Dexter: Original Sin Series Premiere Review

This review contains full spoilers for Dexter: Original Sin Season 1, episode 1, “And in the Beginning”

How do you kill that which won’t die? That seems to be the question facing Dexter, a once-highly acclaimed series that was unfortunately deemed something bigger – a full-fledged franchise – by its corporate overlords and now just won’t go away.

Yes, Dexter Morgan is back again (before the next time he’s back, which is already in the works) in Dexter: Original Sin. This time, he’s taking the prequel route, with Patrick Gibson playing a younger version of everyone’s favorite blood spatter analyst/murderer of murderers circa 1991. The premiere episode – Paramount+ didn’t make screeners of the season available for advance review – is watchable enough and boasts a couple of appreciated touches. Yet it also, perhaps inevitably, feels like it’s going through the motions, repeating previously established information about the man who would become The Bay Harbor Butcher.

At this point, Dexter is just graduating college, and by the end of the first episode, he’s starting as a paid intern in the forensics department at Miami Metro. And wow, look at that, it’s most of the folks we know from the original series in their younger days, including Angel Batista (James Martinez) and Vince Masuka (Alex Shimizu), with Maria LaGuerta (Christina Milian) on her way in future episodes. Try not to dwell on Gibson only being about six years younger than Michael C. Hall was when he began playing Dexter or Milian actually being about a year older than Lauren Vélez was in 2006 when she began playing LaGuerta and pretend it all tracks. Nothing against these talented actors, who are doing what they’ve been asked to do, but when we hear Shimizu mimic C.S. Lee’s Masuka laugh or see Martinez wear the familiar Batista hat (turns out Batista has always been a hat guy), there’s a strange and amusing feeling that we’re watching some high-production-value cosplay. We’ve already seen these characters interact so much in this Miami Metro setting, and seen them be oblivious to their coworker’s true nature for so long, that it’s hard to overcome the anticipatory exhaustion. Dexter: Original Sin feels intent on returning us to dynamics that already played out 100-plus episodes of other Dexter shows.

Meanwhile, Dexter’s home life is represented by his sister, Debra (Molly Brown) and father, Harry (Christian Slater), with Harry of course also very much part of the cop story as a Miami Metro detective. The busy premiere episode involves Harry having a heart attack that sends him to the hospital, leading to Dexter’s first kill when he realizes Harry’s nurse, Mary (Dead Space’s Tanya Clarke) is poisoning him – which is immediately where a feeling of déjà vu sets in, because Dexter fans have quite literally seen this story before. In the original show’s third episode, “Popping Cherry,” flashbacks showed Dexter killing Nurse Mary (there played by Denise Crosby). Dexter: Original Sin replicates multiple scenes from that episode, with some of the dialogue recycled verbatim and some contradictions that can now drive continuity-obsessed viewers crazy. (Couldn’t they have at least put the Morgan family in the same outfits they were wearing in “Popping Cherry” when we see the same scene of Deb spinning Harry in his wheelchair?)

Sure, every Dexter fan has joked about Michael C. Hall’s terrible wig in those flashbacks to college-aged Dexter. But more to the point: Dexter’s origin was very well told throughout the original show. There are so many flashbacks to different parts of his life and so much information given over time that Original Sin was always bound to tell and show us things we already knew. It turned out it only took one episode to fall directly into that trap. At this point, Dexter Morgan is just not a character with gaps in his history that are begging to be filled in.

“And in the Beginning” also introduces new-to-us Miami Metro characters Bobby Watt (Reno Wilson), Aaron Spencer (Patrick Dempsey), and Tanya Martin (Sarah Michelle Gellar). The show certainly did well in terms of casting actors with notably iconic backgrounds in the form of Slater, Dempsey, and Gellar. And it’s in this Miami Metro realm that we’ll presumably get the biggest ongoing storyline and genuine new information, since you likely don’t cast Dempsey and Gellar without intending to do some notable things with them – which also means we can start guessing which of them will turn out to be a killer and/or victim by the end of the season.

In its early seasons, Dexter was a prime example of a dawning prestige-TV era. But then it went on much longer than felt comfortable, collapsing into a shell of itself with some truly cringeworthy storylines culminating in a disappointing eighth season and finale. (Lumberjack Dexter, anyone?) Keeping Dexter alive was rumored to be a Showtime mandate, which makes sense given network execs immediately spoke about their wish to have a Dexter spinoff about… Dexter. When it finally happened, 2022’s Dexter: New Blood wasn’t amazing, but it was decent – and far better than Dexter’s last few seasons. More importantly, it gave Dexter Morgan, the character, a much better and seemingly final send-off.

But they just couldn’t leave well enough alone, and so not only do we have this prequel series, it’s already been announced Michael C. Hall will be starring in the “Nah, he’s not dead after all” Dexter: Resurrection. Original Sin kicks off with a teaser for that 2025 series – it actually turns out to be a bridge between New Blood and Resurrection, since this is kinda/sorta a sequel series too, with a framing device showing Hall as Dexter being rushed to the hospital after being shot by his formerly estranged son, Harrison. The character’s life flashing before his eyes gives Original Sin a framing device and an excuse to keep Hall narrating the onscreen action.

Is Hall’s voice a comforting presence in Original Sin that evokes memories of Dexter at its best? To some degree, yes, and Hall still seems to have fun and give his all. However, the narration came to be a hand-holding, exasperatingly redundant symbol of the show’s decline. And even in “And in the Beginning,” there are tinges of that, such as Tanya telling Dexter that Harry taught him well, and Hall’s narration saying “She had no idea” in a way that nearly calls for Gibson to give a Jim Halpert look to the camera.

Gibson gets off to a solid start playing Dexter, evoking the same coldly detached attitude Hall was so great at. A couple of the little smirks he gives show rare, amusing signs of actual delight – via killing or the thought of killing, of course. Playing Deb is more of a thankless job, since Jennifer Carpenter’s delivery and foul-mouthed attitude in the role were so specific and funny, leaving Brown feeling like she’s mimicking Carpenter. Hopefully she can make the character feel like her own in future episodes – and hopefully Dexter: Original Sin can somehow stop feeling like such an echo of something that was once great.

Other thoughts:

• The premiere’s one big addition to Dexter lore is the reveal that Harry and his late wife Doris (Jasper Lewis) had a son who died prior to Harry adopting Dexter. The son’s death by drowning (under Harry’s watch) is clearly there to add another layer to why a guilt-stricken father would protect Dexter (and his murderous urges) at all costs. But it also feels unnecessary. Couldn’t Harry just have been a loving father with his own messed up idea of how to deal with a messed up kid?
• In Dexter canon, Harry dies a year after Dexter kills Mary, so if this show continues, Christian Slater might eventually be playing the same imaginary/”ghost” Harry that James Remar did. That’s pretty funny given Slater’s role on Mr. Robot.
• Dexter’s urge here is portrayed in almost supernatural terms, especially when he tells Harry that seeing the blood of the guy he fought at that graduation party brought it forward. This almost makes Dexter sound like a vampire, which is an entertaining approach.
• Though we saw Dexter kill Mary already in that 2006 episode, we hadn’t seen him dispose of her body, nor that he took her earrings from her. If we’re going to look for new information, it looks like this show will fill in more of the blanks to how Dexter ends up ultimately taking a blood slide from each of his victims and disposing of their body parts in the water, rather than feeding a corpse to gators. But because the original show showed us so much in flashbacks, we know this needs to be Alex Timmons. Timmons was already established as the first Dexter victim he took the blood slide from, as established in the Dexter Early Cuts web series back in 2009, following his appearance in flashback form in Season 1’s “Return to Sender.”
• The director of Original Sin’s first episode was Michel Lehman, who last worked with Slater on 1989’s all-time classic Heathers.