother she wants to make incest babies with. I know, I know, I can't believe I just wrote that sentence either. Welcome to Dexter circa 2013. Anyway, Deb's run away from home, taken on increasingly dangerous bounty hunting missions, and gotten hooked on a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs, presumably as a kind of coping mechanism, the kind you'd expect a sixteen-year-old emo kid or a Bret Easton Ellis character to embrace. Now it looks like we get to watch Deb have a total meltdown for the rest of the season that may or may not lead her to finally tell her police buddies that her brother is the Bay Harbor Butcher. DRAMA. I'm on the edge of my seat here, guys.
Through her drugged-out, self-destructive haze, though, Deb does make the intriguing obervation that without her in his life as a constant moral influence to touch base with on a regular basis, Dexter Morgan is essentially lost; adrift at sea. Dexter has always thought that his sister was dependent on his level head and emotionless rationality to keep her mood-swinging psychobitch personality in check. As Deb correctly points out in a confrontation in this episode, Dex has got it backwards. By making Deb hold on to his secret life and shoot LaGuerta, he has unconsciously made himself even more dependent on her, and it's hard to see how he has failed to miss this seismic shift in their dynamic until now.
In this last season, Dexter is obviously falling apart. He's made his sister hate him, his son fear him, and with the introduction of the seemingly omnicient Dr. Vogel, his life has become entirely unmoored. Everything's business as usual in Miami, it's true, but at this point even resetting the status quo of the series doesn't change the fact that for the two leads of the show, there's no going back anymore. All they can see is the end looming ahead of them, and all we can do is hope that the destination was worth the long and frustratingly uneven journey.
Written by Modern Sin
