Dexter" Season 5 Episode 12"

• Showtime
• Good-night, sweet Robocop; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Oh Dexter. You make me sad. Here we are at the the finale, a whole 11-episode season gone by, and things are just now getting interesting. It makes for a helluva climax—the kind of episode that gets me excited for the series all over again—but also makes everything that came before that much more frustrating in retrospect.

The discovery of Liddy’s body, especially, could have given this season a subplot worth following, tying Quinn and Dexter together in an uneasy orbit, tipping back and forth between adversarial and empathetic. That scene on the boat, Deb questioning Quinn and Quinn, in turn, questioning Dexter about Liddy’s murder was awesome to watch—but infuriating too, in that we could have been dealing with that kind of tension all season, that these auxiliary characters might have had such compelling arcs fully relevant to the Dexter plot, and that instead it was saved for the very last episode (giving it an inevitably hurried and unlikely resolution—could clearing Quinn really be as easy as misidentifying the drop of blood on his shoe?).