Saying goodbye to Dexter, even though it's only for a few months, is not easy. Like a suicide without a passing note, the series left us with so many unanswered questions.

Maybe Dexter was caught up in the holiday spirit - those last three episodes did have a macabre holiday theme. Or perhaps the producers of the series knew they'd packed a little too much in the twelve episodes of the first season and prodded the writers to wrap it up, dangling plot threads be damned. There are a lot of dangling plot threads.

It's been a few weeks now since the finale first aired - time enough to recover from the holidays and time enough to reflect on those twelve episodes, especially those last three. "Seeing Red," "Truth Be Told," and "Born Free" work as one large season finale, tied together with a very macabre holiday theme. That's part of the reason it's taken this long to write this final Dexter piece. Body parts wrapped in festive bows and ribbons didn't seem wholly in keeping with the season.

I know the furor over the series has died down, so to speak, which makes it a bit easier to look back at it with jaded eyes. Don't get me wrong - I still think Dexter is the most original take on the crime drama ever to come down the pike. There was nothing remotely realistic about the twelve episodes, but that was what made it work.

The premise of a forensics expert working for the Miami Police Department and moonlighting as a serial killer who only preys on murderers beyond the reach of the law is the delightfully implausible stuff of comic books, and the plotlines reflected that.

The recurring cast of characters — Dexter's flighty but determined, foul-mouthed and lovable foster sister Deb; the "tough guy with a dark secret" cop Doakes; the manipulative and politically ambitious Lt. LaGuerta; and Angel, whose easy-going style belied his detective abilities — were broadly drawn and often over the top.

None of it should have worked, and in lesser hands none of it would have, but by the writers' choosing to have at least most of the continuing plot seen from Dexter's perspective, it did. Michael C. Hall's portrayal of Dexter — disarmingly charming on the outside, calculating killer on the inside — was what riveted us to the screen through the series. It was almost enough to forgive the potential plot threads that ended up tossed by the wayside and to accept the leaps in logic that made us believe Dexter could go unnoticed as he merrily killed evildoers.

That final three-episode arc sucked us inexorably into Dexter's world. We simply had to know how it all began and what originally possessed him. We already knew that Rudy was the Ice Truck Killer and we'd all pretty much surmised that he and Dexter shared a past. What we didn't know was why Rudy was obsessed with Dexter. Close your eyes now if you don't want to know.