lamphorn

Uh oh, does this mean...

TheKing

I had a feeling this was the direction the show was headed for a couple of years. At some point Rita had to die because like Harry alluded to in the episode, Dexter's future cannot be a happy one. And Rita, for all her flaws as a character, represented the happy ending that Dexter thought he could have.

At some point, Dexter has to lose everything because his dark passenger cannot be stopped. It's now cost him his wife and their family. Now all he has left is his sister and his son, a son that could wind up with a dark passenger of his own.

I think Season 5 will be about the mistakes Dexter made with Arthur and how those mistakes lead to his downfall. There's just far too many loose ends at this point. Arthur at the police station, Dexter being arrested at the same parking structure that Arthur's van was found, Arthur's family knowing Dex as Kyle.

With the FBI taking over the case of a killer they believe is still on the loose, these are threads that can't just be ignored. I'm guessing the season opens with a flashback to Rita's murder, filling in the gaps left in the timeline, and giving Rita a larger sendoff.

Still, a great ending to a really great season, and I really can't wait for Season 5.

dino88

My guess (and hope) is that next season jumps ahead about 10 years and revolves around Dexter and his son.

kaze0

single dad dexter. woop

Josh-da-man

No shit.

With all of the stuff that's been leaked, it's been pretty obvious that someone close to Dexter was going to get killed; either Deb, Rita, or one of the kids.

So I spent the whole episode waiting for it to happen... Oh, shit! He's in Deb's apartment! He's going to kill her!... Oh shit! His Mustang died! Rita and/or the kids are going to happen upon him!... Oh shit! He killed Trinity! Rita had to take a different plane, and her plane crashed!

If everyone had kept their big yaps shut, it would have been really shocking.

freshticles

I didnt find Rita any more annoying than a regular wife so I was a little bummed to see her go. I thought the whole thing seemed a little rushed and improbable, to give us a big shocker to finish up the lackluster episode. Almost like the episode was filler for that moment. Regardless, Dexter is not getting out of this one next season.

movieking

This episode didn't do it for me. I found it to be pretty anticlimactic, and the ending just seemed to be thrown in for shock value. As for next season, I am curious if it is going to start right where this one ended, or if it will be in a couple of months and we see how Dexter is coping.

I wonder if there is any chance that Dexter actually killed Rita himself, since Harry has been hounding him about how he needs to get away from the family. With his auto accident causing him to forget where he stored one of his bodies a short while ago and being under extreme pressure to find Trinity, I wonder if he just snapped and killed Rita. He posed it like a Trinity killing (I guess now leaving the ashes don't matter since Arthur no longer had them anyway), but having the baby covered in his dead mother's blood is a re-enactment of a tramatic incident from Dexter's childhood, which is exactly what Arthur had been doing with his murders. I can understand Arthur killing Rita for revenge, but it is outside of his pattern and he did tell Dexter that as long as Dexter left him alone, his family was safe. Arthur seemed like in more of a rush to get out of town rather than take revenge. I would have thought that Arthur might have said something about it on the table about to die, but all he mentioned was some vague talk about Dexter's life changing, which could just refer to his demon taking over moreso than it did in the past. Of course, this is all a wild theory on my part...

Vipper II

That's exactly what I thought.

movieking

From EW.com:

Might she return as a ghost like Dex’s dad?
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER CLYDE PHILLIPS: The answer, at he moment, is no. However, had you asked me two years ago if Lundy was coming back I would’ve said no. We didn’t know he was coming back until this year. It just seemed expedient to the story — to Dexter’s story and to Deb’s story.

Groucho

There was an interview after the show with John Lithgow and some street drifter that answers this question definitively.

clckworang

This episode left me floored last night! Great ending to a great season. I didn't recall or just forgot hearing anything about a major character's death, so this was a shocker for me. I think Rita was a grounding force on the show and for character. I'm really anxious to see what next season is going to look like. Will it be Dexter as a single dad to one or three kids? What will happen with Deb - suspicions about Dexter, possibly moving in to help with the kids? How will possibly being a single dad affect Dexter's nocturnal activities - bring-your-child-to-work day perhaps?

It was sad to lose Lithgow. I actually thought there was a chance he might escape to next season. Dexter gave Trinity his song and his train to make his death easier, and all the while, Rita was in a bath of her blood at Trinity's hands. I'm betting Dexter wishes he weren't so kind. This has all kinds of implications for next season. As others have said, I wonder not just what next season will be like but when. Is it going to kick off from this moment, jump forward a few months, maybe even a few years? I can't wait!

Doc Moonlight

I agree. OT: Benz is sexy as hell in BOONDOCK SAINTS II.

HotThang

LMAO! He really did look homeless! I wonder if it's for a role?

Slumbering Fist

Well, as for the whole "clean slate" thing, I think thats taking hyperbole literally. You never listen to fucking actors anyway. Its not like Jennifer Carpenter is in the writing room for season five.

A more appropriate sound bite would probably be "game changer" and Rita's death certainly adds a huge wrinkle. Its one that makes sense to with Dexter being divided between devotion to family and his killer's code. Now he has a way out, an excuse to shun the moral side, but deep down he knows thats wrong... but will his darker side overpower that? The natural progression next season is to have Dexter in very deep shit again in terms of being revealed as a killer and coming to some kind of open-ended compromise.

Deftones

While Dexter doesn't know this, they can probably show with surveillance that Trinity was in the building. Since he saw the board, maybe it had the Morgan name on it and Trinity decided to target "Morgan" not knowing there were two of them. Either that or the same above and Trinity decided to go after any Morgan he could find that was an easy target. Since Deb and Dexter are more difficult targets, he went after Rita.

Groucho

I can see Season 5 going a couple different ways:

* Dexter decides to abandon his "dark passenger" but something happens (a horrible killer gets set free, etc) that makes this hard to do.
* Dexter abandons the code and starts targeting innocents

dsa_shea

If season 5 is the last one does anyone see Dexter taking his own life in the end?

Slumbering Fist

The shows head producer had this to say in regaards to next season.

He also said that the Trinity killing Rita timeline thing was probably a loophole. Rita does say on Dex's voicemail that the moon "is going to be" beautiful, so I guess that opens the door to her getting killed in the afternoon and Dex just not checking his voicemail until later.

freshticles

After thinking about it for a bit, I'm pretty sure Dexter has an easy way out in the fact that Trinity is still considered 'at large' and has a connection to the attacking of people working the case. Also, Rita's death is the next logical Trinity move after kidnapping a boy and that they'll probably pin Rita's murder down to the only possible time it could have been committed which is when Dexter was working the Trinity killer's house with every other cop on the force. Who knows though? I really hope next season doesn't start the first few episodes in a courtroom.

Brack

Good observation, I didn't think about that.

Great ending to a great season.

Jadzia

As far as the timeline is concerned, Rita's satisfied what I had previously thought was a plothole, which is the gap of time of when Dexter was able to go hide in the Mustang before Trinity came to pick it up. When I was watching, I thought it seemed strange that Dexter was able to figure out the Mustang and get there before Trinity, because I was wondering what Trinity was doing the whole time Dexter was at the house at the Swat team. Rita's murder explained this perfectly. It makes sense that Trinity would go find Dexter's house, especially since he thought Dexter had his money. He just happened to run in to Rita who came home before she took the later flight and exacted his revenge.

I deleted the episode before re-watching it, but were there any hints to what Trinity did during his conversation with Dexter while on the table? I am trying to remember if in retrospect, Trinity was teasing about Dexter causing hurt to his family.

I was surprised that Trinity did not act more shocked when he awoke on Dexter's table. At that point, hadn't he written off Dexter as just a failed vigilante/extortionist? I know he saw a glimmer of Dexter's true self at Thanksgiving, but I kind of thought Trinity would have been surprised to learn Dexter was also a serial killer.

Groucho

In the previously-mentioned interview with Hobo Mike, John Lithgow claimed there was. But I didn't go back and watch it all again.

JohnSlider

He said he bet the ending made people rewind and rewatch the previous scene because it would have a new effect on the viewer. I don't recall him saying there was any definitive hints or callbacks to what Trinity had done to Rita.

JohnSlider

Also, I don't think Hall and Lithgow talking in certain terms about what had happened to Rita is any kind of definitive thing. The writers themselves have said they don't know what is going to happen next season and they're not even thinking about it. I think it is entirely possible that they might go in a different direction than we and even they are currently thinking.

mrhan

I liked the episode overall but the one thing that took me out of it was