Dexter: New Blood is a surprisingly welcome return

The last time we left Dexter Morgan – a half-remorseful, half-righteous serial killer based in Miami – he had lost pretty much everything. The series finale of Showtime’s Dexter reproduced the titular forensic expert and hidden angel of death alone and on the run, starting a new life out west. It was one of the most frustrating series finals in memory, full of kitchen-washing excesses and narrative evasions that felt punishing to people like myself who had stuck to the show even through its shaky last seasons.

We counted on Dexter was made forever, a once richly compelling series that briefly went over the edge of greatness, but which always seemed out of step with, or a few steps behind, the quality boom of the golden age of television’s prestige. But Dexter was, it turns out, not done with us. A confusing eight years after the original series ended, a new version of the show premieres on Showtime (November 7), where Dexter is in vastly different surroundings and rusty to his old tricks.

Dexter: New blood is a surprisingly welcome return to the franchise’s brand of heady nonsense, self-conscious but not overly valuable about its meta-consciousness. Michael C. Hall, who plays Dexter, looks very much the same as he always has, his feathered Caesar cut still intact, his nerdy affect as deliberately hollow as ever. He’s cold, though. Not cold in the sense of his barely-checked-in sociopathy, but actually cold – he is in a small town upstate New York, flooded in snow-white and living in a humble cabin. The series is smart enough to make one Fargo joke quite early; otherwise, its investigated opening of that series (instead of the film) would begin to seem like minor theft.

The show works well in this new environment. The humid heat in Miami was an appropriate grotesque addition to Dexter’s misdeeds – it ugly amplified all the smell and squish. But the northern setting allows the series to move away from the ironic glare and into something more meditative. Dexter, now called Jim, works in a sports shop (lots of guns and knives everywhere) and satisfies his appetite for murder by going on physically intense solo hunts in the woods behind his home. He has not killed a human being in almost a decade. That’s not all that has changed: in the first almost hour of New Blood, Dexter’s glaring voiceover – truly the original series’ main sin – is gone. It’s coming back eventually, I’m afraid, but it’s not quite as telling. Age and time and relocation have slowed down the internal monologue some.

Dexter has also freed himself from his ghost father therapist, replaced by force of Jennifer Carpenter‘s Deb, whose death was such a sour tone in the original series finale. Dexter’s sister is used more sparingly than his father, Harry, and she brings a more interesting emotional tone. Deb, or at least Dexter’s notion of her, does not encourage or help guide Dexter’s so-called “dark passages” (which are the series’ pseudo-poetic term for Dexter’s series-killing impulses). Instead, she’s an alarming doomsday that warns Dexter of his precarious position, how steep his slippery slope will be if he rolls back on it.

It adds a good note of excitement New Blood, whereas the original ghost interludes quickly became repeated and foreign. On the whole, this version of Dexter is more artful and restrained – at least for a little while. Gradually over the four episodes made available to critics, the familiar Dexter root begins to creep in, a tangle of plot threads that overcomplicates what was briefly trimmed and effective. But that root of the story is also what defined Dexter. In the best seasons (especially the Trinity Killer series of episodes), the writers managed a magnificent convergence, setting up all the different parts in a satisfying causal context. I hope so, perhaps naively New Blood will do the same with its thicket of threats and suspects and crimes.

Dexter has gone from working for a police force to dating a member of a local sheriff Angela (Julia Jones). It’s exactly the kind of stupid decision – making that was a hallmark of the original series, and the complications it presents oscillate between pleasantly difficult and downright annoying. A character from the past emerges to further disrupt Dexter’s new life, while some shadowy, HH Holmes-like figure imprisons and murders wayward young women. There is also a new political consciousness, seen in the series’ preliminary exploration of the native identity and in a threatening industrial character, whose poisoning of the environment is probably not the only bad thing he does.

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