Following the most shocking season finale in series
history, Dexter has left fans wondering:
- Will Dexter be a suspect in Rita’s death?
- Will his connection to Trinity be discovered?
- What happens to Cody and Astor?
Producer Sara Colleton spoke with TV Guide this week and tried to answer a few
pressing questions, including whether or not season five will pick up immediately following Rita’s gruesome murder…
On why Arthur killed Rita: We left it that way so everyone, based on their own life and their own experiences, would interpret it so it made sense for them. One way to interpret it is that in some bizarre way, Dexter gave Trinity a finality in his situation, that he does this in a bizarre way to trigger Dexter to deal with who he really is. You can only fake it for so long.
On Dexter’s relationship with Trinity: Dexter can’t say that he knows Trinity killed Rita and that he just killed Trinity. There are a lot of possibilities and they will all be thrown out in the room to be discussed.
On Dexter’s season five reaction: [He may go on a killing spree], he may not. Hopefully it will be in what we call the “Dexterous response,” which is based in human behavior, but uniquely put through the prism of Dexter’s special needs. The fact is that he has children now that he is the sole parent of, and how that affects what he does and the choices he makes.
On Dexter as a suspect: If you know anything about crimes, usually a spouse is involved. We may jump ahead six months and it could be all handled. What we wanted to do is give ourselves something that gave us the widest range of possibilities.
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Though the sting of Dexter’s season finale is still fresh, it’s time to think about next season. Executive producer Sara Colleton tells TVGuide.com how far in time the show may jump ahead, who the No. 1 suspect in Rita’s murder will be and how much the Trinity Killer will play a role in Season 5.
TVGuide.com: Did you feel that you had to push the limits with this finale?
Sara Colleton: It’s something that comes so organically with the storytelling of where Dexter [Michael C. Hall] is in his life and what he’s learning and what he needs to learn. Of course, when it first comes up, you think, oh no, we can’t do that, because we’ve created these characters and we love them. It became self-evident as we progressed that this is where Dexter needed to be taken.
Dexter’s John Lithgow talks about the shocking finale
TVGuide.com: Why exactly did Arthur (John Lithgow) kill Rita (Julie Benz)? Was it just revenge?
Colleton: It’s complicated. We left it that way so everyone, based on their own life and their own experiences, would interpret it so it made sense for them. One way to interpret it is that in some bizarre way, Dexter gave Trinity a finality in his situation, that he does this in a bizarre way to trigger Dexter to deal with who he really is. You can only fake it for so long.
TVGuide.com: Do you see Trinity playing a role next season though? Questions will be raised by Rita’s murder and Arthur did show up at the police station.
Colleton: All of those things are legitimate. All those questions will obviously be a part of next season. Dexter can’t say that he knows Trinity killed Rita and that he just killed Trinity. There are a lot of possibilities and they will all be thrown out in the room to be discussed.
TVGuide.com: Is there a chance that Julie Benz or John Lithgow might return next season to appear to Dexter in his conscience?
Colleton: Anything is possible on this show because it is a theatrical invention, so any of those devices are possible, but again, none of those have been discussed yet.
TVGuide.com: What are the odds that Arthur pushed a woman to her death before killing Rita and being bludgeoned, thus completing the cycle?
Colleton: But did he break the cycle? If you really examine his death scene, Dexter is giving him an opportunity to break the cycle. Rita is the tie-breaker because he says, “It’s all over now.” Trinity’s thing is tied up with the way he hid the reality from himself. In his master plan, this is the gift he has left behind for Dexter. It can be interpreted, if you look closely at the script, in any number of ways.
TVGuide.com: Dexter can’t get vengeance for Rita’s murder because he already killed Arthur. Is he going to become more bloodthirsty?
Colleton: That’s an instinct he may have, but he may not. Hopefully it will be in what we call the “Dexterous response,” which is based in human behavior, but uniquely put through the prism of Dexter’s special needs. The fact is that he has children now that he is the sole parent of, and how that affects what he does and the choices he makes.
TVGuide.com: Were Paul’s parents introduced as an easy out for Cody and Aster to leave Dexter’s care?
Colleton: We needed to have the children not be there for this finale. We’re trying to find the most interesting way to have to handle this situation because obviously they can always go with their grandmother or their paternal grandparents, or Dexter can take custody of them. It just opens up a variety of ways we can have Dexter deal with his grief.
TVGuide.com: Are you nervous about writing or casting a villain that can live up to or surpass John Lithgow? Might you do without a villain this season?
Colleton: That’s something that’s on the table to discuss because of the awesomeness of what Dexter has to deal with on an emotional level. Obviously there’s going to be an investigation into who killed Rita and the number— and Dexter is going to be involved in that.
TVGuide.com: Were you about to say that Dexter might be the No. 1 suspect in his wife’s murder?
Colleton: If you know anything about crimes, usually a spouse is involved. We may jump ahead six months and it could be all handled. What we wanted to do is give ourselves something that gave us the widest range of possibilities. It’s so intense on a show like this, so emotionally draining, and we have a scant couple of months before we get in a room again, so all of these things are up for discussion.
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Freshly diced Dexter beauty Julie Benz has two apologies for TV Guide Magazine. The first is for being a few minutes late to her official exit interview—something she understandably would rather have skipped.
The second is for telling a little lie at our recent Hot List party: “You’re wrong!” she’d declared, when asked if her character, Rita Morgan, the eternally sunny wife of Showtime’s celebrated serial killer, was going to fall victim to John Lithgow’s Trinity Killer in the season finale. “I felt bad,” she confesses. “I even told you we shot multiple endings, which we did not.”
No worries, Julie. We get it. As TV secrets go, this was a doozy, even though we had our suspicions way back at Comic-Con last July when Lithgow spilled to his new costars that he knew something so shocking about Season 4 even they would be floored. Did he actually know Benz’s fate way back then?
“I’ve been told two different things,” says Benz, 37. “The producers and executives told me they didn’t know at the start of the season. But I’ve also been told that Lithgow did know.”
As they were drawing near the finale, Benz’s costar David Zayas (Det. Angel Batista) clued her in that Rita may not be long for Dexter’s world. “There were rumblings that something major was going to happen,” says Benz. “I even asked the producers and they said, ‘We would never kill Rita.’”
Then in late September, the day before the season finale script was to be distributed to the cast, the bomb dropped. “It was my day off, and I was called in for a meeting with the producers,” Benz recalls. “At that point, you pretty much know. It was a tough meeting. In a bizarre way, it felt like a scene from ‘Defending Your Life.’”
Producers explained they wanted to shake up the structure of the show. It was becoming more difficult to sell Dexter as a tortured soul since his life was growing increasingly idyllic in the Miami suburbs with the perfect wife and children. In fact, just before murdering Trinity and discovering Rita’s corpse, Dexter vowed to end his killing spree—which also would have ended the show.
But there’s nothing like discovering your wife’s body slumped in the bathtub with your baby boy crying in a pool of mommy’s blood to reboot your warped psyche.
“It’s a very poetic mirror to how Dexter was found when he was 3,” says Benz, who, before her four-year run on Dexter, was a “WB girl” with parts on Roswell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
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Nowadays, it’s rare to find a show that makes villains, particularly serial killers, look good in the public eye. But Showtime’s Dexter
manages to do just that, effectively turning blood spatter analyst Dexter Morgan into America’s favorite serial killer by giving his gruesome passion for thrill killing a constructive direction: killing people who deserve it. Unfortunately for some fans, they are so engrossed on Dexter that they can’t distinguish the thick line between TV fiction and reality.
Last year, Alberta filmmaker named Mark Twitchell, a Dexter fanatic, decided to write a screenplay about murder, and then murdered people that way. Most recently, though, 17-year-old Andrew Conley killed his 10-year-old Conner Conley after being inspired by the Showtime series.
According to Ohio County Prosecutor Aaron Negangard, Anthony Conley murdered his brother Connor last month, evidently strangling the boy and then stuffing his head in a plastic bag so that blood wouldn’t “get everywhere.”
Conley, who turned himself in to authorities the following day, said he then drove and dumped his brother’s body to Rising Sun City Park, near the elementary school where his brother was in the fifth grade.
“I just feel like him,” Conley said of fictional serial killer Dexter Morgan.
Conley, who did not regret or showed no emotions when he was narrating the crime, was taken to the Dearborn County Juvenile Detention Center in Lawrenceburg but was transferred to Switzerland County Jail in Vevay on Thursday night where he also confessed that he wanted to kill his father, Shawn.
Though Conley was deemed guilty in the eyes of prosecutors, he will not be charged of murder because he’s still underage. However, when he reaches the right age and if convicted, he will spend 65 years in prison.
Showtime representatives have yet to be reached for comments on the allegations.
Watch Sneak Peek of Dexter Season 4 Episode 12 “The Getaway”
If you’ve been obsessed with Dexter lately, you are not alone.
“I’m nerding out right there with you!” Jennifer Carpenter (aka Mrs. Michael C. Hall) tells us, while admitting that she stuck around the set to watch the last few scenes of the finale because, “I couldn’t wait to find out!”
The first of Dexter’s final two episodes airs this Sunday on Showtime, and according to Jennifer (who kicks serious gluteus maximus as her real-life husband’s onscreen sis, Debra Morgan), the fourth season finale is well worth the wait—though you might need to invest in a little psychotherapy after it.
“I hope you have a good time talking to your therapists about it because it’s beyond whatever you may think,” Jennifer says.
So what’s in store? Will Deb find out Dex’s big secret? Without giving away anything too spoilery (we don’t want to be responsible for that therapy bill!) here’s the awesomeness Jennifer reveals…
Give it to us straight. How good is the season finale?
I have to give a lot of our fans credit. The stuff that they come up with and the guesses that they make on how it’s going to end are really impressive, but you just can’t top our writers. All the time you put in [episodes] one through 11 watching the show, you’ll be glad that you did in 12. Everybody matters in the end. Everybody matters. We all had to be there to shoot the finale.
How does it set up season five?
At the end of every season, collectively, the writers, the producers, the actors, we all sort of cry, “What are we gonna do next year?” And this season it ended and everybody said, “Well, what can’t we do next year?” I know the mold is sort of breaking and that’s an exciting thing. I think people are kind of getting comfortable sitting in their living rooms with a serial killer, and my hope is to make him more dangerous.
Will Deb find out about Dexter’s mom? It seems like she’s getting close.
They’ve been sort of unraveling that cord for four years now, so I can’t say that anything is finished. That’s sort of the brilliance of the finale and the twisted psyche of our writers. It’s sort of epic and vast, and it all counts. I feel like a lot of viewers are waiting for the big payoff, the big reveal when Deb finds out, but I think it will be more exciting and feel more dangerous if the blanket’s not just ripped off the secret, if it’s slowly discovered. So I guess we’ll all get there someday.
Do you think Deb will ever discover Dexter’s big secret, that he’s a serial killer?
Personally, being a player in this game, I want to see it happen, partly, just because I’m curious. I think I know Deb as well as anyone, and I think they [the writers] would claim to know her just as well, and I’m interested to see if we’re all on the same page about what it would look like. We all throw around ideas just for fun when we’re waiting on-set, or even after when we’re on hiatus and all hanging out as friends we all say, “Well, what if this happened?” and “What if that happened?” And I have real responses to what people say. I get angry about it; I get hurt about it. I get protective of it. So I’m ready to go in any direction that they tell me to move, but I don’t think you can tease an audience the way we have about her getting close to it without giving them the payoff, whatever it is.
Deb has been a punching bag for a while now. Will she ever find happiness?
They certainly tested me all year long; I went to work afraid almost every day, and that’s the way it should be. It’s really visceral when you’re living it. I think that I’ve earned a little bit of happiness on this show. I think it’s coming. I think it will be all the more solid when she finally does get some safe ground to stand on because it will have come so hard earned. And Deb never ignores the lessons, so through all of this pain and all of this mourning and grief are opportunities. It will make her sharper and make her do better police work and will make the Dexter-Debra relationship all the more interesting.
Well, thanks for talking to us and keep up the good work.
Thank you. I’ve been so excited about this season. It’s amazing to be four years into a television show and still be excited about your job.
It shows, right? (And BTW, confession: Jennifer Carpenter is officially our new favorite girl crush here at Watch With Kristin headquarters, ’cause she’s kinda awesome.)
So what do you all think will go down in the finale? See if you can prove Jennifer wrong and come up with something just as good as what the writers have planned and post it in the Comments. Go on. We dare you!
And if you’re digging Dexter this season, holler below…
Deemed as one of the “most incredible endings ever”, the season finale of “Dexter” next week will see Dexter’s family in danger because of his pursuit of Trinity. As the noose tightens, Arthur warns Dexter to back off. But Dexter will do anything to stop Trinity from eluding him, even if that means putting himself on the wrong side of the law.
Rita acknowledges the rocky relationship she and Dexter share, but reaffirms her support. Batista and LaGuerta face the consequences of their actions. Debra unearths a deeply-hidden truth, but not one she expected to find. And ultimately, Dexter and Arthur find themselves on a collision course, leading them to a confrontation that will change their lives forever.
“The Getaway” airs on Sunday, December 6 as the season finale before the show returns to Showtime for a fifth season next year.
On what her takes of the episode, Jennifer Carpenter aka Deb told E!, “I have to give a lot of our fans credit. The stuff that they come up with and the guesses that they make on how it’s going to end are really impressive, but you just can’t top our writers. All the time you put in [episodes] one through 11 watching the show, you’ll be glad that you did in 12. Everybody matters in the end. Everybody matters. We all had to be there to shoot the finale.”
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Watch Promotional Photos of Dexter Season 4 Episode 11 “Hello Dexter Morgan”
(Click to Enlarge)
For most of season four, Dexter Morgan has been stalking Arthur Mitchell, trying to understand (and the kill) his fellow mass murderer.
But on Sunday’s new episode, the dangerous tables are turned, as the man referred to as “Trinity” asks Dexter over the phone: “What kind of man witnesses a child abduction and doesn’t call the police?”
We know that answer, of course. Watch Arthur try to deduce it in the clip below, courtesy of the episode “Hello, Dexter Morgan.”
What else can fans expect from the second-to-last episode of the season? Angel questions Christine and – mini-spoiler alert! – Arthur actually shows up at the Miami PD headquarters.
Click on the photos below to enlarge scenes
Dexter’s worst fears have been realized. Because of Debra’s unrelenting pursuit, Miami Metro is just one step away from discovering the identity of the Trinity Killer. And Dexter can’t let that happen. Arthur’s arrest would not only deprive Dexter of a satisfying kill, it would also expose the secret life Dexter’s been leading in his pursuit of this monster. Dexter must take drastic action to buy himself time to deal with Trinity in his own fashion. Meanwhile, Rita decides to confide in Dexter, which doesn’t go as well as she’d hoped. LaGuerta and Batista’s breach of ethics paints them into a very tight corner. And Arthur, who still can’t understand why Dexter didn’t simply turn him in, begins his own bloody investigation into Kyle Butler.
Written By: Scott Buck & Lauren Gussis
Directed By: SJ Clarkson
TVMA – Brief Nudity, Violence, Graphic Language, Adult Content
