Dexter

Season 1 – 85% – At its core, a small, pleasantly escalating case where too many personal coincidences happen around the main character. And in the bigger picture, it's the first step of a sympathetically sophisticated series that intoxicates viewers with a sweet feeling of knowing more than everyone around the central character, while still being led by the footsteps of an unknown killer. In the end, it's a relaxed and gradual spectacle that once introduced me to the world of cable TV and gave me a criminally minded character with purely logical thinking and somewhat noble intentions. However, nothing is black and white, and there are many twists yet to come. Season 2 – 90% – Cold logic starts to crack due to an animalistic force in the form of a seductive stranger, sympathy is increasingly stolen by the uncompromising Debra, and the deserving place in the spotlight belongs to the charming Julie Benz as Rita, who is unnecessarily scorned by viewers. In this season, the creators found the ideal balance that guaranteed the show's position for a few more years, a show that everyone watches (or at least plans to start watching at any moment). And it must be said, deservedly so, because the dynamics of relationships between Dexter-Doakes, Dexter-Lila, or Debra-Lundy can captivate viewers. Season 3 – 70% – Surprisingly stumbling at a time when all storylines should gain strength. Laguerta, despite occasionally emphasizing her importance too much, fails to impress, and she can't compete with the consistent performances of Deb or Rita. Dexter himself battles with an almost anonymous enemy and embarks on further endeavors with a rather problematic sidekick, Miguel. Here, in the third year of his Miami escapades, I got the feeling that the script can waver dangerously and, in the wrong hands, could lead the entire series into unexpectedly murky waters. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and the Skinner case was concluded with aplomb, leaving only the anticipation for a more nourishing prey, which didn't take long to arrive. Season 4 – 100% – The pinnacle of the whole bloody show, which cannot be surpassed in terms of uncompromisingness, nerves, or breathlessness due to unexpected twists. The Trinity Killer became a symbol for Dexter, the epitome of a first-class villain whom everyone that follows will strive to match – and they will never succeed. When the storylines around Batista and Joey Quinn finally work perfectly, the outcome is determined. It's a a royal ride with a breathtaking thriller of a finale, and arguably Showtime's most popular viewer trophy-winning showcase. Season 5 – 100% – A change of central creator for the first time and a straight-up hit. Chip Johannessen may have tried out for the role of leader for a single year, but it's the season helmed by him that is my favorite of the entire series. The charming Lumen, the manic Jordan Chase, and the pleasantly intertwining relationships of the various main and supporting characters have simply pieced together an unbreakable whole for me, led by the increasingly humanized title character. A heartbreaking period that unfortunately couldn't last forever. Season 6 – 80% – A change of central creator for the second time and the beginning of the end. It was from the arrival of Scott Buck as showrunner that some promising storylines never reached their zeniths, and in Dexter himself, that original unreadable hero was sometimes hard to recognize. Fortunately, the tension and the gradation of individual twists still work perfectly, and the religious subtext also fell on unexpectedly fertile ground. The rating is thus not lowered by the almost unbearable Maria Laguerta (nothing against the fitting Lauren Vélez by any means), nor by the feeling that some of the material should not be subjected to too many rewrites. Season 7 – 80% – New key characters like clockwork and occasionally a lot of question marks over the actions of the old ones. Some explicitly annoy (Louis, Nadia), some delight (the unflappable Yvonne Strahovski as Hannah) and some, somewhat surprisingly, steal every episode (Ray Stevenson and his rhino-like freshness in the skin of mobster Sirk). As a whole, I'm still enjoying it so much that I'm not only sitting on the edge of my seat in suspense, but almost on the back of it at times, but the final impressions, like last year, are perhaps a little lost. While the first seasons had a more meandering pace but lingered in the mind for months, the more recent seasons – despite heartbreaking or absolutely pivotal events – simply fail to impress. This leaves one single but all the more crucial unknown, the quality of the final batch of blood, evidence, and monologues. For it is with Dexter, perhaps more than any other series, that the quality of the finale itself is depended upon to support or detract from the previous season. Season 8 – 60% – Pleasant flashbacks, surprising explanations, and a slowly collapsing house of cards. But what at the beginning seems like a paraphrase of earlier themes (Dexter as both mentor and pupil) eventually degenerates into a rather dull plot due to dysfunctional supporting characters (Elway and the Marshal) and, worst of all, a chase with the absolute worst villain. That this particular amateurishly-acting individual would slam Dex, Deb, and everyone present in such a manner is what I consider to be a regular screenwriting misstep. Ironically, instead of feeling like a culmination, the final season just feels like a series episode and is therefore a considerable disappointment. After all, even an unconcluded season seven would have felt a bit more fateful as a finale, as it at least somehow gradually arrived at its climaxes. Eight, on the other hand, just works around the new characters, tries to close everything that needs to be closed in the last two episodes – and leaves the rest lying around. No catharsis for the secondary characters or answers to the burning questions of the last few years. Thus, the top ratings that have been slowly grinding away for some time now are rightfully fading into irreversibility, making the end of a viewer cult an unnecessarily bitter bite. To make us wait years for redress after the worst episode ever was maddening. But all is forgiven in the winter of 2021. New Blood – 75% – This surprisingly self-contained project, cut off like this by many years, works a little better than it would have as a possible ninth season. And for how long the creators have been treading around its creation, they're a bit like elephants in china now, standing still the moment they're supposed to step up and rushing forward when it would be convenient to wait, so fast that I don't even have time to look around before the plot is somewhere else. However, what remains the same is the atmosphere, which even without the sun and Miami beaches brings back that paranoid spectacle of the protagonist spinning thrilling wheels in all directions. The much-praised and hated finale is certainly not the best episode, but thankfully it's not the worst either, easily undoing the damage done by the last episode nearly a decade earlier. It's just a shame that it's where the rush is by far the most frantic, because by that point the viewer already has an inkling of how the whole series might end, and is just guessing who's going to kill who, who's going to stay where and with whom, and just throwing figures around in such equations. But because the creators leave the viewer groping for a very long time, it is still possible to fit almost any composition into such a conundrum some twenty minutes before the end, and then when it finally comes to breaking bread, it loses in emotion the weight that the nine previous episodes tried to soak up. As a result, New Blood doesn't rank among the best seasons, but it reaches somewhere to the level of the third, sixth, or seventh, the ones that are good enough and solidly watchable, with surprising ease. Without the blatant logical shortcuts, where a lot of things are made implausibly easy for the main characters (see the very convenient conference or the increasingly rapid putting two and two together), I would still be a class above satisfied, but the main goal is met. A series that I still considered one of the best (at least of the ones running at the time) after its fifth season, I suddenly stopped caring about at its first ending because I felt like the creators were making a fool of me. Now I certainly do care, and my memories of Dexter as a whole have finally been properly brightened again. (2008-01-30) (less) (more)