Dexter: Original Sin (2024)
It’s the early 1990s. George Michael is singing about Freedom and Naughty by Nature is rapping about Other People’s Property (O.P.P.). But Dexter (remember Dexter Morgan?), well he’s enrolled in a pre-med program at the University of Miami and still living at home with his father Harry and sister Debra.
Some TV shows grab you by the throat and stay with you long after the last credits of the final episode have rolled. Showtimes’ Dexter, which ran from 2006 to 2013, was just such a show. The original was set in Florida and revolved around the life and crimes of Dexter Morgan, Miami Metro Homicide blood spatter analyst: reluctant boyfriend, hesitant (step)father, devoted son, emotionally-distant but loyal brother, and – wait for it – serial killer!
As we slowly came to find out, Harry Morgan (Miami Metro homicide detective) had taught his adopted son Dexter how to kill and get away with it. But this was a last resort for Harry who came to discern that Dexter was not a normal boy. “Born in blood” as Dexter described it, Harry had found his son in a shipping container bathed in his mother’s blood after the three-year-old Dexter had witnessed his mother’s heinous murder. Needless to say, Dexter was never the same, and as Harry described it, something had gotten into him too early. It was an attraction to death that Harry, with all good intentions, could not remove from his young son’s psyche. So instead, we learned in the first series how Harry had slowly trained Dexter – in meticulous detail – to research, stalk, kill, and dispose of the worst of the worst criminals who had escaped the grasp of the Miami P.D. But the most important lesson that Harry had imparted to Dexter was how not to get caught.
Showtime’s Dexter: New Blood (2021-2022) walked us into the future after Dexter had lost his anchor, sister Debra (played with brilliant, foul-mouthed bravado by Jennifer Carpenter), and forsaken his promise to his beloved serial killer girlfriend Hannah (Yvonne Strahovski) and his young son Harrison to meet them in Argentina. Dexter: Original Sin also time travels, but this time backwards to follow Dexter the university student in his early twenties as he finds his ever-awkward way through university as a brilliant but uninspired pre-med student who discovers his passion for forensics – blood spatter analysis to be precise. Comically, we see that the problem is not that Dexter does not feel anything. He feels quite a lot, but for the “wrong” things. When the photographer taking his graduation photo urges him to smile by thinking of something he likes, Dexter (who lacks the ability to feel normal human emotion and connection) does so only after thinking of the book American Psycho (1991).
We were thrilled to see that the new series was set in Miami again which was a huge part of the original show’s contagious Latin flavour: from the music to the food, to the scenes of Dexter disposing of his most recent plastic-wrapped kills in Miami Harbour. Cleverly, Michael C. Hall – the brilliant, award-winning actor who played the original Dexter – is also back too, but as the narrator of the younger Dexter’s life through flashbacks from his hospital bed in upstate New York where he has just been revived after being shot by his son. (To fully grasp this, you must recall how Dexter: New Blood ended.)
Ingeniously too, creator Clyde Phillips has revived the original theme music and refreshed the visuals from the unforgettable original title sequence which now shows a younger Dexter (played by Patrick Gibson) rising from bed in the morning to wash, groom, and dress himself and prepare and eat his breakfast. It is déjà vu except for the fact that Dexter no longer exits his waterfront Miami condo solo, but the bungalow of his widowed father Harry (now played by Christian Slater) alongside his dad and a teenage Debra (played by Molly Brown).
When we first meet Dexter in the latest series, Harry has already taught him the infamous “code,” but not yet allowed him to act on it; a fact that is making Dexter a bit twitchy. Interestingly, the devoted Debra of the original series is not what we get from Brown. Although still foul-mouthed, she is instead exasperated by her uncool, unfeeling, mystery of a brother and overly anxious to explore her limits in perilous ways.
But the combination of Dexter’s and Debra’s growing pains make for a near disastrous mix. Forced to take Dexter with her to a house party, Debra drinks excessively and ends up passed out in a locked bedroom with a young man who does not understand that unconsciousness is a sure sign of a lack of consent. When Dexter breaks down the door and rescues her, she barely stops him from killing the man with a knife. It is the confession of his near disastrous slip that forces Harry to give Dexter the green light for his first kill, but only after Harry’s life is imperiled by a nurse who is the opposite of a healer.
What is also exciting about Dexter: Original Sin is how the creator imagines the younger versions of some staple characters from the original series. For instance, the younger Det. Angel Batista is played by James Martinez, Det. Maria LaGuerta by Christina Millian, and the comically creepy Vince Masuka by Alex Shimizu (he still has the odd, staccato laugh by the way). But there are new characters too like Reno Wilson’s Det. Bobby Watt, Patrick Dempsey’s Capt. Aaron Spencer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Head of Forensics, Tanya Martin.
By the end of the first episode – which is somehow jam-packed with vital information without feeling forced – Harry has had a heart attack and Dexter has left behind his dream of being a surgeon to start a $4.25/hour forensics internship at Miami Metro Homicide under Masuka’s guidance. He’s also murdered the serial killer nurse and fed her to hungry reptiles in alligator alley. Well, he doesn’t have a boat yet!