5. A Better "Big Bad" For The Final Season
Instead of all that nonsense with Dr. Evelyn Vogel and her demented "brain surgeon" son Cole Saxon, along with countless other new characters and sub-plots introduced this season that didn't add up to much of anything, there should have had a new big bad introduced in the first episode. The series became famous for this early on, and sometimes accused of being formulaic for introducing a new big bad every season that Dexter would have to dispatch with by the end. But they went a couple seasons without one or at least a memorable one that lasted an entire season, so one that was even more powerful than Trinity was long overdue. It should have been Dexter's ultimate adversary, as deadly and psychotic as The Joker character was in The Dark Knight. Basically, the biggest bad that Dexter's ever faced-not some generic whiner with mommy issues like Cole Saxon. The actor Kevin Spacey has said that he was once interested in portraying a big bad on Dexter, and imagining someone as meticulous and menacing as his character from Seven taking on Dexter in the final season seems so perfect. This would've presented a real threat to Dexter and produced real consequences something the final season was sorely lacking. The discovery of this character and Dexter's failure to take him down would set in motion some catastrophic series of events that were inadvertently caused by Dexter messing with the wrong psychopath. The entire season should've been focused on this, building tension from episode to episode. By the time the finale came around, the new big bad would somehow brutally kill Hannah and Harrison (real consequences for Dexter like Trinity created by killing Rita in season 4) and set off a bomb at Miami Metro Homicide that takes out nearly everyone, including characters like Baptista, Quinn, and Mahsuka that have served very little purpose throughout the seasons. This should've been the tone of the final season--an all out war with a terrorist-level threat resulting in a bloodbath beyond anything the series has ever dared to show on TV.