3. Too Much Focus On Sub-Plots We Don't Care About
For me, one of the biggest problems with Season 8 (I'll go into more depth on the entire season later) was a massive lack of urgency and focusing too much on sub-plots. This has been commented on a lot and it's one of the biggest reasons for me that the final season hasn't worked. In an effort to try and flesh out some of the supporting characters the writer's devoted a fair chunk of the final season to them. The biggest offender in this was the Masuka storyline involving a long-lost daughter. Some of the exchanges between the two have induced outright face-palmage. Some of the dialogue has been awful, and whilst Masuka was always there for comic relief, it always worked in the bigger context of the scene around it. The scenes we've had this season often seem disjointed and felt like they were put in because the writer didn't feel that they had developed the character enough. Whilst it's great they're doing that, it's too late in the shows run for us as an audience to care about it. Especially when there's much more important things to be focusing on. Another major annoyance in this department came from Season 7, where entire chunks of episodes were devoted to Quinn being offered payoffs to turn a blind eye to dodgy dealings in a Russian gangster-owned strip club. He got involved with one of the dancers, perhaps a little more than he should. It wasn't a terrible storyline it worked okay in the context of the rest of the Season but it had absolutely no conclusion to it. It just didn't get wrapped up the stripper decided to go away and Quinn got on with his life. So what was the point in all of it? To show Quinn isn't as much of a dirty cop as we think? To show he is capable of banging a stripper? This whole storyline was completely bonkers and even led to a shoot out from which Quinn was investigated by Internal Affairs. Again, nothing came of this, and that's awful storytelling. If they're going to force us to watch a sub-plot like this, at least give us some closure. I couldn't finish this section without one statement. Dexter, stop letting people off your table! I mean seriously. Does he not learn? He let Hannah McKay go and she tried to kill Deb, among other things. Sure, things worked out well for them further down the line, but still, a lot of problems could have been fixed if he had just killed her. He did the same thing with Zach, with the exact same results. The biggest 'what the actual F*CK' moment' for me was when he didn't kill Oliver Saxon at the end of Season 8's 'Monkey In a Box,' an act which resulted in my shouting at the television for the first time. It baffled me that the writers had pulled the same thing yet again. How could they pull the same inner monologue realistation repeat that we've heard a million times, and have Dexter let the biggest threat to himself and his family go? It's just terrible writing. What makes some of these sub-plots even worse (let's take the Masuka/Daughter storyline, and the rather strange Quinn promotion elements) is that there was zero pay-off by the end of the final episode. Nothing came of Quinn wanting to be promoted and then dealing with Batista yanking it away from him. Nothing came of Masuka's daughter showing up out of nowhere. Seriously, what was the point in either of those storylines? It proves to me that the writers had no idea what to do with Quinn from the beginning. He was always just a red herring.