Season Four
As any Dexter fan knows, season four was and remains the peak, crowning glory of the series. It was nothing short of phenomenal television; shocking, exciting, terrifying and entirely, utterly brilliant. How many standout moments came from those twelve episodes? Lundy's shocking death, the chilling thanksgiving scene and that ending. That insane, perfect, heart stopping twist that nobody saw coming. It was a moment that has simply never been topped for me no matter how much good TV I watch on a daily basis. It left me silent and unable to process what I had just seen. It was exactly the kind of thing I had expected from the series after season two, the kind of audacious twist that managed to not only shock me to my core but make every brilliant moment that had come before even better. But the greatest achievement of that twist is how it managed to overshadow the excellent twelve episodes that preceded it. I watched season four in a day. One day, hunched in front of a computer, heart in my mouth, knowing I should go to bed but unable to move, to even think about sleeping without knowing what the hell happened next. The cat and mouse game between Dexter and Arthur Mitchell was genius on so many levels; their animosity belied the fact that they were very, very similar, and that Dexter's attempts to kill Mitchell were always undercut by his terror that this was what he could one day become. The specter of the police finding out about Dexter may have lessened considerably since season two, but this was a far more interesting threat. The war with Trinity felt personal, and when it ended in the most horrifying way imaginable, any sense of shock was tempered with satisfaction; the writers had not disappointed us. They were willing to make risky, shocking choices, to shake up the status quo and leave us desperate to know what would happen next. Season five could not come fast enough, but now, in retrospect, I wish I'd given up here.