Dexter PTSD: Lithgow & Benz Reflect on THAT Season 4 Shock Ending

Posted in: Showtime, TV | Tagged: dexter, john lithgow, Julie Benz, michael c. hall

Dexter PTSD: Lithgow & Benz Reflect on THAT Season 4 Shock Ending

Remember the fourth season of Dexter and how good it was? Good times. Julie Benz and John Lithgow discussed the ending that shook everyone.

Published Fri, 30 Oct 2026 07:37:10 -0500
by Jeremy Konrad
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Article Summary

• Dexter season 4 delivered TV’s most brutal twist as Trinity Killer murdered Rita, shattering the series forever.
• Julie Benz says Rita’s death made Dexter fans realize no one was safe, and the audience may never forgive it.
• John Lithgow praises Dexter’s Trinity Killer as a dream role, balancing a bland family man with pure horror.
• Lithgow reveals the fake finale ending hid Rita’s death, creating a Dexter shocker he says still hasn’t been topped.

Dexter, for this writer at least, was on its way to becoming an all-time TV classic heading out of its fourth season. Dexter (played by Michael C. Hall) went up against The Trinity Killer, played to perfection by John Lithgow. Their dark game with each other reached its shocking end in that season's finale, where, to the immense shock of anyone who watched the show, Dexter's wife, played by Julie Benz, was found dead at Trinity's hand. It remains one of the most shocking reveals in modern television history. After that, the show's quality went off a cliff, as Dexter lacked the moral grounding to keep him from fully turning to the dark side, and the series spiraled from there. In a new chat with EW, Lithgow and Benz reflected on Rita's death and its place in the pantheon of shocking TV twists.

Dexter Was Never the Same, It Couldn't Be

"I'm not over it," Benz admits to EW. "Now anytime anybody joins Dexter, they understand they could be killed off at any moment. Like, I think everybody has died at this point. When we were doing the show, we didn't realize that — especially killing a mom who just had a baby. To me, the audience is never going to forgive you. "I always thought of her as this bird with a broken wing who was still trying to fly and believed that she would fly. She was the vessel through which the audience could fall in love with Dexter, and she was the hope in a very dark show."

"They created a character whose two identities were so vastly different from each other," Lithgow says. "This bland, sort of inconspicuous good citizen, this dean of his church, this family man, who was just so ordinary that you would never even notice him. And yet he had this appalling other side; he simply became a different person. For a character actor, changing gears, changing your expression, going from revealing one [side] of your nature after another, it's a wonderful thing to play."

On the death of Rita, Lithgow was on board: "We did the table read, and I thought it had a meh ending," Lithgow divulges. "I was disappointed. Like, That's how they're ending the whole season? I mentioned that to Michael, and he looked at me and said, 'That's a fake ending. They want to fool everybody.' That's when I found out that Trinity killed Rita, and it was like, Here we go! I can't think of anything since that has had the same astonishing, surprising impact on an audience."

"I knew I was playing a really cool scene because Trinity was keeping this secret from Dexter," Lithgow says. "He'd already murdered his wife, and I was talking with him almost like, Oh, you poor pitiful slob, you don't know. It was a marvelous misdirect, misdirecting Dexter and the audience, but, in a curious way, doing it in this deeply perverse, almost compassionate way. Like, wow, why is he behaving in this very strange way, knowing he's near death, talking to a man who is about to kill him, knowing that he's already destroyed that man's life? And the audience doesn't know any of this. It's just brilliant."

I haven't watched any of the revival series, so I don't know personally whether they redeemed themselves after what happened after Rita's death. All I think about when the show comes up is how hard I cried when I first saw her in that bathtub, and knowing that this show that had become so precious to me, as Trinty himself would say, was already over. I just didn't know it yet.

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