Dexter Season Finale: Look Who’s Coming To Skinner.

Since Dexter is my favorite show on television, I always want each season to go on and on, but Sunday’s season finale should have lasted two hours at least. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to. Maybe Showtime’s letting the world know there would be another season of Dexter forced the creators into a revisionist frenzy that led to a perfunctory and dull wrap-up of everything. Consider what we learned in less than an hour:

Rita gets a card from her mother that says, “Third time’s a charm.” Rita tells Dexter that it’s for the third kid, but Dex can tell she is lying. He learns she was married for just a few months at 16. He decides to let her have her secrets. He has plenty of his own.

LaGuerta is uncertain of how to handle Ellen Wolf’s murder and Miguel’s involvement in it. Dexter advises her to keep it all to herself rather than to ruin his family’s memory of him and inflame the Hispanic community for no reason.

Ramon is following Dexter and the kids until Dex pulls a fast one (literally) and Ramon crashes the car he is driving. He is OK enough to leave the scene of the accident before he can be arrested, likely for drunk driving and running a red light.

Still drunk, Ramon shows up at a restaurant and pulls a gun on Dexter. He is immediately disarmed and arrested by Debs and Angel. In a quick interview that should have gone on much longer, Dexter and a finally sober Ramon have a little talk at the police station. When Dexter says he knows how Miguel pushed his father down the stairs, Ramon confesses that it was him who had done the pushing, and that he has been struggling to cover up for Miguel’s excesses and bad behavior for years. “The sins of the father go on and on and on from kid to kid to kid,” Dexter tells Ramon, who is apparently ready to listen. Problem solved and in a far from bloody fashion. Our boy is learning the power of persuasion, it would seem.

After Angel discovers that Debs has been sleeping with Anton, he goes to LaGuerta and confesses how he met his current girlfriend and what Debs has been up to with an on-again/off-again CI.

In her meeting with LaGuerta, Debs chooses Anton over her career and, astonishingly, LaGuerta gives her a detective’s shield anyway. Debs goes and tells Dex, “The Morgans are gonna be all right,” then heads out to find Anton and, in a beautiful scene, she tells him that she loves him.

Masuka solves the mystery of the tobacco leaf found in the Skinner’s car and calls Debs to tell her where she can find the Skinner. She is kissing Anton when her cell phone rings. She is off the case, she says, but apparently listens to what Masuka knows anyway.

In what is undoubtedly the most rushed scene in the episode, Dex is bashed on the head and wakes up tied to the Skinner’s table. There are a few incredible moments here when, as the cliché goes, facing death a person knows what he must live for. For Dex it is a true, emotional moment when he realizes that his unborn son and Rita and her kids mean everything to him. Harry is proud, he tells Dexter in one of those amazing flashbacks. Knowing that he must get the upper hand, Dexter then confesses to the Skinner in graphic detail exactly how he killed Freebo. Enraged and not believing him (“How can you torture me otherwise?” Dex tells him) the Skinner walks away from the table to get his knives. This gives Dex enough time to roll the table, free himself (Oh please, the Skinner had Anton tied up for days. He would not tie crappy knots like these!) and in spite of a broken hand, snap the Skinner’s neck.

Squad cars with sirens screaming descend on the old tobacco barn (wouldn’t the cops sneak up so they could catch the guy?). As they pull in, the Skinner’s body falls in front of Debs’ car, presumably a suicide. In spite of no car and a broken hand, Dexter makes it to the hospital and home somehow.

Dexter and Rita get married. As they have their wedding dance, blood leaks from his cast onto her red dress. Symbolic of next season, most likely.

Are you feeling breathless yet?

The upside is a simple one — the creators of Dexter are not keen on those nasty cliffhanger endings and this viewer, for one, is happy. The Ice Truck killer died. Doakes got incinerated and Lila injected. Miguel was strangled and Ramon is suddenly a pussycat instead of a tiger. But there are a few nagging little pieces from this season.

Will Rita’s first marriage be relevant to anything beyond raging adolescent hormones and parental rebellion?

Is Ramon really ready to forget his Dexter grudge?

Is Quinn a scumbag, misunderestimated or merely misunderstood?

Will a baby change much of anything?

And why, why, WHY, even though the questions are hardly pressing do we have to wait so long for the answers?