5. The Doctor Is Out
After Rita's untimely bathtub passing at the hands of a bewildered Jon Lithgow at the end of the third season, Dexter Morgan has been passing through a revolving door of women, almost to the point of parody. It seemed every season brought a new gal for Dexter to pine over. After Julia Styles in the fourth season, it became obvious seeing her go at the season finale, only for a new love interest to emerge the following, that this cycle was doomed to be stuck on repeat until the show no longer aired. Sure, the writers tried to mix it up by throwing adopted sister Deb into the love calendar of season seven, because everyone enjoys a little awkward weird quasi-sister-on-brother romance, but that may have proven a bridge too far for most American stomachs to handle. Sure, we can all bear witness to the "hero" Dexter Morgan slicing and dicing his so-called deserved victims in all his gory glory with a pump of the fist but nary a turn of the tummy, yet show us a potential flame or on-screen kiss between non-blood related siblings, and in some small town USA someone cries out "think of the children" amid the streets teeming with bile as the masses watching collectively blow chunks at the mere idea of incest. The oddest lady to enter Dexter's roller coaster love-life that seemed to be synchronized to the timing of the premiere and finales of each season like some kind of relationship-menstrual cycle, was also perhaps unsurprisingly, the eldest. Oh, Dr. Vogel. You entered with such an obvious ret-con to the entire established history of the Dexter series you immediately made the final season head-scratchingly raw and bloody. After seven seasons of Dexter talking to the imaginary ghost of his dead adopted dad and believing his mom to have been killed before his eyes, another parental figure is introduced, Doctor Vogel. A psychiatrist who evidently was the one who cooked up Harry's code for son Dexter's vigilantism, this wrinkly matriarch was peddled out not as a sexual love interest (although, who knows, there may be some serious saggy slash fan-fic out there featuring a voluptuous Vogel and her prized patient), but the Doctor was rather a maternal love to the motherless child Dexter. The maternal compassion was completely absent from a viewer standpoint, the audience had zero interest in Vogel or any real reason to care. In fact, her open-window throat slashing may have been the most welcomed death in modern cable TV history, if for no other reason than for how drawn out the inevitable death of her predictable character arc was. So long, Dr. Vogel. We can't say we can miss you.