Oh, come on. The ending of TDKR is not even comparable to what was done with Dexter. At least in TDKR, you had the goddamn Batman (a man with extraordinary abilities and focus on preparation), an auto-pilot system in play, and the fact that we never saw Batman in the middle of the explosion. Let's also not forget that Batman semi-planned his "death" or escape plan, whatever you want to call it.
In terms of Dexter, we (the audience) watched Dexter steer his boat full speed, head on into a massive hurricane. We then saw wreckage of his boat afterwards. It had been smashed to bits. Are we to assume that despite his boat being destroyed, his small, motorized life raft somehow remained intact? Are we also to assume that after driving into a hurricane, Dexter would be conscious and able to operate this indestructible life raft? He wanted to die. That's why he drove into the massive storm. Okay, let's run with that. If he miraculously survived despite wanting to die so badly, couldn't he have remained at sea until death? Drowned himself, maybe? Stabbed himself with jagged debris from his boat? Instead, he flipped his motivation, had a will to survive, and gets himself back to shore safely.
This is what I hated about the finale and the season overall -- the balance of good ideas and bad ideas. Many good ideas dragged down by awful, unjustifiable ideas. The whole idea of Dexter surviving and living alone in exile is fine and a fitting punishment for him, I guess. It could have worked and made sense...if it didn't follow the ridiculous fake hurricane death that we were forced to watch. There's been plenty of leaps we as viewers have had to make in terms of realism throughout the series, but this one is unforgivable, IMO. And in the series finale, no less! Showing Dexter driving into a hurricane (seemingly attempting to kill himself), showing the wreckage of his boat, and then showing him alive and well is like a big F U to all of us.
I don't think any of you can believe the writers/EP when they say this is the ending they've envisioned for awhile. Even if they've known that they wanted to force Dexter to kill Deb and then show Dex living on in solitude, they just ****ed up the execution of all of it by including the nonsense that they included. The hurricane fake-out is only the tip of the iceberg. It's as if the writers the writers just needed to wrap things up quickly and didn't care how it was done. They needed Dexter to kill Saxon, so he did. They then needed Dexter to be free to he could do the stupid **** with the hurricane and Deb's body, so there's the ridiculously brief scene with Angel and Quinn and then Dexter is free. I could go on and on but what's the point...
