Dexter

Started by gob, October 24, 2006, 01:59:21 PM

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Fernando

*crickets*

poor Dexter, having to face br ba awesomeness in its final poorly developed and written season.


SPOILS FOR EPISODES 1O AND 11 SEASON 8


Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on July 18, 2013, 01:32:13 PM
I guess I do have one prediction. Notice how Rampling's character keeps remarking with curiosity on things Dexter says or does that are not typical of a psychopath. "Hmm that's strange, psychopaths usually don't express love in that way" etc. etc. Are the writers simply winking at the audience, who know that Dexter does have a conscience and could probably stop killing? I mean we all know that, right? Are they going to blow that wide open finally? They've played with this halfheartedly countless times, but they almost really did it in Season 5, which I found immensely effective. Would they ever actually commit to that?

well, your prediction came true at least for episode 11 where Dex just couldn't kill Saxon and instead he called Deb, obviously that had to turned bad when the US Marshall showed up and cut him loose just to be stabbed by Saxon.

btw, I thought the finale would be Dex struggling with two nemesis, the US Marshall on one side and Saxon at the other, both good and evil against him, but the Marshall is done (i think) since he was stabbed in the heart.

then there's Deb, she's alive and probably make it....or not, either way Dex will seek vengeance for this no doubt and that may finally be his downfall....could that be his Mike Ehrmantraut moment? (leave granddaughter and save himself). in Dex's case could be avenge Deb or run away with Hannah....

Ill predict this, no fucking way Dex leaves with Harrison and Hannah to live happy ever after, even if Deb dies.


and god, Harrison could take acting lessons from baby Holly White, he is the worst! (mainly referring to episode 10)

AntiDumbFrogQuestion

- Hannah should just fucking dye her hair already

- HOW COME A MARSHALL WOULDN'T RECOGNIZE MIAMI'S MOST WANTED

Fernando

haha, right on both counts.

this is why this final season has been so meh.

Tictacbk

I hope it ends with Dexter making breakfast.

MacGuffin

This is how poor the writing has been:

Hey, Hannah, don't go outside or you'll be spotted.

Next scene...

Harrison cuts his chin. Looks like Hannah has to go outside and be spotted
.

---------------------

Deb: I need pens. Let me go look in Quinn's desk and find the ring that he's hiding here for no other reason than for me to find for plot purpose.

This has nothing to do with Breaking Bad. It's just bad writing. Too many unnecessary characters (Masuka's daughter; the annoying nanny) that took away focus on the ones that matter.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Brando

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 18, 2013, 01:17:08 AM
This is how poor the writing has been:

Hey, Hannah, don't go outside or you'll be spotted.

Next scene...

Harrison cuts his chin. Looks like Hannah has to go outside and be spotted
.

---------------------

Deb: I need pens. Let me go look in Quinn's desk and find the ring that he's hiding here for no other reason than for me to find for plot purpose.



That episode was horrible. If there weren't only 2 or 3 episodes left, I would have stopped watching the show. I don't even feel like spending the time to write out all the stupid shit that's been going on.
If you think this is going to have a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.

AntiDumbFrogQuestion



That episode was horrible. If there weren't only 2 or 3 episodes left, I would have stopped watching the show. I don't even feel like spending the time to write out all the stupid shit that's been going on.
[/quote]

One episode.
Then Showtime wraps the show in plastic and takes it out of it's misery.

Does anyone think that maybe the show would have been tighter if it had brought it's endgame up sooner? As if they weren't already struggling to give characters arcs, they have to throw logic out the window to elongate it's run

Lottery

Quote from: AntiDumbFrogQuestion on September 18, 2013, 04:49:15 PM
Does anyone think that maybe the show would have been tighter if it had brought it's endgame up sooner? As if they weren't already struggling to give characters arcs, they have to throw logic out the window to elongate it's run

Like Season 4? Yeah.

It peaked at Season 2 and a few of the episodes at the end of Season 4 were damn interesting. Also they actually killed my favourite character (Doakes) in Season 2 so fuck this show.

MacGuffin

What a let down. The writers did a total disservice to the character. This entire season he was never in any peril or given a threat. I was never given a reason to care.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Kal

Probably one of the worst finales I have ever seen.

SPOILERS

This should was never incredible but it did have some amazing moments. First season was great, Ice Truck Killer, Doakes, Bay Harbor Butcher, the Trinity Killer, even Colin Hanks had some good moments. The whole idea of Dexter getting caught, or how it would end was always what kept it interesting. All those clowns at the Police Department had to find out at some point, right? Something had to happen.

Instead nobody found out shit. The last season had no suspense. Nothing about him getting caught, people knowing the truth, him learning anything or making a forced change, or anything fucking interesting at all.

Deb died in the most stupid way anyone can die and I hope she's pissed about that. She was a badass the entire show and died like a nothing. Masuka and the entire Police Department didn't even exist or matter. Quinn? Angel? What the fuck? Nothing at all. Dexter ended up alone with a shitty fake beard suffering in silence. What was the fucking point? If you want to live like that just kill yourself. Or try to change and start a new life with your son. His existence is fucking pointless. Everything he stood for and everything he did was meaningless with that ending.

It was the laziest, stupidest and infuriating ending possible. It's like they couldn't finish this and get home fast enough.


Jeremy Blackman

It's strange, but I almost completely lost interest in the show since my last post and had to force myself to watch the last 3 episodes, which I finished last night.

I'm not even sure how to react. In a way it was sort of a bold choice on the surface and I have to respect that, but it was so botched and unsatisfyingly strange that I don't feel they deserve much credit. The whole final act, starting with Deb's brain death, felt like a series of alternate endings from Dexter's DVD extras. Like "these are some ideas we had" or "this is what we might have done." It feels like the actual finale has yet to happen.

Execution problems aside, consider the problematic message. At first glance it seems like they're punishing Dexter, but that's not what's happening. Deb sets it all up in that hospital room scene, when she literally absolves Dexter of all his sins and pleads with him not to feel guilty about anything.

But indeed, as they've been hinting at all season (and as they did in Season 5), Dexter is not a psychopath, does not actually need to kill, and has a conscience. And now everything is weighing on that conscience. When he sacrifices himself, we're supposed to be like "Noooo Dexter, don't! You didn't need to do that! Oh my gosh, he's so selfless!" (Which is morally ridiculous even within the show's universe.) Then when we learned he's disappeared, our reaction is supposed to be "Oh wow, he's going to suffer his whole life, just to protect his loved ones!"

In other words, they didn't punish him, they martyred him. Anything less would have been insufficiently heroic.

The writers apparently actually believe Dexter is a hero. From the AV Club:

QuoteAfter reading one of last week's comments, I decided to catch up on Sundance Channel's The Writers' Room, which features candid conversations with the writing teams behind television's most daring, clever, observantly written shows... and also there's an episode about Dexter. Watching the Dexter writing team discuss the show confirmed all my worst fears about the thought process that goes into creating this world and gave me a new framework for understanding why this show never reached its full potential.

The former conventional wisdom about Dexter's difficulty hitting its stride was that it was a victim of its success; because it was such a draw for Showtime, the network held its creative team hostage, never allowing the writers to start thinking ahead to a satisfying ending. At the beginning of season seven, when Showtime's executives began suggesting the end was near, the episodes seemed to bear out that theory. But by that season's end, it became clear what the real problem was, and it was confirmed by The Writers' Room. Scott Buck and his team are too enamored of the character to create a compelling show around him.

Dexter's writers go to unbelievable lengths to keep Dexter suspended above everything else because they see him as a superhero, a man who has bravely taken responsibility for vanquishing evil in the world and whose only real flaw is his need for human connection. Essentially, they think of Dexter as a low-tech, plain-clothed version of Christopher Nolan's Batman, charged with a vital duty he's too heroic to abandon, and forced to carry the weight of the chaos it causes around him.


Also, this could be the most mindblowing scene in the history of the show:



Did they intentionally edit this scene for comic effect?

Brando

Quote from: Kal on September 24, 2013, 01:54:48 AM
Probably one of the worst finales I have ever seen.

I think it's by far the worst finale i have ever seen. I don't think it would be possible to make a worse finale for a show without actually trying to do so. The season has been terrible but the finale actually worsened my opinion of the season as a whole. The best way to describe it would be amateurish. It feels like it was written by a high school creative writing course. I never read Dexter wrap ups/reviews but glad I read the one from the AVClub. It sums up my opinion better than I could.

Why would you put to rest your beloved sister in the same place you discard the horrible people you've killed?

The treadmill incident was predictable and just stupid writing. The execution was even worse. There are moments in the season that just stand out as poor direction/execution. Quinn is having a conversation with "whats her name" about moving to Atlanta. The scene ends with him just getting up and walking away without an explanation. How do you end a scene like that? It's something you don't expect to see in a high level production. In the Finale, Dexter confronts Saxon in the hospital. Angel with officers show up, take Saxon into custody. Angel walks away with Saxon without acknowledging Dexter is even there. He doesn't tell him that his sister is brain dead. He doesn't say "Hey we got him." Again, its something you'd expect to see in an amateur production.

The original Show runner gave an interview telling how he envisioned ending the show. He would have pitched the show ending with Dexter opening his eyes and he's on execution table about to be executed by the state of Florida. The entire show would have been his life flashing before his eyes before he died. Also, the writers may have wanted to keep Dexter alive to leave to possibility of a spinoff.

If you think this is going to have a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.

Fernando

Quote from: Brando on September 26, 2013, 09:58:20 PM
Also, the writers may have wanted to keep Dexter alive to leave to possibility of a spinoff.

haha, you may be onto something here, a showtime movie?

anyway.

yes, this finale was awful, even worse than I could imagined, maybe deservedly so to a horrible season, none of the other ''main'' characters got any closure:

- Batista let slip that it was crystal clear that Dex plotted to kill Saxon, wtf was that?

- Mazuka and his daughter, that didn't go anywhere

- Joey just mopped and sided with Dex too


I'm sure we could gather here a better team of writers and plot a better ending, although that wouldn't be a challenge.

I wonder what the actors thought of it...they must know it was a shitty season right?

Pubrick

this is why you don't waste time on a show that is not 100% perfect.

just wait til the walking dead ends in a similar whimper.
under the paving stones.

Fernando

no wonder it sucked....although that's no excuse.


Showtime told Dexter writers they couldn't kill Dexter, forcing them to go with only other possible ending

While everyone left the Dexter finale satisfied—having at last seen the story of a serial killer who's secretly working inside a police station reach the conclusion it had been naturally building toward for eight seasons, by having everyone inside that police station still think Dexter's awesome while he goes off to become a lumberjack—it turns out this was just one of several endings the show could have had, some of them possibly not even involving lumber. Vulture spoke to Dexter executive producer John Goldwyn, who revealed that in the writers' room "there were a lot of endings discussed because it was a very interesting problem to solve, to bring it to a close." But there was one solution that Showtime did not find as interesting or as fitting a climax as Dexter sailing into a hurricane on his boat, then emerging on the other side with a beard.

"They won't let us kill him," Goldwyn said of the network's constructive note for the show that was once thought to be predicated on the suspense that its character might end up dead or in jail, until we all realized it was really about the suspense of whether he'd get to be in love or in the lumberyard. "Showtime was very clear about that. When we told them the arc for the last season, they just said, 'Just to be clear, he's going to live.'" With this creative suggestion in the form of a network mandate—which is definitely in keeping with Showtime's insistence that Dexter is Batman, and its attendant hope he could similarly just go on forever—the producers were forced to find some other ending for what Goldwyn called its "very core loyal following," one that provided the only logical conclusion to the story they'd been watching.

Fortunately, it found it in an ending where Dexter's secret dies with the character whose body he unceremoniously dumps into the ocean—leaving every single other person who cared about her haunted by her disappearance forever, yet still believing that Dexter was super cool, despite his always being really weird and aloof (because donuts)—and Dexter is at last able to pawn off his son for good on some poor woman, this time a fellow murderer. Meanwhile, he goes off to live in the woods, having officially learned nothing, but definitely a little sad. This satisfied Dexter's very core loyal following of total masochists.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/showtime-told-dexter-writers-they-couldnt-kill-dex,103892/