One of the most talked-about television programmes of the past decade is currently building up to its long-awaited series finale. It's an American import about a white male antihero with a compulsion for crime that tears his family apart. To make matters worse, this family has members in the very same law enforcement organisation that's out to get him. Breaking Bad? No, I'm talking about Dexter.

Not watching Dexter? Well, who can blame you. At this point, the only people still watching are life-hating masochists like me who grimly cling on to each new arid, inert, incident-free episode just because they've already sat through seven and a half godforsaken years of this tripe and they feel a wrongheaded sense of duty to discover how it ends. Worse, like me, they may even still harbour a forlorn speckle of hope that Dexter will be able to come up with an ending that feels both satisfying and earned, even though nothing that has happened in the past four years has suggested that this will actually be the case.

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Still, four more episodes left. Four more episodes of Dexter Morgan narrating things that we can already see. Four more episodes of Ghost Dad popping up to morosely inform Dexter that murder is wrong. Four more episodes of Deb swearing instead of having a personality, of Dexter being able to access every single piece of information that the Miami police department has – regardless of how classified it is – even though he just works in forensics. Of Angel suddenly marrying and then suddenly divorcing a colleague, or leaving the force to open a taco restaurant and then rejoining the force for no reason and then getting promoted anyway. Of Captain Matthews turning up to work every now and again, even though everyone's pretty sure he retired a couple of years back. Of nothing exciting happening. Ever.

When a show has four episodes left, it should be building unstoppably to its climax. At this point, Lost was breathlessly killing off as many main characters as it could in a desperate rush to the end. The Sopranos had Kennedy and Heidi, an episode that started with Tony killing one of his family and ended with him screaming "I get it" at the desert on peyote. Breaking Bad still has five episodes left, and there's already enough momentum for the finale to feel both significant and inevitable. But Dexter? If you watched this Sunday's wheel-spinning episode – the one where Lil' Murderer was offed before anyone could be bothered to actually start caring about him, and that was about it – you'd think it was a mid-series filler episode, written and produced long before anyone knew when the end would come.

The saddest thing about Dexter is that it once had so much potential. In the early years, when he was pitted up against The Ice Truck Killer, or the one policeman who knew he was a serial killer, or John Lithgow's monumentally creepy Trinity Killer, Dexter could be gripping. It knew where it was going. But then, through the interminable Julia Stiles years, and Colin Hanks's bodged twist, and Deb falling in love with Dexter, then finding out the truth about him, then becoming a murderer herself, then turning into a coke-addled sex fiend for about three seconds, then suddenly just carrying on like none of that had even happened, that potential slowly evaporated away to nothing.

Sure, bad things happen, but never to Dexter. At this stage, he's the calm eye of the storm, trying to feign interest at all the redshirts who keep keeling over around him. Perhaps something of note will happen to him in these last four hours – perhaps Deb will arrest him, or he'll be killed by someone tied to his past, or Ghost Dad will bludgeon him to death with a hammer because he can only listen to someone narrate the visible minutiae of his life in a silly, Halloweeny half-whisper so many times.

Perhaps one of these things will happen. Perhaps something else will. Perhaps everyone in Miami will drop dead of boredom. Right now, with our expectations in the gutter, all we want is for Dexter to end in a way that doesn't take our years of idiot dutybound loyalty and slap us in the face with them. But, right now, even that feels like too much to ask.