'Dexter': Reviewing the trailer for next week's finale: yeee-oww!

I just hope somehow Angel and/or Laguerta end up dead so we can finally stop dealing with their god awful romance.

This has been an incredible season. Up until this season my favorite was hands-down season two with the hunt for the Bay Harbor Butcher, but season 4 is certainly giving season 2 a run for its money in my mind!

I was disappointed that the writers had Christine commit suicide because it made her a more sympathetic character and it would have been better if she remained alive and was charged with killing a cop. The fact that she persisted in protecting her father was not entirely credible, especially after he cruelly cut her off.

Two elements have guided the series from the start: 1) for all his driven psychosis, Dexter chooses to continue his life as (not with) the dark passenger, and 2) Harry prepared Dexter from the start that no matter what, eventually Dexter will be found out and executed. Dexter is the story of a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Yes, Dexter was fatally damaged in that shipping container, and yes, there is that rush of obsession that proceeds every killing, but if we think about it, Dexter chooses to kill not from mere compulsion but because he long ago accepted the fundamental reality that that is who he truly is. It seems from the sketchy scenes of his early life, that the issue was never to get Dexter to stop killing, but rather to find a way for his killing to serve some worthwhile purpose and to be survivable. Harry gave Dexter the “code” so that he would have a framework in which to be himself.
Dexter certainly longs for the normalcy that Rita and Harrison represent, but he never seriously turns from the one element that could prove (and in the last episode clearly proves) that he cannot keep that white picket-fence and that shrink-wrapped table in balanced order. The story never wavers because Dexter never wavers. Dexter is human. Dexter is a serial killer.
Rita’s murder has finally answered the question of the past few seasons; can Dexter live a dual existence, or can he be redeemed and leave the life born of the shipping container behind? The answer is no. That’s why the last episode was so shocking. We were rooting for Dexter to kill the monster that was Trinity as a means to temper or kill the monster in his own soul. The story led us to the possibility of his reclamation through love and fatherhood, but instead, we gazed at that romantic Miami moon, and passed the bathroom door only to find the same continuum of blood and murder. The shock wasn’t so much that death came to Rita, the shock was our realization that it could not have been otherwise.
From the start of the series, when any victim was strapped to the table and Dexter was in the final moments before the knife finds it mark, his speech patterns, emotional intensity and body language changed dramatically. It’s more than just the excitement of the moment, it comes across as a revelation of Dexter’s true character, a revelation that Michael C. Hall’s fine portrayal affords us. Think of the almost puppy dog look of the Dexter at Arthur’s Thanksgiving table, and the knife-flashing, jungle cat having pounced on Arthur in the kitchen a few minutes later. Dexter is most alive when he is killing because killing is who Dexter really is. Let’s be honest, it’s not the stopping-to-pick-up-milk-on-the-way home- to-the-wifey-and-kiddies Dexter that interests us. It’s the Dexter who follows his deranged girlfriend to Europe to perfom one final act of intimacy of death that gets our juices flowing.
If the writers don’t sidestep this fact, the remaining episodes of the show will have the usual interesting twists and turns. But at the last, Dexter will be what he was from the beginning, and he will end as he was always intended to end, strapped to a table letting us listen in on that inner conversation as he experiences death. But this time, the death will be his.