The final season of Dexter up until the final episode "Remember the Monsters" might not have been as good as say the Trinity Season, but it was pretty solid keeping the tension coiled pretty tightly , and using the fact this was the final season to put more weight behind its punch. Earlier in the season it carried over from the previous season the feeling that Dexter was losing control. Bringing Harrison in the car to find Deb, seemed to make it look as if he was following a downward spiral of the typical serial who gets careless and more explosive until he gets caught. Ever character who was introduced seemed to gain possible leverage to Dexter being caught.
Then when Hannah resurfaced it looked like Dexter pulled it all together and put the life he could have with her and Harrison as a priority, saying that he didn't care what happened to Saxon as long as someone killed him, he was ok with Miami Metro taking Saxon in. Then Deb got shot and the storm came a combination of events that brought that to a halt. So when Dexter went back for Deb is where thing stopped being as thought out so meticulously as they normally are.
Deb gets a blood clot and goes from bad to worse. Dexter goes after Saxon who is taken into police custody , while I can make sense of this if Dexter was making a better case for himself , then he would have made it look like that Saxon was more of the aggressor than he did, but he was supposed to be overcome with grief about Deb. I can even deal with that after Quinn and Angel watched the security footage with him.
Even going back to finish Deb, I can make sense of , but they way her rolled her body out of the hospital seemed a little over dramatic, seems like he would have at least stolen a hospital uniform, rather than in his kill room brown. Dumping her body over the side of the boat reached the further limits of the character as it would seem like he would want more for his sister than dumping her where all the other bodies of his victims were. But deciding to fake his own death to get out of the lives of his son and Hannah seems out of character, particularly after his final memories of Deb centered on Harrison's birth. Deb's final words for Dexter were for him to go be happy in his life with Hannah and Harrison. So this means that
A- Dexter decided to just become selfish and ignore Deb's last request, which seems odd he would honor her memory in that way and
B - the change that occurred when Dexter came a father was undone in the span of the final twenty minutes. If Dexter was going to live it doesn't make sense he would do so at peril of the relationship between he and his son. I'm a parent and this does not compute. I can understand faking his death even if we want to take a long shot to throw everyone of his tail once and for all in case other evidence in his murders ever came up but not going to get his son is out of character for what we had established for him up to this point and there wasn't enough hot water for him to be in to justify this . So the writers should have ran this about maybe actual parents and seen how unlikely that decision was.
They did seem intent on making sure the series had an unhappy ending and hinted the only ways this could occur was to get caught or die, though going into hiding was on the table , it seems like doing so with another killer who is also wanted makes the most sense if you are not making sense because if someone doesn't identify you they might identify her but made sense for the character who was blind to that side of her. It didn't ruin the show for me but made the sting of the series finale a little harder to swallow and a sour note to end on. But I'll keep telling myself it's just a show , which I did not do with Buffy or Smallville .
