The big bad for this season was not compelling at all. Truthfully, there hasn’t been a worthy villain since the Trinity killer (although I did enjoy the Edward James Olmos/Colin Hanks storyline more than most people did).
I think the problem with the last couple of seasons, development-wise, is that certain things had to happen in order to keep the thing moving. I think Deb had to discover his secret, and once she had discovered it, she had to die if Dexter was going to live. But since we all love Deb (well, most of us do), it was hard to embrace the development of that story. I loved that they had Dexter kill her. I thought that was really well done. I liked Hannah; I think she’s the only sort of person who Dexter could reasonably end up with. I thought she was believable enough.
What I didn’t like from the last couple of seasons was the Deb-loves-Dexter-no-I-mean-REALLY-loves-Dexter storyline. That was unnecessarily awkward, for the audience, and no doubt also for the actors, who were divorced during the course of the series!
And I think they should have brought some sort of completion to the serial-killer-who’s-not-a-genuine-sociopath thread. He feels, he loves. Harry brought him up to be a killer because he believed that he was a sociopath. But was he wrong to do so? Dexter is obviously not a sociopath. Harry sort of got a pass in the last season because it turns out Vogel was egging him on in training Dexter. I wish he hadn’t been let off the hook, and I think Dexter needed to realize that he might have had a life not as a serial killer if he’d been given different options.
And then… that enigmatic ending. I didn’t like the last shot, where he stares into the camera. The kind of life they gave him to live out is worse than death. I don’t think that’s fitting, and I don’t think the audience deserves it, either – we’ve been coerced into rooting for Dexter (however disturbing that is), so condemning his character is sort of like condemning us, too. But it’s difficult because he can’t go around having a glint in his eye after abandoning his kid. I feel like there should have been a third way. Maybe killing him would have been better, although the audience would have been even more pissed about that kind of ending.