Last night’s season five finale for Showtime’s Dexter completed a transformative season for the serial killer’s detective sister, Deb. Once strongly rooted in playing by the homicide department’s rules to achieve advancement, she’s begun to step into a gray area where doing what’s right isn’t necessarily the right thing she’s been trained to do. Spoiler Alert from here forward as the season finale is discussed.
We were all on the edge of our seat as Deb, with gun drawn and senses heightened, approached the basement room where Dexter and Lumen were preparing to dispose of Jordan Chase’s freshly killed body. The wait for Deb to learn the truth about her brother has been 5 years in the making. Surely this was the time and place for it to happen.
From the moment she entered the room and a sheet of translucent plastic separated her from her brother, it became clear she would not look on the other side. Deep down Deb admired what Lumen and her accomplice had done, even though Deb didn’t know who they were. Chase and his cohorts deserved to die, and those most affected by their terror against young women did not deserve to be punished.
Executive producer Sara Colleton promises that Deb will eventually make the discovery about her brother. “At some point that is an inevitable thing, and that will be an important season in Dexter’s history for that to happen,” she told E! in an interview. She then went on to reference the chat Deb and Dexter had after Deb offed the thug in the bar. Dexter’s response to Deb having no feelings after her first kill, the first sign of her understanding a different kind of justice, was to quote their father’s line about how some people deserve to die. For Dexter that was a test, to see how she would react to what she will have to come to understand as a key driving force behind what Dexter does in his off hours.
Colleton goes on to state that nothing has been written or laid out for season six yet and other then the next season picking up where this one left off, there are no big new clues dropped in the finale to suggest where the story goes next. The writers will all get together on February 1 to start hashing out whether season six will be the one where Deb gets to meet the dark passenger face-to-face.
