Talk:Vince Masuka/@comment-1748472-20131231074935/@comment-757765-20140103021843

Dude, I know how you feel. Early seasons, you couldn't take out much, but starting with season three and really reaching an apex in season five, if you took out all the bullshit, the show would be down to a half hour format. Really, after season five this show shouldn't have been around, or it should've had shorter seasons (Say, eight episodes instead of twelve). That, or the writers could've tried to make us feel for these characters, make them useful, instead of just giving them bullshit side plots to fill out the time.

I think a big problem is the writers were too afraid to kill some characters. Yeah, I know they killed main characters in the past, but think about who they killed. Doakes, who for all intents and purposes was an antagonist for the first two seasons, Rita, who got in the way of Dexter's urges and became pretty annoying after the first season, LaGuerta, who was a bitch to Debra and became an antagonist for Dexter, and then Debra herself. Debra was killed in the finale so as to make at least one episode in season eight worthwhile, but with the other three, do you notice a pattern? They were all bad for Dexter in some way.

The writers on this show couldn't kill anyone but them. Think about this, wouldn't seeing Batista die instead of the marshal have meant more? What about in season five, wouldn't Quinn dying at Dexter's hand have had more of an impact? But the writers couldn't do that, because they still had redeeming qualities to them. Batista, Quinn, Masuka, Jamie, and Matthews were all untouchable, which was a huge mistake. There are times when the only way to make your characters remain interesting is to kill them off. Teasing deaths is another way, but as we've seen with Batista, it gets old after so many times. But even then, the writers probably would have screwed that up, I think. They did with everyone else, because none of those deaths had any lasting impact to speak of, except for Deb's, and if given a ninth season I'm sure they'd have fucked that up, too. Quinn would've been mentioned in passing a handful of times in season five, and they'd act as though Batista wasn't there in the finale. Pretty sad that the first writing team left after the fourth season. Yeah they only would've wanted to do one more season (Clyde Philips planned to end at five, if I recall right), but you still have to wonder what could have been if they original team had been there til the end.