Hope I didn’t bury the lede too much there.

We’re more than halfway through the final season of Dexter, and what seems to be missing from the show this year is any sense of urgency whatsoever.

While I don’t need every season of every TV show to have a sense of NEED TO DO IT NOW urgency, I feel that the final season of a series should have at least something to heighten the tension more than a show usually would. The exception to this is shows that don’t know they’re in their final season. I’m talking exclusively about shows that have contracted out their final year, they’re writing to an end goal, they’re advertising it as the final season, and everyone’s on the same page: After this year, there will be no more of this show. Ever.

Take for instance Breaking Bad. While, technically, last year was the beginning of their “final” season, we got eight episodes last year, and eight this year, with a good year in between airings. On all but paper, they’re essentially two distinct seasons, each with their own overarching themes, goals, and narrative structure. Judging from the way a typical Breaking Bad season works, we get a few episodes of slow burn, and then POW! Right in the kisser. This year, however, Breaking Bad started off in a full sprint and it hasn’t stopped. They know what they’re doing, it’s all over, and they’re going out with a bang.

LOST did much the same thing. In its final year, we began to see characters who had, until that point, only been seen in fleeting glimpses, or whispered about in hushed tones. In LOST’s final season, we got everything (except, as someone will always mention, answers. To that, I say we got everything in regards to character conclusions, which is what the show was about).

To a much smaller TV-footprint scale, Smallville’s final season was all about wrapping up the entire series. The show was all about Clark Kent becoming Superman. Well, guess what? In the final season, it was all about Clark Kent becoming Superman. There was a known sense of direction that was palpable to the viewers, which is what made Season 10 of Smallville one of its best outings ever.

But with Dexter, what’s the end goal here? I know there’s a mystery of the week/season, but for a final season of Dexter, so what? We’ve seen it all before. There’s a killer on the loose. Dexter has to find that killer while at the same time balancing his complicated tri-level life of family man, lab geek, and serial killer. There hasn’t been any real sense of finality to this final season whatsoever. The main plot, not the subplots, but the main, selling-point plot of the season, the brain surgeon and Dr. Vogel, easily could have been put into the series at any one point in time, and it would fit just fine.

In a way, the show did this to itself way back in Season 2. The FBI’s hunt for the Bay Harbor Butcher is what the final season should have been, and fans have been saying that since Season 2 aired. Dexter’s on the defensive and every episode threatened to have his hidden life exposed to the public. I very distinctly remember watching that set of episodes and having such a feeling of tense dread that I was almost shaking. It was a phenomenal season of not just Dexter, but for TV.

Now that I’ve ragged on the final slew of episodes, I do want to say that the episodes we’ve gotten have been made of individual scenes, plot threads, and themes that I do really enjoy in and of themselves, but just not for a final season of a TV show like Dexter. Even the concept of Dr. Vogel, while at first I was opposed to it, upon thinking on it more, I came to really enjoy. This series has been all about identifying those roles in Dexter’s life that have been missing, examining them, and then giving them a rather perverse Dexter twist.

Season 1 gave us Rudy, the brother that Dexter never knew he had. It was a chance at a real blood tie to another human being, a human being almost exactly like Dexter in every way. But it was not to be.

Season 2 gave us Lila, a woman who was attracted to Dexter’s dark side (this is a theme that will continually crop up). Instead of hiding who he was from Rita, Dexter had a chance at a relationship with a person knew about his Dark Passenger and wasn’t repelled. But it was not to be.

Season 3 gave us Miguel, a man tortured by his own dark feelings of violence. Dexter had, for the first time in his life, a chance at a true friend. Someone he could share his feelings with over a beer, play a round of golf while discussing kill room tactics. But it was not to be.

Season 4 gave us the Trinity Killer, a mirror into the life that Dexter so desperately wanted: A balance between his family life, professional life, and the killing. Dexter looked to Arthur Mitchell as a guide and teacher on how to “play the game” for so long and avoid not just detection and capture, but even suspicion. But it was not to be.

Season 5 gave us Lumen, a woman who, through her own birth-in-blood moment, discovered that she, too, had her own Dark Passenger. And for the very first time, Dexter found not just a woman he could love, but one who could actually participate with his killings. An ally. A partner. But it was not to be.

Season 6. Unfortunately, it was. The less spoken about it, the better.

Season 7 collide all aspects of Dexter’s life together. With Deb discovering he was a serial killer, Dexter had to contend with that, as well as with Hannah McKay, a woman he discovered he loved, but who also had a past filled with murder. She loved Dexter so much that she saw him as one whole person, not a bifurcated one, with Regular Dexter and Dark Passenger Dexter. And in Hannah, Dexter found a woman he could talk about murder with at the dinner table just as easily as we do about work. But it was not to be.

And Season 8 has examined the role least spoken about in the entire series of Dexter, a mother. We’re familiar on a base level with his biological mother, who was killed in a shipping container. But his adopted mother, Harry Morgan’s wife, has only been mentioned in passing a handful of times. I think we’ve only actually seen in her a single episode. So Season 8 has given us Dexter’s spiritual mother, Dr. Vogel. The woman Harry went to for guidance regarding his young son, whom he suspected had sociopathic tendencies.

At first, I was unhappy with this reveal of Harry’s uncertainty. For the duration of the entire series, we’ve been given the notion that Harry, at wit’s end with how to handle his son, focused his son’s urges for murder in the direction of least harm to the general public. It’s been a fascinating look at how a man, a police officer, even, decided that the justice system was broken, and he had found the solution in his son. In the show itself, it’s impossible to turn away as we see Harry train his son to be a killer, and how he grapples with his conscious as Dexter enjoys it gleefully, looking at it as a game as, after one night exercise in the kitchen, he declares to Harry, “I won.”

Taking an objective step back, however, Harry’s a pretty terrible father. His son has some severe emotional issues, and he doesn’t even take him to a psychologist to work them out? WHAM, first step in dealing with a crazy kid is teaching him how to kill.

Only with this final season of Dexter, we see that wasn’t the case at all. Harry went to see Dr. Vogel, renown for working with psychopaths, about how he should deal with his son. Her solution was the Code. As it turns out, that wasn’t even Harry’s idea.

As it turns out, this woman we’ve never met helped to shape Dexter into the finely-tuned killing machine that he is. And upon Dexter’s discovery of this, her feelings of pride are unmistakable. Like a mother at her son’s college graduation, she looks to Dexter as someone who has made it, someone who has taken all the burdens of life and been chiseled out of granite. Success, victory, progress. It’s a concept that had never occurred to me, and it’s an amazing one, at that.

If only it had been written better.

We got a few episodes of Dexter searching for former patients who might have held a grudge against Vogel. Given that she treats psychopaths exclusively, it was a colorful group. But for the one dropping off pieces of brain matter at Vogel’s front door, the Brain Surgeon, they stumbled onto one of her former patients with none of the same MO as the Brain Surgeon (like, not even cutting out pieces of brain), and because Vogel found some brain pieces in jars off screen, they decided he was the Brain Surgeon and called it a day.

We, as viewers, know this is a terrible conclusion. And because it’s a conceit of TV, we know the Brain Surgeon story isn’t over. But the idea is that the characters don’t know that. But they totally should have known that.

For a trio comprised of a world-renown psychotherapist, a successful serial killer, and really the only good cop in Miami Metro, none of the three involved in this escapade thought to notice that the killer they had stopped, while actually being a killer, shared absolutely zero of the same tendencies of the man they were looking for. It’s sloppy, stupid writing, and the characters should have known better. And that’s why it’s frustrating.

We’ve seen Hannah McKay come back, and while she and Dexter are completely in love, even when it doesn’t make any sense to, they stay together. For TV, this makes good drama, but as a viewer, it’s difficult to watch, namely because we’ve seen it all before. It was called Season 7.

And for all of the drama and ideas that have gone into this season, some being very good, for a show in it’s final year, it doesn’t seem to be leading to anything. It’s as if it could all just end in a final episode, roll end credits, and “Boy, wasn’t that fun, guys?”

As much as everyone lauds Season 4 and the Trinity Killer (and much of it is very good, except for a slow part in the middle of the season), up until that very last episode’s very last scene, the season, plot-wise, is entirely skippable. If that final scene hadn’t happened, if it had all ended hunky-dory, you could go from the end of Season 3 straight to the beginning of Season 5 without missing a beat. And that’s what much of this final season feels like. We’ve seen the fallout to LaGuerta’s murder on Deb, and we’ve seen her and Dexter coming back together, which is important for the show, but aside from that, the entire arc of the season so far – its killer, its guests, its subplots – could just as easily fit into any other season of the entire run. And that’s not what a final season should be, especially not to one of Dexter’s pedigree.

@kent_graham