“I totally get people’s dissatisfaction”: why Michael C. Hall didn’t like the end of ‘Dexter’
The longer a popular TV series goes on, the more pressure falls on the shoulders of the showrunners to get it right and stick the landing when the time comes for the final episode, although Michael C. Hall was sympathetic to the many viewers who believed Dexter crashed and burned instead.
A large number of shows have overstayed their welcome to varying degrees, driven largely by the people calling the shots deciding that there’s no point drawing a line under the story when there’s still so much interest, which by extension means money to be made.
Damon Lindelof would be the first to admit Lost went off the rails when it lost sight of its original intention, while Prison Break went downhill from the second there was an actual prison break, with Homeland, House of Cards, and The Office just three more examples of hugely popular hits that should have ended a lot sooner than they did.
Until Game of Thrones‘ disastrous eighth and final season came along, Dexter‘s 96th and final episode ‘Remember the Monsters?’ was arguably the most hated swansong for a once-mighty show of the small screen’s entire ‘Golden Age’. The Sopranos might enter the conversation, but whereas that was polarising and divisive, the season eight finale of the serial killer thriller was flat-out reviled.
After Jennifer Carpenter’s Debra dies and is buried at sea, Hall’s title character rides a boat headlong into a hurricane to go out in a presumed blaze of glory. However, the last scene reveals him to be alive, well, and living under an assumed identity at a lumber yard, sending the Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-winning show out with a whimper.
A decade later, Dexter sought to atone for the mistakes of its past by returning with sequel series New Blood, which allowed the leading man to try and make up for the initial disappointment. “I totally get people’s dissatisfaction with the way the show ended because it didn’t really end,” he admitted to Entertainment Tonight. “It just left us in this pretty unresolved funny certain place.”
Although he admitted “it made sense for the character to find himself in that position and to put himself in this self-imposed exile after all the chaos after the show,” the actor nonetheless conceded how “I would get why it was pretty unsatisfying and infuriating for fans” after they expected many of the lingering and unanswered questions to be cleared up. It “didn’t sit that well” with Hall how Dexter wrapped up, either, to the point he “owed it to myself to explore it further if it came up.”
It may have taken eight years to get there, but New Blood restored the feeling of Dexter‘s original pomp and gave long-time fans the resolution they’d been denied the first time around. It was a longer journey than expected, but at least it got there in the end.
