Dexter

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flyonthewall2983
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Re: Dexter

#51 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Sep 22, 2013 10:55 pm

Just read about the finale, and am glad I didn't get Showtime this year.
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A fucking lumberjack?

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mfunk9786
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Re: Dexter

#52 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Sep 22, 2013 10:57 pm

So glad I didn't stick with this show past the first [cornball, hideously overrated] season. AVClub gave the finale an F:
“There will be people who hate it, but we can’t try to anticipate that or put it through the lens of any other show’s finale, because that was another show. This is our show. This is Dexter.” -- Executive Producer Sara Colleton
First, a few deep, meditative breaths to calm myself down. Because generally, when someone vacillates between hysterical giggling and apoplexy this rapidly, he gets placed under state care. The Dexter team outdid themselves. Some folks would say “This show is as shitty as it can possibly be, so now we can rest on our laurels.” But not Scott Buck and his team. They never stop striving to create the most offensively stupid show on television. And look, if that was the objective here, a slow clap is in order.


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therewillbeblus
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Re: Dexter

#54 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Oct 18, 2020 1:28 am

I guess people are really asking for more of this? I can’t think of a more frustrating show, especially seasons 5-7 (or 6, I don’t remember when I finally cut the cord), which were some of the most painful television I’ve ever forced myself to sit through. I watched this at a time of my life that was pretty rough and whatever my college roommate put on, well that was that, but when even a zonked out mess wants to pull their hair out from hearing Hall stare off into the distance and talk about his “dark passenger” for the nth time, I can’t imagine who’s getting duped into thinking it’s quality programming.

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Big Ben
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Re: Dexter

#55 Post by Big Ben » Sun Oct 18, 2020 2:54 am

The final seasons of this show are downright atrocious. My favorite scene from the is this one involving a child falling a treadmill. Careful observers will notice that it's a fully grown man actually hitting the treadmill. It's the exact kind of unintentional comedy that proliferated the final seasons that makes me ponder who in their right mind thought continuing this show was a good idea.

The good news in all this is that the showrunner responsible for the early seasons. Whether this will cure the atrocity that was the lumberjack laden finale remains to be seen.

flyonthewall2983
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Re: Dexter

#56 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Oct 18, 2020 10:02 am

I'm hoping for a redemption. The show had promise very early on that was nearly squandered in early seasons, only to be completely done in once the showrunner, Clyde Phillips, left. Now that he's back I have some faith they are aiming to make things right and end on a high note.

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tenia
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Re: Dexter

#57 Post by tenia » Sun Oct 18, 2020 10:16 am

To me, the show reached its peak with the end of season 1 and the first episodes of season 2, only to go downhill from there on. With I don't recall how many seasons (8 ?), that was a long way down...

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Dexter

#58 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Oct 18, 2020 11:36 am

I just remember the Colin Hanks/Olmos one as a kind of traumatic endurance test, but the Julia Stiles one was also pointless. I actually gave the show a chance because of Lithgow's perf in season 4, which I actually watched first out of happenstance (being in the wrong college room at the wrong time, over and over) and then went back to the earlier seasons, and disliked all of it.

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Re: Dexter

#59 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Oct 18, 2020 1:45 pm

The best post-Lithgow villain they had was Ray Stevenson and they even kind of wasted him from what I remember but he had some pretty nice moments on the show. His arc kind of hinted at the direction I wish the show went in, which put Dexter against other kinds of criminals apart from just other serial killers.

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Re: Dexter

#60 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:12 am

Oh my god

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Dexter

#61 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:22 am

flyonthewall2983 wrote:
Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:12 am
Oh my god
"Oh my god" the revival is actually good and surprising, or "oh my god" how could the most inexplicably lauded premium cable show of the millennium sink any lower and I just found out?

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Re: Dexter

#62 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Nov 09, 2021 3:40 am

It’s good, it’s very good. It reached some of the peaks of the former show at it’s best but pushed to a whole new degree. Family is a huge theme and I think it needed to be given how really it was never in the kind of focus this revival may be now. The one movie that this parallels a bit heavy to me is Wind River, and Julia Jones was a major stand out in that movie and will potentially be a standout character here.

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Re: Dexter

#63 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Nov 16, 2021 9:40 pm

The 2nd episode was good. I like the actor playing Harrison, he carries off the trauma the character endured without really selling it too hard, sort of like how Hall was in the first couple seasons regarding Dexter’s own childhood trauma.
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Jennifer Carpenter as Deb in the “new Harry” role is quite effective and seeing the quirks in her character (the cursing and violent tendencies) have an added perspective to the character now a victim of Dexter’s. It makes what they could possibly do with John Lithgow’s character this season all the more tantalizing, and damn creepy too.

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Re: Dexter

#64 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Jan 09, 2022 9:23 am

Just watched the finale. I’m glad I got Showtime this year.

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Re: Dexter

#65 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jan 10, 2022 11:35 pm

For anyone who ever enjoyed the show, at any point this felt like both a justification and basically an erasure of the bad taste whatever turned you off from it. That’s my take on it and while I really don’t expect anyone to go into this thinking it’s the height of this medium, all I can say is that my meager expectations were utterly blown away.

It’s clear to me they took on Twin Peaks: The Return as a bit of a model the same way the original run took inspiration from Lynch otherwise, but more in the spirit of revisiting these themes through modern eyes. It spends a good deal of the season unwinding the sense of mystique around Dexter, by making his return to his deadly craft more difficult on account of not just his age, but how technology (early on in the voiceover he has an incredibly funny line about the new front-door camera technology cramping his style) and particularly how true crime has morphed into today’s pop culture with podcasts and such bringing to light unsolved crimes.

This is also a reclamation for Michael C. Hall, and the character he indelibly portrayed (sometimes against the rather tepid side-plots the show went through not just after the fourth season but the entire run I have to admit). Justifiably so this season is all about family in as intense a way as it was when he had that incredible year squaring off with John Lithgow in what I have to say was the most transparently evil performance I’ve ever seen.

Hall and many of the actors in this ensemble raise the dramatic level to a place of poignancy I really didn’t see coming either. Julia Jones, Clancy Brown and especially Jack Alcot as Dexter’s now-teenaged son Harrison (maybe the show’s MVP and consistent show-stealer) all have solid arcs which lead up to an incredible and emotionally charged climax that utterly justifies this reclamation and any platitudes I can give this.

As for me, watching this with my dad has really brought to bear some cathartic things to see on a television show, that have helped in their own way bring things full circle with me that quite honestly fits with several aspects of my own upbringing and particularly feelings of abandonment and the issues of mental and emotional health out of trauma a brought to bear.
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And almost never has the ends justified the means as to the way the final act of the finale unfolds, if not a little too quickly but as someone I read say put it so perfectly it was all building up to that moment. Dexter’s final line of voice-over before being killed sums up so much of what I think the creators this time were aiming for. The brief curtain call of the many people in his life who were unnecessarily served up as collateral damage to the Dark Passenger clinches the whole moment too.

I also believe that the hidden theme of this is that the creators realized the ridiculousness of how the character became a pop culture superhero in a rather violent point in American history. This much is expressed when Harrison realizes correctly that it was his father who was the passenger, using the code he lived by to just pacify himself and to hell with the collateral damage which up to that moment included a good man and police officer.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Dexter

#66 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Jan 17, 2022 9:56 pm

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The wrap up was too quick to have the impact they were going for. The evidence against Dexter was so obviously circumstantial that it was hard to believe Dexter, with his forensics background, wouldn't know the case would be thrown out, meaning it was also hard to believe he would've panic-killed the deputy. That seemed like the quick route to the ending they had in mind more than proper set-up. Plus, major missed dramatic opportunity not to have Batista confront Dexter after all those years. I was really waiting for that and it never came.

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Re: Dexter

#67 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Jan 19, 2022 10:46 am

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Good points but I was far too invested in the father-son stuff to be really even bothered to care about all that. They probably could have gotten an episode or two more out of everything left on the table, but in the end it worked for me.

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