Note to readers: If you've watched the Showtime Drama, Dexter, and you're already familiar with the cast and how it ended, please skip the intro and start reading after the double line. If not, let me provide some background. The show lasted for eight seasons so it will take a while to provide the needed detail. If you're a fan, you may find my timeline out of sync with the real show. My apologies to the purists, but this is how I'd like to have seen things end.
One additional note. The guy who played Dexter, Michael C. Hall and the woman who played Debra, Jennifer Carpenter, were married in real life for a couple of years while the show was being aired.
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Supporting Cast:
Maria Laguerta: Miami Metro Police captain who is Debra's superior. She is the only person who believes Dexter is really a serial killer called "The Bay Harbor Butcher." She never gives up on this belief and at the end of Season 7 she finally has the proof she's waited six years to get. Debra kills her at the end of Season 7 when she is forced to choose between killing her or Dexter.
Joey Quinn: A hard-drinking Miami Metro Police detective whose marriage proposal to Debra was rejected. She later professed her love for him in the final season.
Angel Batista: Miami Metro Police Detective Sergeant. Debra was promoted to Lieutenant over him for internal, political reasons, but like everything else, Angel takes it in stride and supports her as much as possible.
Harrison Morgan: Dexter's five-year old son. His mother, Rita, was killed by a serial killer named Trinity around the end of Season 2 leaving Dexter to raise the boy on his own. Through Harrison we learn Dexter is capable of loving someone else.
Vince Masuka: A true pervert who is Dexter's fellow lab geek.
Jamie Batista: Harrison's nanny and Angel's younger sister who gets romantically involved with Joey Quinn.
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Why I'm writing the story:
The ending to Dexter has been rated the worst in the history of television series several times. Many fans were okay with how it ended; some even insist it was the only possible way it could have happened. But most, like me, were either strongly disappointed or downright disgusted with it as it left us hanging and completely unsatisfied. It just didn't make sense. In stark contrast, many people, myself included, thought the ending to Breaking Bad was the best in television history. A minority thought it was too canned and too sterile leaving no loose ends. This is my attempt to provide an ending that seems much more logical and satisfying. Again, purists won't much care for it, but c'est la vie. :-)
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Background Summary:
"Dexter Morgan, Miami Metro Police Department blood spatter analyst, has a double life. When he's not helping the homicide division solving murders, he spends his time hunting and killing bad guys that slip through the justice system. He spends his sun-drenched days solving crimes - and moonlit nights committing them. But not to worry, our cool-blooded Dexter doesn't kill just anyone. He reserves his homicidal hobbies to taking only the lives of other killers."
For those who need even more info, here are the details:
When Dexter Morgan was three, he watched as his mother was brutally murdered in front of him inside a cargo container. She was dismembered with a chainsaw and the event scarred him for life. A caring police officer named Harry Morgan, found the boy and later adopted him. Harry knew this traumatic event had created in him what Dexter later called his "Dark Passenger" that drove him to kill until his lust for blood was temporarily satisfied until the need to kill arose again.
Harry was afraid Dexter's demons would land him in Florida's electric chair so he created a Code by which Dexter lived. He could kill, thus satisfying his need to do so, but he could only kill those he knew to be guilty through thorough research and vetting and who had escaped the criminal justice system. As you might expect, there were exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, Dexter did indeed try to live by the Code. As a sociopath, unable to feel what others felt, the Code and Harry's teachings helped him fit in during various social situations where he would have otherwise stood out like a sore thumb. It was a survival mechanism, pure and simple.
Harry also had a biological daughter named Debra who, like Dexter, went to work for the Miami Metro Police Department. Unlike Dexter, a blood spatter analyst, Debra Morgan was an extremely foul-mouthed police officer who was later promoted to detective and then to lieutenant. As they grew up, Harry favored Dexter and excluded her to the point that it cause Debra to have trust issues with men. As a result, she had relationships with some very unlikely guys to include a pot-smoking police informant, a serial killer (who, as it turns out, was Dexter's older blood brother who had also seen their mother murdered, but who wasn't adopted by Harry because he was 'too old to save') an FBI agent thirty years her senior, and a hard-drinking fellow detective.
At one point in Season 6, Deb tells her police-department therapist the only man she's ever really trusted is Dexter. After some back and forth, the therapist asks her if there might be something more than just trust to her feelings. She is initially revolted by the comment, but when she's reminded Dexter isn't really her biological brother, she must grapple with these new feelings.
Debra has no idea what Dexter does in spite of the many clues a good detective should have noticed and pieced together over the years. Deb's love for Dexter blinds her to all of them so until the final episode of Season 6, when she sees him kill a man he has meticulously prepared to kill on an altar in a church, she is clueless about his Dark Passenger.
Prior to that, she see's him only as her protector, her hero, and her quirky big brother. As a result, even after she learns his deepest, darkest secret when she sees him kill a serial killer who's been terrorizing Miami, she can't bring herself to turn him in even though she is now a police lieutenant. She struggles to accept this newly-discovered side of her hero-bother, but doing so tears her up inside. Dexter later dispatches a man who intended to kill Debra and although she doesn't approve of what he does, she tells him that Dexter's killing him made her feel 'good.'
During a particularly heated exchange in Season 7, Deb finally blurts out that minutes before learning Dexter's secret in the church, she'd planned to tell him she not only loved him but was in love with him. Dexter doesn't have much to say about the comment and the writers never explored that possibility. Instead, they had him fall in love with another serial killer, a beautiful blonde woman named Hannah McKay. Hannah taught Dexter, a sociopath, he could feel emotion for another woman. He'd already learned he had the capacity to love when his first wife, Rita, gave birth to their son, Harrison. (Rita was killed by guess what? Yep, a serial killer around the end of Season 2.)
The series ended with Debra abandoning her feelings for Dexter and declaring her love for Joey, Quinn, the hard-drinking fellow detective she'd once loved but fallen out with. Tragically, Debra dies in a local hospital after being shot. Dexter buried her body at sea during a hurricane then the scene inexplicably cut to him being a logger in Portland, Oregon, the place he had once said a lot of people end up and the series is over. WTF?
So, for most of us, the ending was both illogical and wholly unsatisfying, thus the reason for calling it the worst ending—ever. This is how I would have wrapped up the series. ymmv.
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"I love you too, Deb."
"You do? I've never heard you say it out loud before. You really do love me?"
"Of course I do. You're my sister."
"Is that how you still see me? After all these years? I'm still just your little sister? Really, Dex?"
"I don't know what else to say. You are my sister, right?" Not sure what else to say but sensing he should say something, Dexter blurted out, "You're also a good cop and a good detective." He paused and had that goofy look he always gets in any social situation where he's not sure how a normal person should respond. "Can you help me out here? How am I doing?"
Debra just grunted and walked away. Her therapist was even more fucked up than her she told herself. "In love with Dexter, my ass," she said under her breath as she went into her room in the apartment they'd shared since her last romance ended in disaster. She shut the door and wondered why she even bothered trying to talk to him about anything involving feelings. Sociopaths don't have feelings. They can't empathize. And Dexter is a sociopath, right?
Yet every time she watched her brother play with or care for her nephew Harrison, she knew that wasn't true. Dexter was a killer, but he wasn't a sociopath. He couldn't be. He loved his son and he showed it by making sacrifices for him. No true sociopath could do that. And he loved her. She knew he did. He was just too fucking stupid to know he might also be in love with her. Okay, he wasn't stupid. In fact, Dexter was one of the smartest people she knew. He just had no real experience with sharing his feelings—feelings she knew he had them. Hell, she saw them nearly every day when he interacted with his son. Then again, what difference did it really make? This whole idea of being in love with someone who was raised as your brother—even if he wasn't biologically related—was as fucked up as every other relationship she'd ever had.
Deb sat there and recounted the men she'd let in and it made her shudder. The first turned out to be a serial killer called 'The Icetruck Killer.' She remembered how he'd groomed her and strung her along until she fell hard for him. The highlight of the relationship came when he proposed to her and she'd said 'yes.' That was immediately replaced with the anger and shame she felt when he kidnapped her and used her to lure Dexter to her location. He was going to kill her, for fuck's sake and yet she'd just accepted his marriage proposal. Great detective my ass. Oh, and the added bonus was he was Dexter's biological brother! Yeah, that was a great choice, Deb!
Then there was Joey's CI or confidential informant who was dope-smoking musician with very little ambition. "Good work there, too, she thought to herself.
Ah, but it didn't end there, either! No, Debra Morgan had fallen in love with an FBI agent twice her age. Had he not been gunned down in his search for another serial killer named Trinity, she'd have married him. "I'd have married my own fucking father," she said out loud as the verbal self-flagellation continued.
"And now I'm love with my mother-fucking brother—a serial killer for Christ's sake! Jesus Christ on a fucking stick! I am one fucked up bitch," she told herself before she went to sleep.
The next day, Debra got word that another murder suspect had kidnapped another victim whom he was likely terrorizing. This was his MO. He would befriend a woman, invite her or take her by force to his place, then spend the evening 'hunting' her as she tried to elude him. In the end, he would kill her but not before making her live through hours of hell on earth first. If she could just find his location, she could stop him.
She had uniforms out looking for this sick bastard when she remembered something from an earlier case. Without telling anyone where she was going, she headed to the location where she thought he just might be. Thirty minutes later, her suspicions were confirmed when she entered the three-story house with her service weapon drawn. Music was blaring and strobe lights were flashing. It was utterly disorienting but he was here and she was ready for him.
