Old friends, old urges, and one old cast member haunt Dexter in the first New Blood trailer
Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter are both back in Showtime's Dexter revival project
TV News New Blood
After a whole bunch of teasing, we’ve finally got ourselves a nice, meaty glimpse of what’s been going on with Acclaimed Lumberjack and Retired Serial Killer Dexter Morgan after all this time away, in the form of a new trailer for the Dexter sequel miniseries, New Blood, that arrived online this weekend. Sorry, that’s “well-liked man-about-town Jim Lindsay” (a reference to the original author of the Dexter books) who seems to have been maintaining his human being act pretty well since the controversial finale of Showtime’s hit murder drama back in 2013.
After all, he’s got a girlfriend (small-town police chief Angela Bishop, played by Julia Jones), and he even knows Clancy Brown! Still, though, it just wouldn’t be a Dexter revival without him being disproportionately surrounded by serial killers, and so Mr. Lindsay soon seems to find himself getting drawn back into the murderin’ game, a return-to-form that’s accompanied by a somewhat surprising appearance by an old friend from his Miami days: His sister Debra. (Surprising to anybody who missed that Jennifer Carpenter was coming back for New Blood, anyway, reuniting with ex-co-worker/ex-husband Michael C. Hall to play a guilt-infused mental ghost version of her character, who died at the end of the show’s final season.)
Anyway: When kids start dying in Dexter’s vicinity, the old “serial kill serial killer” urges start coming back, likely only exacerbated by the sudden reappearance of his long-lost son Harrison (Jack Alcott), the one person who knows that this humble PNW shopkeep was once Florida’s foremost purchaser of big ol’ murder tarps. And it’s not like the Dark Passenger has just gone away, no matter how cheerfully Iggy Pop sings about it on the trailer’s soundtrack. As Dexter himself asserts, he’s probably still a monster—but he does at least promise to be an “evolving” one; here’s hoping former Dexter showrunner Clyde Phillips (who left the show at the end of what many considered its last really good season on Showtime) can find new ways to make that evolution compelling.
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Dexter: Fascinating premise, stunningly presented, terribly acted by everyone but Michael C. Hall. Couldn’t tear my eyes away from the first season. (Didn’t they run it on like CBS shortly after it finished airing on Showtime? Really sucked me in.)The very definition of diminishing returns. I was out in the middle of, like, season 3.
Pity. Season 4 was it’s peak with an excellent performance by John Lithgow.
The performance was great but the Dexter writers fucked it up royally like they always did. If they would have stuck with Lithgow as the perfect father and a pillar of the community but also a serial killer, that would have been a fantastic story and something for Dexter to have to grapple with. But no, they copped out and he suddenly turned into an abusive monster to his family (with almost no foreshadowing, if I remember right) so Dexter, and the audience, had no qualms about putting him down.It’s just one more time they almost had something then blew it, which is why the show is so fascinating to hatewatch— it keeps being almost good then goes right off the rails again.
Season 4 was the peak, but I thought season 5 was pretty good too, and Julia Stiles was fantastic.Season’s 3, 6, and 8 were pretty dire though, and 7 was not great. Jimmy Smits and Edward James Olmos are great actors, but they could not come close to saving their seasons. Colin Hanks seems like a likeable guy, but he was terrible.
Oddly enough, Ray Stevenson came close to redeeming Season 7 through sheer force of personality. I mean, there was no way the show could have been good, but he was fun to watch and actually managed to generate a degree of pathos.
Erik King was awesome as Doakes.
Jennifer Carpenter was pretty great too.
Ugh, Doakes and his sister were TERRIBLE. The awful acting hall of fame, Dexter special edition, from most terrible to slightly less most terrible:1. His sister2. His partner (Angel?)3. The police captain, some lady whose name I forget4. His nemesis DoakesTheir acting made Rita and the evil Goth chick (from S2?) seem competent by comparison. But maybe I’m being too hard on the actors. Somehow even Jimmy Smits didn’t do it for me on this show.Michael C. Hall was *fantastic* though, which makes all the rest of it so weird. And the opening credits, fucking amazing!! If I were honest it was probably the opening credits that kept me coming back way after I was tired of the show.
Yes they ran it on CBS during the 2007 writer’s strike. That’s how we got hooked on it.
After season 5 I just started hate-watching it just so I could keep up with the AV Club reviews and hilarious commenters, back at the original site.
and he even knows Clancy Brown!I mean, it’s like a 75% chance he’s the bad guy.
It can’t be that obvious, but he would certainly be a formidable opponent. My fear is that Dexter is going to find out he himself is the killer, having split his personality in two as a coping mechanism.
It’s Brian!
dexter would never kill kids, though.
There can only one (serial killer in town).
Damn, they’re gonna ruin the most memorable series finale in history. I’ll never accept any other ending for Dexter than “He became a lumberjack on his way back to his home planet”.
There’s still time for him to have been a double agent all along.
Calling it “controversial” is so generous. “A perpetual object of mockery and the benchmark for bedshitting finales ever since” is a bit wordy, I guess.
When I feel down and I need a pick-me-up, I go re-read Joshua Alton’s glorious F-graded review for the finale, plus all the comments (in the middle of which there’s also my own derisory remembrance of each and every character ever appeared in the show).
https://www.avclub.com/dexter-remember-the-monsters-1798178011
I wish I saved all the Dexter memes from the Something Awful discussion thread. Incredible stuff, especially anything about Harrison’s threadmill adventure.That shit ran right next to Breaking Bad’s final season and watching them concurrently was a damn trip.
I wish like hell I would’ve saved a comment from those days. Someone wrote out this wild fever dream of a scene and all I remember is “Angel’s hat? No. That’s Rita fucking Morgan.” I don’t even remember the context but it still makes me laugh when I think of it.
I’d be lowkey delighted if they’d just end “You” the same way.
How am I supposed to spam every Dexter article with the “SURPRISE LUMBER FUCKER!” joke now?
I fell off of Dexter by the time the last season rolled around, but watching that trailer reminded me that its title sequence remains one of the best short films of the 2000s.
The theme song is also phenomenal.
Agreed. Though it came before the video games, I stumbled on Dexter after I had played the Dishonored video games, so I at first thought “Oh, no wonder Dexter’s music reminds me of Dishonored so much: they share composer Daniel Licht.” Then I realized that the theme was done by someone else. Now I’m torn in wondering if Licht cribbed so much of the feel of scores I adore from his co-worker’s work.
Wait, should Harrison be that old??
Depends on what his age is actually intended to be. It’s been 12 or 13 years since Harrison was introduced end of season 3/beginning of season 4, but there’s also a pretty big jump in age in season 8: dude goes from being an infant that requires being carried everywhere to playing soccer and talking after a year in Florida.And, of course, as we all know, last year was five years long.
Foreshadowed by the threadmill fall, which had Harrison inexplicably age 20 years after a fall.
I would argue that the Julia Stiles season was very good, but it was not nearly as good as the John Lithgow season so it suffers in comparison. I would even argue that the Julia Stiles season was better than season 2 in my personal ranking of Dexter seasons.The first five seasons were easily superior to what came after though.
Izodonia: I would approve your comment, but Kinja is so fucked I can’t find it.