Dexter’s all-time terrible finale was actually the least of its problems

Great art is often polarising. There’s a reason why the best TV finales have often proved the most divisive – who could forget The Sopranos’ infamous cut to black? Or the head-scratching conclusion of Lost? Dexter was another series with a finale that divided opinion – between those who said it was a pile of excrement, and others who weren’t nearly so kind. I’m being facetious, of course; the conclusion of Showtime’s dark serial killer drama had a few apologists, and no one could accuse it of playing things too safe. But for eight seasons, Dexter’s blackly comic look at the double life of Miami killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C Hall) had its audience scandalised and thoroughly seduced. They were expecting fireworks – a grand finale that would culminate in reckoning or redemption. What they got instead was a random and abrupt eleventh-hour twist, as its cornered protagonist fled to Oregon to live out his life as a lumberjack.

The sheer out-of-the-blue anticlimax was met with mockery and derision from large sections of Dexter’s fanbase; the disappointment was not lost on Hall, or the show’s creator, Clyde Phillips, who recently described the conclusion in no uncertain terms. “It broke a certain trust with the audience that we had built up in the early years,” he told Screen Rant. “Let’s just be blunt. If you Google ‘The Top 10 Worst Series Finales Ever,’ Dexter is going to be on every list.” Fortunately for Phillips, the show has been given, by his own admission, a “chance at redemption”, in the form of a new sequel series, premiering tomorrow on Sky Atlantic. Dexter: New Blood is set years after the ending of Dexter, and sees the meticulous killer resume his old, deadly habit. But redemption might be easier said than realised: Dexter’s real problems ran a whole lot deeper than one stinker of a finale.

Dexter began in 2006, less than a decade before the streaming era, fortuitously anticipating the boom of interest in serial-killer fiction that would come to dominate the next decade. It was always too schlocky to be really included in conversations about the era’s best TV, but at the time it was a worthy spin on the antihero formula that had come to define “prestige” series. Hall came to the series off the back of a phenomenally strong performance in Six Feet Under, and proved a more than capable leading man. In its early seasons, it also served as a fresh spin on the classic police procedural, with Dexter’s day job as a forensic expert an ingenious plot contrivance.

As with every double-life drama, though, a large part of the thrill was the will-they-won’t-they – arrest him, that is. In the second season, the noose tightened around Dexter, as law enforcement found a trove of his victims’ corpses. He was eventually able to pin the identity of the “Bay Harbour Butcher” onto someone else, but the series could never truly go back. The stakes had been raised, and there was no way of matching them. Subsequent seasons threw increasingly ridiculous nemeses into his path (“The Skinner”; “The Doomsday Killer”; “The Wolf”) with varying success; by the time Dexter reached its final stretch, it had already undergone several cast changes and worn its premise into the ground.

But did Dexter even know what its premise was? This was, first and foremost, supposed to be a show about an unrepentant serial killer – think Hannibal Lecter walking off into the crowd at the end of Silence of the Lambs.  Dexter, however, was constantly making excuses for its hero, making him subtly or not-so-subtly more sympathetic to an audience’s whims. Dexter Morgan killed by a code, targeting only those who deserved it, paedophiles and murderers and other incorrigible villains. That’s not a serial killer. That’s Batman.

It could be argued that the series’ bizarre finale stemmed from this very uncertainty. Was Dexter a character who had a chance at redemption? Was he even in need of it? A glorious hero’s death would have seemed almost as apt as a brutal judicial comeuppance. Every effort to chastise the audience for sympathising with a monster was undermined by the need to constantly qualify Dexter’s crimes, pitting him against some other, more detestable evil. Maybe this was wise; I suppose audiences would be put off by a doggedly realistic depiction of a dead-eyed killer. It would, at least, be a very different type of show. But the enduring popularity of the serial-killer drama –  series like You, or The Serpent – might suggest pure evil isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker.

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At the end of the day, a bad finale isn’t the end of the world. If a show is good enough, a mediocre or even downright awful finale can be laughed off (see, for instance, Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, or The X-Files). Dexter’s finale lives on in infamy not because the series lost its nerve at the last minute, but because it encapsulated all the woolly equivocations that had plagued the series since its inception. When it came to its main character, Dexter was, ironically, a series that lacked a killer instinct. Let’s see if New Blood can find it.

‘Dexter: New Blood’ begins on Sky Atlantic at 10pm on Monday 8 November