Dexter is probably one of the most entertaining and gripping serial killer shows out there. Michael C. Hall played the titular character leading a double life – a forensic technician by day and a vigilante serial killer by night. The crime drama went on for eight seasons before coming to an end. A few years later, Dexter returned for a miniseries, Dexter: New Blood.
While the show was so well-received by both critics and fans, there were some seasons where things didn’t look up for Dexter. The final season of the series has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score and fans have been complaining about how the show ended, for a long time. As it turns out, even Michael C. Hall didn’t bother watching the final episode.
Michael C. Hall’s Honest Opinion on Dexter’s Ending
Dexter was not your average serial killer who went out randomly picking out his victims and murdering them for no reason. He would instead hunt down murderers who had not been punished by the law and bring them to justice himself. One could say that Dexter was the Robin Hood of serial killers.
This is particularly why Dexter was so popular amongst crime genre enthusiasts as they finally had a show that was different. However, those who stuck with Dexter for all the years it ran, were left disappointed with its ending.
After the death of his adoptive sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), Dexter fakes his own death and leaves his old life behind to start a new one as a lumberjack. While discussing the ending with The Daily Beast, Michael C. Hall revealed that he has no opinion on the series finale since he hasn’t watched it himself. He believed that the big finale lacked flavor.
Liked it? I don’t think I even watched it. I thought it was narratively satisfying – but it was not so savory.
Hall went on to state that according to him, Dexter lost its torque due to the fact that it had been running for so long.
I think the show had lost a certain amount of torque. Just inherently because of how long we’d done it, because of the storytelling capital we’d spent, because our writers may have been gassed.
Talking about fans’ expectations and their reaction to the ending, Hall stated that while people might want a more satisfying ending, Dexter being in a prison of his own making seems perfectly fitting to him.
Maybe some people wanted a more satisfying—maybe they wanted a happy ending for him, either a happy ending or a more definitive sense of closure. They wanted him to die or something, but I think the fact that he’s sort of exiled in a prison of his own making is, for my money, pretty fitting.
On Rotten Tomatoes, Dexter season eight has a score of 33% on Tomatometer whereas the audience score is at 53%. Clearly, neither the critics nor the fans were too thrilled by how the story ended.
Michael C. Hall Hoped Dexter: New Blood Would be a Redemption
The story of Dexter: New Blood is set ten years after the events of the original show. The limited series was released in 2021 and Hall hoped that it would be an improvement from how things ended in the final season of the OG show.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hall acknowledged the fact that fans found the finale to be unsatisfactory. He added that he had hoped to find a story in the future that would be worth telling and he finally found it in New Blood.
All in all, the limited series was a way to answer one important question fans had for a long time – what the hell happened to Dexter?
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 added that while he understood why Dexter did what he did, he believes the criticisms were all justified as people expect to get a proper closure from the show they spend years watching, and let’s be honest, Dexter didn’t really provide one.
Upon its release, New Blood received generally favorable reviews from critics and was said to have restored the show’s shine, which was lost thanks to its ending.
Stream Dexter on Netflix and Dexter: New Blood on Prime Video.
