Dexter: The Final Season (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD) – Showtime’s black-humored series about a serial killer with a code (he only kills killers) was never as nuanced as Breaking Bad, as flamboyant as True Blood, or developed as dark and elaborate a mythology as such network shows as Hannibal or The Following, but for eight seasons it did what it did just fine.
Michael C. Hall plays Dexter, blood spatter expert for Miami PD and TV’s favorite serial-killer hero, and Jennifer Carpenter is his adoptive sister Debra, a police detective who learned Dexter’s secret the previous season. Dexter couldn’t be in better shape but Deb spirals into a self-destructive binge when the contradictions become too much to handle. So this season is all about reconciling the past and present and coming to terms with family history, which comes back in the form of psychopathologist Dr. Evelyn Vogel (Charlotte Rampling), the woman who helped Dexter’s adoptive father Harry (James Remar) create Dexter’s code and now consults for Miami PD in the case of a serial killer nicknamed The Brain Surgeon (for reasons obvious after you see the first victim). There’s a family connection of sorts there, as well, and a potential apprentice for Dexter to mentor, and maybe even a chance at a real family life of his own. At least that’s his dream between the bodies.
The final seasons of Sopranos and Breaking Bad set the bar for ending dark dramas with a satisfying sense of completion. Clearly there can be no happy ending for a man who spent his life as a serial killer, even one who targeted only the guilty, because so many innocents have been killed along the way, the collateral damage of a life of secrets. So the end of Dexter plays with the idea of Dexter aspiring to a normal life, of overcoming his need to kill, and why such a dream is unattainable for a man who has both a past and a conscience, or at least a primal instinct to protect those he loves. If there is anything Dexter has learned, it’s that your actions and your enemies come back with a vengeance.
13 episodes plus six featurettes and the first two episodes of the Showtime series Ray Donovan. The DVD also features bonus episodes of the Showtime series House of Lies, The Borgias and Californication via E-Bridge technology (which requires an internet connection).
Also available this week is the box set Dexter: The Complete Series (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD), which collects all eight seasons in a paperboard box that looks suspiciously like Dexter’s slide box. Only instead of blood samples of victims, this one files discs (25 on Blu-ray, 33 on DVD).
Farscape: The Complete Series – 15h Anniversary Edition (Flatiron, Blu-ray, DVD) is technically “complete” but practically speaking not quite: it features all four seasons of the wild made-for-cable science fiction series but not the mini-series finale, which was produced after the series was cancelled and belongs to Lionsgate. The show was the first real trademark hit for the SciFi channel, an original series filled with exotic aliens, marbled worlds, and spacescapes that look ripped from the cover of “Amazing Stories.” But it was more than just space opera and pulp adventure. Our heroes are essentially outlaws, escaped from an authoritarian regime and on the run from pretty much everybody out there. The totalitarian worlds and mercenary survivors of this hostile universe are a far cry from the Federation friendly universe of “Star Trek,” and the dark art direction and wild, often grotesque creatures (courtesy of Jim Henson studios) made this the most imaginative and unpredictable science fiction show on TV in its day. This series knew how to make an epic on a budget.
As in the previous “Complete Series” box set from A&E (the first Blu-ray edition came out just a couple of years ago), it features all 88 episodes of the show on both DVD (27 discs) and Blu-ray (20 discs), the retrospective documentary “Memories of Moya: An Epic Journey Explored” (previously available on Blu-ray, making its DVD debut here) and all the commentary tracks (31 in all, with multiple tracks on a couple of episodes), featurettes, interviews, character profiles, deleted scenes, galleries and other goodies seen on earlier releases from show. The only real new supplement to the set is a mini-comic book with a Farscape story and an interview with producer Brian Henson. And like the previous edition, it lacks an episode guide and a supplement menu. You have to put the discs in to find out which episodes feature commentary tracks and deleted scenes, and which discs feature the supplements (most are on the final disc of each season, but not all).
Silk: Series One (BBC, DVD) stars Maxine Peake and Rupert Penry-Jones as rival barristers competing for a seat on the Queen’s Counsel. The British legal drama also stars Natalie Dormer, currently making an impression with American audiences with scene-stealing performances in Game of Thrones and Elementary. Six episodes plus a featurette.
Also from Britain comes the miniseries Last Tango in Halifax (BBC, DVD), starring Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid as seventy-something widowed folks in love, and The Paradise: Season One (BBC, Blu-ray, DVD), a 19th century soapy romantic melodrama set in Britain’s first department store.
More releases:
Family Ties: The Complete Series (Paramount, DVD)
Combat! The Complete Series (repriced) (Image, DVD)
The Carol Burnett Show: Christmas With Carol (StarVista, DVD)
Stan Lee’s Superhumans: Season Two (Lionsgate, DVD)
The Capture of Grizzly Adams (Paramount, DVD)
The Naughty List (Arc, DVD, VOD)
The Best of Dance Moms: The Championship Dances (Lionsgate, DVD)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD