spoiler chat

Besides all of Dexter: Season 6 that has aired so far, I'm spoiling a few old movies here too. You have been warned...First off, I'm happy for those folks out there who were genuinely surprised by this week's final "gotcha" twist at the end of the Dexter episode, " Get Gellar ." Really I am. I like to be surprised too. I enjoy TV. It's kind of the big reason I write about it for a living. And to go on the nine-episode James Gellar journey with that tasty morsel waiting at the end must have been thrilling. I loved watching The Sixth Sense too. I didn't see that ending coming. It got me. I was amazed. But what do you do when you spot the big twist after the first episode of the season?After the first episode of the year, "Those Kind of Things," I suspected that Edward James Olmos ' Gellar character might not be real and I wrote about it in my review of episode 2, "Once Upon a Time." And so I let that sit in my brain. Granted, back then it was just a theory. It could have wound up going either way.

IGN's Review of Dexter: "Get Gellar"

We never saw Gellar talk to, or interact with, anyone other than Travis. And no one ever talked to him.





James Gellar, a man who seemed to thrive on the worship of others and the love of hot Teacher's Aids, vanished three years ago. No one has seen him since. Not a soul.





When Gellar burns his own arm, he doesn't scream or complain.





In episode 2 of this year, Gellar never talked to the hostage and the hostage never looks at Gellar when he stood in the doorway.





Gellar objects to Travis having dinner with his sister but is then "okay" with Travis taking a random waitress out on a date. Oh, and the waitress never looks at Gellar while he's in the diner or when she's tied up on the kitchen floor. Also, Gellar doesn't even have a napkin or utensils at the diner.





Gellar is not afraid at all to walk around in plain sight of everyone in the day time even though he's a wanted man with his face plastered on every Miami newspaper.





When Travis loses his nerve and can't capture a "whore," Gellar tells him that he'll be with him. Then, in the car, Gellar pushes down on Travis' leg, which makes Travis accelerate into the woman.





When Travis tells Dexter that he didn't kill anyone and that Gellar did it, that was a huge cue to the audience. If Gellar killed every single one of the DDK victims, because Travis chickened out, that means that during the scene in the season premiere, when Travis approached the fruit vendor with a machete that he... What? Chickened out and said, "Wait a minute. Stay right there, terrified man. I can't do this. Let me run back to the car and get my friend. He'll kill you with this here machete."





Also, the police suspected two killers; one sloppy and one meticulous. Gellar was the meticulous painter. But then Travis said that Gellar also killed everyone. So he was also the sloppy cutter. Which would make no sense.





Gellar won't even pay vendors at a Farmer's Market. He makes Travis do it.





The episode "Nebraska," which featured an imagined version of Dexter's brother Brian, clearly showed us that figments could stand there and do things, like eating and drinking. Also, when the figment side of the brain takes over, that person is shown doing the killing. As shown when we all initially saw Brian killing the motel clerk with the pitchfork, when it was Dexter doing it.





When Gellar wants Travis to come back to the fold, he goes to Travis' sister's house. And then he says "Just let me in," as he moves to just… walk into Lisa's house. As if Travis would have ever let him in even if they were still partners in crime. And he did it so nonchalantly. As if he weren't a person confined to an old abandoned church and just went into strangers' houses all the time.





Gellar was not afraid to pop up at Lisa Marshall's elementary school in broad daylight and attack Travis with a shovel. Also, not afraid to stare down at Travis when Dexter entered the church, risking being seen by Dexter. When Dexter turns around, Gellar is able to hide fast enough not to be seen.





Oh, and also, Gellar is apparently able to scamper up to the second floor of a church and then leap out a window and double scamper away into the forest in a matter of moments. Dexter buying this kind of near-superhuman agility was also fairly bogus.





When Gellar takes over fully, Travis is either out cold or sleeping. Another device established by Fight Club.





Gellar somehow knew the hotel and room where Travis was hiding.

I write the episodic Dexter reviews here at IGN. I've been doing it the past three years. I've loved the show so much in the past that I've given some episodes a perfect "10." But the show has developed some deep flaws. And too many times the characters are made to do things that they wouldn't do just so they can bend to the story that the writers want to tell. The big twist that James Gellar was a manifestation of Travis Marshall's own twisted mind, and was never real in any of the scenes we saw, was so obvious that it made Dexter into a chore to watch this year. And it made Dexter, as a character, do some dumb things too. Because he had to follow suit, to play along with the twist.No, not everyone spotted the twist, but I'm also not the only one that saw it coming. Many of you, along with many TV critics, saw it too. After the season premiere, I had a theory, simply because Edward James Olmos' character made his pupil, Travis ( Colin Hanks ), do everything. Physically, I mean. But then, every other episode that followed just supported my theory. Each week it became more and more obvious, and every single scene between the two of them only reinforced the fact that Gellar didn't exist.And I couldn't just keep quiet about that. You can call what I write "reviews," "recaps" or whatever you want. They're online discussions. They're me writing about what I thought about an episode. How it played out and what the events that transpired might lead to. The scenes between Gellar and Travis were done up like moments from The Sixth Sense and Fight Club and Gellar was, essentially, Tyler Durden. So Travis can both be him, as an alternate personality, or talk to him as if he were a separate person. A multiple personality device that was established in past movies. This also includes scenes where Gellar is hiding and watching Travis do something with disapproval in his eyes. Fight Club also established, in a court case "precedence" manner, that two personalities can actually battle one another as if they were two people. But some viewers argued that James Gellar couldn't be all in Travis' mind because he clearly was a real person on the show, who the police were hunting for. Which brings us to Hitchcock's Psycho, where Norman Bates assumed his dead mother's domineering personality as one of his own.The writers took a big risk here. Many films have done this type of twist, but they only have to sustain the artifice for a short while - for the running time of the film. This was nine episodes of TV. On a show where people really pay attention to new, big villains. Maybe if they let the cat out of the bag in episode 4 or 5, things could have gotten better. Because one of the producers and/or writers must have thought "Hey, guys. What happens if people figure this thing out after a few episodes? We still have six or seven more episodes to run before the reveal."Here's some of the many, many signs that made this twist so obvious:So what did Dexter have for all of us who were able to spot this twist a mile away? What did it offer us this year? Not much, unfortunately. And it's sad that that was a risk that the producers were willing to take. We can only hope that the final three episodes this year are able to make up for nine episodes of lumbering gimmickry.

Matt Fowler is an Editor of IGN TV . You can follow him on Twitter at @MattIGN