It may no longer be the go-to punchline for bad series finales (congrats to Game of Thrones), but the final episode of Dexter is a notorious stinker. Airing on September 22, 2013, “Remember the Monsters?” was a “flabby, flaccid, manipulative, horrible cop out of an ending,” with serial killer Dexter Morgan, played by Michael C. Hall, leaving sunny Florida for the woods of Oregon to become a lumberjack. The Dexter revival won’t undo the finale — “What happened in the first eight years happened in the first eight years,” original showrunner Clyde Phillips said — but according to Hall, it will set things right.
“I think in this case, the story that’s being told is worth telling in a way that other proposals didn’t, and I think enough time has passed where it’s become intriguing in a way that it wasn’t before,” the Six Feet Under star told the Daily Beast when asked about bringing back Dexter as a 10-episode limited series. He continued:
“And let’s be real: people found the way that show left things pretty unsatisfying, and there’s always been a hope that a story would emerge that would be worth telling. I include myself in the group of people that wondered, ‘What the hell happened to that guy?’ So I’m excited to step back into it. I’ve never had that experience of playing a character this many years on.”
Hall, who was also in one of the best TV finales ever, believes that the negative response to the lumberjack ending was “warranted,” although “I certainly thought it was justifiable for Dexter to do what he did. I think some of the criticisms were about that, and some of the criticisms weren’t so much about the ‘what’ as they were about the ‘how,’ and those were valid, too.” How can Dexter undo a famously terrible ending? Two words:
Replace Dexter’s dad with Doakes.
(Via the Daily Beast)