Dennis Reynolds exited the last series of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on an uncharacteristically tender note. Having discovered that he had fathered a child, Dennis (played by Glenn Howerton) said goodbye to his awful friends and left the city in a newfound quest for maturity. And now it looks as if that’s how things are going to stay.

A recent Vulture festival panel hinted at a Dennisless future for It’s Always Sunny. Now that Howerton has a role in next year’s splashier AP Bio, it’s likely that he will be a bit-player at best. In response to a question about his future, Howerton answered with an ambiguous: “Eh, damn it … I will say this: All joking aside, I love these guys and we have an absolute blast working together. We’ll see.” Co-star Charlie Day has also hinted that Dennis might only return in “part of” the next series.

If this really is the end of Dennis Reynolds as a regular character, it’s a crying shame. Because while Day’s Charlie Kelly might be the ensemble’s screaming wild card and Danny De Vito’s Frank Reynolds might occasionally burst out of sofas naked, Dennis is the decayed heart at the centre of the show. In a series about monsters, he is the most monstrous of all. In fact, there’s a good argument for calling Dennis Reynolds television’s greatest ever monster.

Admittedly, he had a slow start. In early episodes, he was simply a self-absorbed everyman who strayed into morally ambiguous territory by accident (it was he who kicked out the underage drinkers in the first series, remember), although things would quickly disintegrate from there.

It wasn’t long before signs of Dennis’s psychopathy bubbled to the surface. He started muttering darkly about how winners like him didn’t listen to words like “no” or “stop”. He offered to have sex with his lawyer’s wife while she slept. And then came the light-year jump that was the patented D.E.N.N.I.S system of seduction – “demonstrate value, engage physically, nurture dependence, neglect emotionally, inspire hope, separate entirely” – a method of exerting control as simultaneously chilling and overthought as anything schemed up by a movie villain.

And then, most famously of all, came the Implication. After he had bought a boat, Dennis explained that it’s easy to coax women into sex if you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean. “If the girl said no, then the answer is obviously no,” he told Mac. “The thing is, she’s not gonna say no. She would never say no. Because of ‘the implication’.” It is, perhaps, the darkest thing ever uttered by any character on a television sitcom. The Implication was where Dennis could finally out himself as a monster. After that, after finally unveiling himself as the walking embodiment of Neil Strauss’s The Game taken to its logical endpoint, the gloves were off for good.

He was revealed to have kidnap and torture equipment in the boot of his car. He drugged his friend to keep him thin. When a man asked to buy his car, he responded by screaming: “I AM UNTETHERED AND MY RAGE KNOWS NO BOUNDS!”, all veiny and puce and impotent.

Perhaps this was Dennis reaching the outer orbit of his terrible inclinations. Perhaps he had gone as big as he could go, and his departure is simply an admission that there was no more oxygen left for him to suck out of rooms. And perhaps, in this post-Weinstein environment, some of his actions strayed too uncomfortably close to the truth for him to continue. But I hope not.

I’ll hold out hope for his return. It would be easy, after all. The quiet domesticity he yearned for at the end of series 12 never really suited him. He attempted it before, when he and Mac bought a house in the suburbs together and unravelled so quickly that they ate a dog within a month. Should the stars align, allowing Howerton a way to meaningfully appear on It’s Always Sunny again, he will still be a monster. The moral of the series, hammered home time and time again, is that people are not capable of change, and this goes double for Dennis. Essentially what I’m saying is: make him eat his own baby. Honestly, nobody would mind.