CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD. MORE SCREENSHOTS COMING!
It is finished. And yet, we’ve only just
begun. There’s a pretty ridiculously good reason why last night’s explosive,
emotionally-arousing finale, “Surprise, Motherfucker!” ranks as the
highest-rated episode ever for any SHOWTIME
original series. Behind the sky-shattering numbers and rave reviews from sea to shining sea is a bombastic story of love
gained, lost, declared and re-written; it is a story tinged with a new and
surprising darkness, as well as an incredibly poignant nostalgia drawn from the
pilot season, in all its sacred charms and guilty pleasures that won us over in
the first. This year, we’ve arrived at yet another cliff and we’ll be hanging
therefrom until next September relieves us—but it’s a different kind of
precipice of questions and hopes, this time around. “This is the Way the World
Ends,” the knifelike stab of a conclusion that left us blue from held breath—we
were suspended in that moment; that unholy, broken utterance, “Oh, God.” And
now we’re left hanging from another “Oh, God,” but we caught a brief, surreal
glimpse into its aftermath before the camera panned from the shell-shocked pair—in
their new tragic intimacy, both born in blood—and up into a sky resplendent
with fireworks to usher in the new year. How perfectly timed considering that
Dexter and Debra are now on the cusp of an entirely new phase of life.
Together, they’ve much more to confront
and overcome than they’d ever dreamed possible. The question, now, is not
whether or not Debra will accept Dexter; it’s whether or not she will accept
herself for what she has done, and if she does… what that will mean for her own
journey. Dexter’s not the valiant superhero draped in black, and Deb’s not the star-studded,
do-gooder cop suited in navy blue. Both are colored with black and blue: the
bruises and growing pains of change with all its uncertain consequences. Let’s
break down the madness, shall we? Welcome to the grandest of surprises, mother**ker. Skip the jump for more.
As we dive into the
thick of things, let me first say that I am absolutely overwhelmed with the
painfully beautiful measures taken by this episode to explore who Dexter was,
and has become—and who Debra is emerging as alongside him. Dexter progresses
from a strict adherence to a Code to a loose relationship typified by
improvisation, whereas Debra seems to be building her own Code with every choice she makes on Dexter’s behalf. Tortured
though she may be with every move she makes to honor that star-crossed love,
she has chosen her way and is beginning to establish herself in a world where
blacks and whites are simply no more. Still, it’s a journey marked by immense
pain (which Jennifer Carpenter conveys with such complex sensitivity and vulnerability that I will be blown away if she doesn’t get her
marvelous self an Emmy nom)—rage, sorrow, self-loathing and tender confusion.
While Debra acknowledges Dexter’s near-tearful assertion of “do what you’ve
gotta do” in the shipping container where LaGuerta also urges her to define
herself apart from Dexter, and she makes her decision… she rushes to hold
LaGuerta’s body with an immediacy so forceful that it feels like the reaction
of a little child to accidentally killing a bird with a pellet gun. The tragedy
becomes that much more impactful to
the audience.
On top of it being the
death of a major characters whose choices have shaped the series in enormous
ways for over half a decade, it’s the way that Debra cradles her to her chest,
quietly murmuring “I hate you” to Dexter, and express how fraught she is over
what she knew she had to do in that wild, wide-eyed moment. Even though
LaGuerta has frustrated and disgusted us at times with her selfish
manipulations and truly emerged as a potent antagonist in this particular
season, Deb’s tragic handling of her in the final five minutes of the episode
made her loss one that is extremely tangible and felt. Debra made the ultimate
sacrifice—the sacrifice of her former self, all her wants and personal
convictions and notions of what’s right and wrong—and I couldn’t help but hear
Isaak Sirko’s words as she and Dexter left the scene and trailed through the
throngs of people at the New Year’s bash: “Love can be inconvenient, perhaps
inappropriate. It can be dangerous. Make us do things we wouldn’t dream of
doing. But wrong? That just depends on where we end up, doesn’t it?” Debra’s
love for Dexter is inconvenient in that she had to put down an innocent human
life in order to spare his and give him the chance of a future. And murder is
considered inappropriate in most circles. Yet, this very love is resetting all
of Debra’s former beliefs and is changing her, accounting for the ways in which
she’s disobeyed the law and “made things up as she’s gone” (as Hannah so acidly
pointed out before her court hearing). Further, the ending scene uniquely parallels
the end of season one in which Dexter fantasizes about walking through a parade
in which he is celebrated by the public for all that he has done, Deb holding
his arm and gleefully guiding him through the crowd as the victory washes over—here,
however, there is a celebration all
around them, but they cannot partake in it. It is not their celebration. They’re just striving to make their way through;
not even to make sense of what’s happened, yet. Just to keep moving. Theirs is
the love that endures beyond all belief,
but it’s the love that hurts the most.
For love is not a
victory march: it’s a cold, and it’s a broken
hallelujah.
And what a broken
hallelujah is Dexter’s mad, mad life! It’s extremely important to look at the
ways in which Dexter has emerged throughout the entire series: from neat
monster to messy, messy human being. The Doakes flashbacks not only serve the
purpose of explaining LaGuerta’s origins and her motivation in clearing the man’s
name once and for all—they also help us to see just how enormously Dexter has
changed in his approach to what humanity is!
Not to mention, these flashbacks really give this finale such a fun diversity;
we’re met with the dense, provocative dark of the seventh season in all its
revelations as well as the lightheartedness of seasons past, before Dexter
could even remember what catalyzed his lethal desires. He was just the perky
yet emotionally-vacant bringer of the doughnuts (like a mild American Psycho)—a façade through Doakes
saw piercingly through. And Dexter realizes that his attempts at flaunting his
human disguises around Doakes only immovably situated him as suspect in the man’s
eyes. Dex had absolutely no clue what it really
meant to be human, figuring that the best way to present himself as such
was through plastic smiles and winning the hearts of the masses with his altruistic
sweets deliveries in the office. Now, this fake life has become altogether real to him—it is a life that is felt
and that he can’t dream of leaving, even if it means breaking the Code that he
was once bound to. It was easy to follow the Code when other emotions didn’t
penetrate his consciousness, but now he grapples with them in constant,
rendering him a very culpable kind of killer that we can actually relate with
on more levels than we could previously. (In other news, I can’t begin to tell
you how much I’ve missed Doakes’
existence in every way imaginable. He was such a flawless foil for the Dexter
of earlier seasons—freaking love his complete and utter indignation to anything
and everything Dexter. Perfect beyond belief. And who knows; perhaps they’ll
bring him back for more new-old scenes in the crazy season to come!)
(Again: Jennifer. I’m perfectly
astounded by you and the way you took that final scene into your own, letting
the brakes fly off and injecting the entirety of your being into that
incredible portrayal. I’m still speechless.)
And speaking of which,
what is to come? How will the nature
of Dexter and Debra’s relationship be changed? Is Debra herself in the process
of changing just as Dexter has radically altered his approach to his life’s purpose?
In changing, will they come closer together? Leave ALL of your reactions to
this episodes’ innumerable surprises,
and let’s hash out the long wait for season eight together! Thank you for
reading!