Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
It’s tough when you’re the showrunner of a beloved series that’s attempting to stick the landing for its swan song: Competing expectations of what various factions of fans desire for a perfect series finale versus the story that the writer wants to tell can often time lead to a diluted end-product that leaves no one happy. When the Showtime series Dexter – the story of Miami Metro forensic pathologist Dexter Morgan (the always fun Michael C. Hall) who is a serial killer with a twist (he only takes out the bad guys that law enforcement can’t get to) – reached its conclusion back in 2013, many fans cried foul, claiming that the ambiguous ending had tonally let the series as a whole down. And so it came to be that, eight years later – the Powers That Be at Showtime brought one of their most popular shows back in a new 10 episode miniseries entitled Dexter: New Blood. Be careful what you wish for…
Dexter: New Blood concluded its 10 episode arc this past Sunday night with an ending that might just go down harder for die-hard Dexter fans than the original finale for the series ever did. Ironically, a big part of the show’s revival and the return of Dexter season 1-4 head writer Clyde Phillips for this new series were to correct what they perceived as an unsatisfying original finale. “This one is for the fans,” Phillips pledged when the news was announced for New Blood. After watching this new finale on Sunday evening, I couldn’t help but think that Phillips, brilliant writer though he is, might have misjudged exactly why the fans were so bummed about the season 8 finale. Here’s a hint: It had nothing at all to do with Dexter remaining alive and relatively well, but instead had more to do with what some thought of as a hastily ill-thought out endgame. Post-It Note to Showtime and New Blood creatives – We actually like Dexter Morgan and tune in not to see him taken down for a dirt nap, but to witness exactly how he slips out of his latest impossible situation. It’s as simple as that, no apologies needed, even in this check the box world we currently reside in.
This latest outing for Dexter was an arc that was crying out from the get-go for a lot of things it never rightfully got, starting with the ten episode order which really should have been extended for an additional two episodes. Though never fully won over by the upstate New York setting (Miami it most certainly is not), the biggest crime I felt that New Blood perpetrated was in building an unsteady and rushed plot foundation from almost the very start, something that the addition of episodes might have alleviated, if not outright fixed. As viewers, we’re never given the proper beats to catch up with Dexter and his wayward son Harrison. Jack Alcott is a talented thespian saddled with an unformed character. This feels more deliberate than accidental: Harrison is played as a possible red herring for nearly the entirety of the new series, a plot device designed to keep everyone guessing as to what his ultimate motives might be. This gets in the way of actually caring about the character as he ping-pongs between being likable to not. There was a story to tell about Dexter and Harrison, unfortunately this was not it. We never fully believe the relationship between the two, so why in the final end scenes when it should matter the most, do we care the very least?
The relationship between police chief Angela Bishop (Julia Jones) and Dexter, meanwhile, fares no better; simply put, the romance between the two was thinly drawn out from the start. She exists the way in which Harrison exists: As a simple device to get Dexter from one end of the board to the other, logic-be-damned. When Bishop begins catching wise to her boyfriend’s dark past, there is no sense of pathos of a lover betrayed or the internal struggle on what exactly she should do. Julia
Jones is one of the smartest actors you’ll ever find, and she’s been done a tremendous disservice with the character she is tasked in portraying. When a simple Google search-illogically – gives her the clues she needs in order to pin Dexter’s past sins onto an iron-clad case against him, the audience has already given up on Angela Bishop as being anything other than a means to an end. Because of bad writing, she has not earned our ability to empathize or care about her. Most importantly – we don’t believe in her.
The ending of Dexter: New Blood came as no surprise to anyone who has been following the breadcrumbs publically dropped by Clyde Phillips over the years. The erstwhile scribe has repeatedly voiced his objections to the character of Dexter and his ability to weasel his way out of even the most difficult of situations. Dexter Deserves to Die seems to have been the edict with New Blood and, though I missed my own prognostication of the exact role Harrison had to play in all of this morass by a good country mile, unfortunately that’s exactly what happened in the closing minutes of the series. In the end it was a lazy death for Dexter and one not well-earned by clever writing and jaw-dropping twists. It was, in my most humble of opinions, a true and unabashed failure.
