Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

DEXTER – EIGHTH AND FINAL SEASON – 2013

To wrap up the story in twelve episodes or chapters, that’s short, that’s fast, but that’s radical, à la Dexter. He manages to solve a ton of problems in these twelve episodes.

First he finds a surrogate mother for Harrison, and that was difficult to find. Luckily the only woman he had loved and that was still alive, apart from his sister turns up and re-activates some fundamental mechanisms. And Harrison likes her. She is very special but she wants to become a good girl.

He manages to solve the problem of his father and how his father, a good cop, could accept his adoptive son to become a criminal, how he managed to come up with the code, etc. In fact the symbolical mother surrogate of his, of Dexter, comes up to him and reveals who she is and what she did. She reveals that his father OD’ed on his heart drug when he could not stand what Dexter had become any more. Dexter hates that doctor Vogel that has nothing of a bird in that story, at most a vulture but that is no  bird you try to attract in your garden with a bird feed and a bird bath.

He has to solve a last case of a serial killer who is aiming at both him and Doctor Vogel. Her past is revealed and she becomes extremely dark and deep with one son killed by another, you know the story of Cain and Abel. And the killing son is sent East of Eden in some institution in England, or something far to the East. And there he is tortured into medical blankness since he is a criminal who deserves to be punished even if it is with drugs or some archaic violent treatment like electric shocks or other forceful manipulations of the body or the brain, and why not the mind and the imagination.

Of course the dear son who was buried alive in this institution plans a good case of arson, with seven dead people in the wing that burns, and himself among these seven, officially, because’ in fact he manages to get out, change identities and then move on, looking for mummy, Doctor Vogel, and all those she preferred to him, and first of all Dexter. And the blood trail can start under the police identity of the “brain surgeon” because he saws up the skull of his victim in a very special way and scoops out one very precise section of the brain and delivers these extracted sections to his mummy. A yummy appetizer for Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving celebrations.

He of course has to save his sister from private investigation and then to make her a star in the Police Department. So he finally comes over his need to kill with his last victim and gives him over to Deborah for her to arrest him. But a Federal Marshall comes up and he completely messes the case, frees the criminal who kills him straight away, takes his gun, shoots Deborah who shoots him but in vain. And things will not turn honky dory and there will be some complications. Dexter then has to close up the file and clean up the plate. Deborah disappears in a hurricane.

Finally he has to take care of himself and to protect Harrison and the substitute mother who has taken the boy to South America, and there is only one way. So he disappears with his boat into the hurricane. A tempestuous ending but it works.

And yet they more or less kept one card up their sleeves, I mean the producers, for a sequel in let’s say five or ten years, when Harrison reaches teenage and starts moving towards finding his father and recuperating the father model he needs and remembers from his tumultuous first four years. Check it all by yourselves with the DVDs how they manage to keep one bun in the oven in slow gestation.

You can always dream. But it is sure the author of the book series will be able to go on working with Dexter if he wants, though the last volume was announced a long time ago and will maybe finally come out next March (2014) and it is supposed to be entitled Dexter’s Final Cut, which promises quite some blood.

We’ll see. Que sera sera. Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? What will be, will be!

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU