They kill off Rita just to replace her with another love interest the very next season? Played by Julia Stiles no less? Fuck that shit.
Some other writer sees that a monogamous relationship commits Dexter and decides that it's totally unacceptable that he can't have a revolving cast of fuck buddies. And as soon as she's dead, they speed up the recovery process as much as possible--certainly more than is convincing.
I wasn't too wild about him a having a relationship with someone right from the start of the series either. I found it rather limiting to be truthful. It probably would have been better to wait and develop something like that later. But I wouldn't have gone back on it--especially not after developing so much anchorage from it.
I'm not saying her death was inappropriate. It was very appropriate. Poetic even. Throughout the season, Harry is lecturing him about how his two worlds could easily collide. No one expects it because it just sounds like concerned, overbearing father-speak. Then Dexter comes home to a scene no one was expecting. It was well-nuanced.
But however appropriate it may have been, that doesn't mean it was at all necessary. Quite frankly, whatever gains were made in story development were heavily outweighed by the loss of the character: Dexter's rock. The lesson learned from her death was not worth the gaping hole left behind in the decorum. All the while the story is trying to move along without Rita, I'm just thinking to myself: what the fuck is the point of all this? It's not necessarily the case that I feel for Dexter's loss--although the visual of her in the bathtub was pretty heart-wrenching--but without this relationship that Dexter's developed over a long period of time serving as a light at the end of the tunnel every season, there's very little reason for the audience to continue being engaged. I mean, they might as well have not had him get married and have a son in the first place: that way, no one would feel so cheated--and all for the sake of him having multiple love interests no less.
Instead of a ploy to have him score more pussy, it would have been better off for the writers to try and have their cake and eat it too by severely injuring her to the point of debility (see also: a temporary coma) and start the healing process from there. Because as it is, the show has gone down hill immensely after the decision to kill her off. After a mediocre season 5, season 6 is starting out as total trash: couples have changed hands yet again and the village bicycle, Dexter's sister, is agonizing over yet another relationship that's probably going to end after this season. And despite the show's best efforts, Dexter and his extra curricular activities are becoming less and less interesting as time goes on.....And they've started pushing a tired religious zealotry narrative...Fuck.
To top it off, It's looking less and less likely that they're ever going to inquire into Rita's death. They obviously showed Trinity at Dexter's old apartment to imply that he wasn't the one who killed Rita (it was probably the next door neighbor making it look like Trinity's MO). Odds are, however, that the revolving cast of writers and directors decided to scrap it because they wanted as many traces of Rita as possible to be eliminated from Dexter's life. Bullshit.
