“In the beginning there was blood.”
Dexter Morgan is a forensic lab rat for the Miami-Dade Police. He really knows blood splatter. He should, because he moonlights as a killer. It seems that poor old Dex just can’t help himself. His parents were criminals, and he witnessed his mother’s brutal slashing by a chainsaw gang when he was just a young boy. He was adopted by Harry Morgan, a police officer. Harry saw the killer instinct in Dexter and taught him how to channel the urges for the sake of good. Dexter adopted Harry’s Code, which means he only kills others that he’s able to prove were killers themselves. Working for the police with his officer sister, Debra, Dexter is constantly just on the verge of getting caught. He has to adapt and evolve to avoid capture. Many of us bore witness to the show’s 8-year run. It looked like it was all over until Dexter was reawakened in 2021 with a revival series Dexter: New Blood.
In the revival series Dexter encounters his son, Harrison only to find that he’s passed on those killer genes. He tries to coach his son like Harry did for him but it leads to a real mess and Dexter shot and dying in the snow as the final moments of the show faded to black. But Dexter is a hard guy to kill. He’s the energizer bunny of serial killers, and now the revival will play host to another two new shows. They both start with Dexter there in the snow, but there’s a fork in the road. Dexter apparently was rushed to the hospital and survived. Here’s where you’ll find that nasty fork. In one direction Dexter goes on trying to find and help his son. That series is just about here and is called Dexter: Resurrection. The other path is Dexter having his life flash before our eyes. We go back to those early days where we now meet a younger Dexter, played by Patrick Gibson, just coming of age and learning to deal with his urges. It’s called Dexter: Original Sin, and it will answer a lot of those background things that were only alluded to in the original show. So if you’d like to learn more about the events that brought us Dexter, Paramount is about to help you to do just that with the release of Dexter: Original Sin Season 1.
Dexter is now a young man about to embark on some kind of a career. His father, Harry, now played by Cristian Slater, is getting worried about Dexter’s urges, but so far they’ve been able to keep him from actually killing anybody. That is, until Dexter meets Miami Metro Police lab rat Vince Masuka, now played by Alex Shimizu, complete with that annoying laugh, at a job fair. The photos of bloody crime scenes excite the young killer-to-be, and he decides to intern at the crime lab under the supervision of Tanya Martin, who was not a part of the original show and is a new character played by Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Another new character is the precinct’s Captain Aaron Spencer, played by McDreamy himself, Patrick Dempsey. The best of the reproductions has to be James Martinez, who plays the younger Angel Batista. He has the look and mannerisms down perfectly. He could easily be the brother of actor David Zayas, who played him in the original and returned for New Blood and will play a part in Resurrection. It’s a great character, and we’re going to be seeing a lot of Detective Batista in the coming seasons. Christina Milian takes over the role of rookie detective Maria La Guerta, who was the precinct boss by the time the original show ended.
Finally we have Molly Brown playing Dexter’s sister, Debra Morgan. I’ve learned something from watching her performance. I always thought that Debra and actress Jennifer Carpenter where the weakest links of the first show. Both actress and character were annoying to the point of distraction, and I was never sure which one to blame for that. Hands down it’s the character, because watching Molly Brown in the role didn’t make her one bit more tolerable. She’s just an annoying character, and the constant F-bombs are just a distraction. If you’re going to do that, you need an artist in the form of the F-bomb like Samuel Jackson. From him the profanity is pure poetry; from Debra Morgan it’s just nails on a chalkboard.
The truth is that Dexter just isn’t Dexter without Michael C. Hall, and while Patrick Gibson certainly nails the part, he isn’t Hall, but the series showrunners have taken care of that for us. Hall narrates the show, much as he often did in the original series. It adds just that last nudge of authenticity to the character to put it over the top. It wasn’t easy to see Dexter in Gibson at first. But if you give it a chance, he eventually truly becomes the character over 10 episodes. By the time it was over, I felt the performance evolved into what you were expecting from the beginning, and that’s OK, because while Gibson is trying to become this character played by another actor, the character himself is learning to deal with what he is, so both actor and character end up on this collision course to what we all tune in to see. Give it a couple of episodes, and while I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that I believed, I can tell you that it did indeed happen, and the series lives up to the promise of the franchise.
The show is itself a flashback narrated by a potentially dying Dexter Morgan, but there are flashbacks within the flashback. Harry has these flashbacks to the case that brought him into contact with Dexter. Dexter’s mother was Doris Morgan, played by Jasper Lewis. She was Harry’s confidential informant, and the relationship often blurred and crossed some lines. We all know what happened to her from the first show, but now we’ll get to see those details come alive … or dead if you will, for us. As the series progresses, you’ll see more and more of that material, knowing all the while where it’s headed, but the trick was can they make it compelling enough even if we know where this is all going. I think for the most part they did exactly that, and I think I enjoyed this show more than Hall’s recent season in New Blood. There’s a lot of information here, but it never feels forced, and the two timelines blend pretty well. I think there’s entirely too much time spent on the Debra character, but you know why I might be a little biased there. But the chemistry between Slater and Gibson is quite good, and the story is rather compelling.
There are so many milestone moments in this season if you’re a fan and you are looking for them. As Dexter learns to stay within Harry’s code, we see his technique evolve, and I have to say, you gotta wonder how he got away with these first kills. We learn how and why he disposes of the bodies after his first solution goes badly and what happens when he tries to take the typical kinds of souvenirs from the kills. He hasn’t latched onto the blood slides yet, but you can see where that’s going.
The cool thing here is that you can start right here. You do not have to have seen the nine previous seasons of Dexter’s life to follow along. If you started here and then worked your way to the first show, it can work for you. The fun reveals will happen in reverse for you, but it’ll work. So don’t be shy about joining the story here. I think they have you covered. You get all 10 episodes and a 10-minute behind-the-scenes feature in the Blu-ray set. The steelbook is a great 3-disc set, so there is no compromise on video quality, and you get Harry’s Code on the back cover just in case you need it to follow along.
As the season comes to a close, we get teased about Dexter’s brother, and I’m looking forward to seeing where that goes. The finale is a huge set-up, and between that and the continuing adult Dexter series on our doorsteps, I think you can count on a lot of Dexter over the next few years. I’m looking forward to it, and the only thing you need to know going in is, “His name is Dexter.”
