Dexter S4 Finale: Whoa.

Last night was the season finale of Dexter and... wow. What a finale it was. Suspense, intrigue, murder, Dexter almost getting caught (many, many times) and... an ending that sets up season 5 as the season that might finally be Dexter's undoing. (The following contains spoilers for all of season 4, including the finale.)

I posted on the beginning of season 4 of Dexter, and with so much else on I wasn't able to keep up with it weekly, but this season is probably my favourite one so far, and for one very big reason: John Lithgow. WHAT an inspired choice in casting. The hilarious Dick Solomon from Third Rock from the Sun. The sympathetic Roberta from The World According to Garp. The tiny yet evil Lord Farquaad from Shrek. Maybe we saw a touch of his wrath as the reverend in Footloose (ha) but nothing could have prepared any of us for the sheer horror of Arthur Mitchell. On the surface, a church-going family man who has it all. Behind closed doors he systematically locks his daughter in a room, beats his wife, and breaks his son's fingers one by one. Of course, that's only when he's at home in between travelling the countryside in the guise of someone doing a Habitat for Humanity project while serial killing along the way. His M.O. was terrifying: first, kidnap a 10-year-old boy, force him to wear the exact same pyjamas that he'd worn when he was a 10-year-old, moments before he looked into the bathroom one day, saw his older sister showering, she saw him watching her, tripped, cracked her head open and died right in front of him. No... he can't have that happen to THIS little boy. So he'll put him in those PJs, tell him to stay innocent forever, and to insure that happens he'll drug him, throw him in a body bag, and bury him (alive) in cement in one of the homes he's building. Five days later, he'll kill a woman in her bathtub, re-enacting what happened to his sister. A couple of days after that, he'll find a woman with a boy and a girl, roughly the age his mother would have been when everything went to hell in his house, trap her, take her to a tall building, and force her to jump. How does he do that? Simple... just threaten her children. He refuses to push her, because he needs her to commit suicide the way his own mother did. And then, he hunts down a man in his 40s, with a boy and a girl. Doesn't matter if they're actually beating their children the way Arthur's father was beating him... but he DOES need to prove to himself that the guy COULD do that if provoked. So he provokes him. Forces him to punch him just once. And that's it: he bludgeons him to death with a framing hammer. Then he packs up, heads home, and continues playing happy families while terrorizing his own.

Oh, and I didn't mention that at each crime scene he leaves a tiny smudge of his sister's ashes that he keeps in an antique urn. All together now: SHUDDER.

I have been a John Lithgow fan for a long time now. He also, in case you don't know, writes children's books. He wrote one of my daughter's favourites: Micawber, about the squirrel who lives in Central Park and becomes a painter. Last week I was cleaning up her room and came upon the book, upside-down on the floor with John Lithgow's happy face smiling up at me. I flipped it over quickly, a cold chill going down my spine. I'm actually typing this in HTML so I don't have to look at the photo above. THAT is how much Arthur Mitchell has affected me.

So last week, Dexter's mistakes he's been making all season (not focusing on his work, getting caught by Rita for having an apartment, killing innocent people because he's not taking the time to do his homework) finally really start to build and Arthur finds the crack and figures out he's not actually Kyle Butler. Arthur follows him to work, without Dex even noticing (a season ago, Dex would have known in half a second if someone was behind him in a car). Arthur strides into the office, all 7 feet tall of him (seriously, that guy looks SO massive) and Dexter nearly passes out as he sees this guy encroaching on his own territory. Dex stumbles out of his office and stands before Mitchell, who grabs a hold of Dex's name tag and says, "Hello... DEXTER MORGAN." I practically passed out myself. It was one of the most frightening endings ever.

This week I figured he'd find the guy, he'd kill him, he'd realize he's making too many mistakes and maybe he'd decide to quit the life, and next season would be about his vain attempts to try NOT being a serial killer. And yes, the episode had all those elements. In fact, when he finally DID have Arthur on the table, it almost seemed anticlimatic, and even stranger when he let him leave this world listening to a favourite piece of music, with the calming sound of his train set chugging around the room. Dexter carried the body to his boat, dropped the parts into the water, and breathed a sigh of relief that it was all over.

But how was it over? Arthur's family knows Dexter, has seen him many times and even saw him try to kill Arthur once. Just because they know him as Kyle Butler doesn't mean they can't finger him when it comes down to it. How will he explain how he had been on the trail of Trinity all along and never bothered to mention it to the REST of the homicide department? And what about Debra? She just figured out that Dexter's brother was the serial killer who died mysteriously at the end of season 1: will she put it together that Dexter was the one who did it? And what is the possibility that Dexter is actually her father's biological son and therefore her real half-brother? She seemed pretty suspicious about Dexter being at Mitchell's house immediately after the call went out -- the same suspicions she had when she wondered how that reporter who turned out to be Mitchell's daughter got to the crime scene so quickly.

Dexter figured out that Arthur was going to pick up his convertible. Arthur picks it up, and we see him riding happily around Miami. Late that night, his car breaks down and Dexter shows up in his killing outfit, having pulled off the oil cap. But what's not completely clear is what exactly Arthur did that day... did he leave from the car lot and go straight on the road? Did he make a pitstop right after or right before picking up that car? And could that pitstop have been... the airport?

For just when Dexter vows to walk away from his life and abandon his dark passenger, he arrives home and gives Rita a quick phone call. Her phone rings nearby. She's not away on vacation like she should have been, even though she just left him a message saying she was at the airport. He hears a baby crying, and follows the sound.

And what he finds in the bathroom is the culmination of his life's work, and the result of his personal vendetta against Arthur Mitchell. Just as his own mother had been bludgeoned in front of him as he sat in the rivers of blood that flowed from her body when he was a mere toddler, now his own baby sits in Rita's blood as she lies, lifeless, in the bathtub, where Arthur Mitchell made his final mark. Just as Harry had picked up Dexter and rushed him out of the scene, only to realize it was too late to save him, so too does Dexter grab his son, Harrison, and rush out of the room. Is it too late to save this child? Or does he have both nature AND nurture working against him here? Will his sociopathic genetics cross with what he witnessed in that room and doom him to a life of crime like his father?

And what will Dexter do next? When he calls 911 and Debra comes over, she'll be horrified at what's happened to him. But then she'll wonder why Arthur targeted Dexter in particular, especially so soon after Dexter was at the Mitchell house. Maybe she'll start to question every strange thing Dexter's done, including the extra apartment. Quinn's been noticing Dex leaving work a lot and running around. He assumes Dex is having an affair, but if he begins putting the pieces together, he'll find something much worse. Masuka told Dexter about Rita's transgression: what if he thinks Dex killed her in the bathtub out of revenge? What if several people believe that, since Dexter would know the details of the Trinity killer's M.O. intimately and would know exactly how to position the blood?

Dexter's been sloppy, and now his family has paid the price. It's probably only a matter of time before he gets caught, but the question is... who will be the one to finally catch him? Will it be Debra? Imagine THAT catch-22: finding the greatest serial killer Miami has ever known and wrapping up several dozen cases all at once (including the demise and damnation of Doakes)... it'll make her career. She'll be the #1 detective on the force, and probably find herself on the FBI for pulling off something like that. But Dexter means everything to her, and while her professional life will be at its peak, her personal life will be in a shambles. She wouldn't be able to live with herself having done that.

Season 5 promises to cause most of the characters' lives to unravel. But none will fall apart quite like Dexter's. Season 4 was a brilliant continuation of this man's story, and knowing that the show has only been planned for 5 seasons, will season 5 finally see the death of Dexter Morgan?

What did YOU think of the fourth season?