Review: Dexter: Original Sin, "And In The Beginning..." | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Showtime’s unavoidably cynical prequel Dexter: Original Sin, which will debut new episodes every Friday. As always, this first review is free for all subscribers, but future reviews will be exclusive to paid subscribers. To keep up with our reviews, become one today!

Here we go again.

I cannot imagine who asked for this. I don’t mean that statement to refer to the quality, whatever you may determine it to be, of Dexter: Original Sin, the latest brand extension of Dexter, the book-series-turned-TV-series-turned-limited-revival, now back again as a TV prequel that also doubles as a continuation(-ish) of said limited series revival, Dexter: New Blood. I simply mean it in the sense that anyone might wonder, “Why go back and show a pre-serial killer Dexter Morgan learning to do said serial killing? What’s the point? We’ve already been told this story.” Especially if he’s not actually learning to do it; here, he’s already internalized Harry’s Code™, gleaned all the lessons his father imported to him (for the most part), and is basically just a wind-up clock, now going off and beginning his lifelong murder spree.1 If you saw the description for this and didn’t immediately think of Patton Oswalt’s riff on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (“You like Darth Vader? Well, in the first movie you get to see him as a little kid!”), then congratulations, you have a less jaded view of I.P. extension than I.

But exist it does, and here we are. To be clear, I would consider myself a Dexter fan. (Here’s my retroactive assessment of the whole thing, over at The A.V. Club.) I watched all of the original series, the good seasons more than once (1-4, though strong arguments can be made for 5 and various stretches of the last few), as well as New Blood, which certainly gave the character a far better sendoff than the execrable conclusion of the first run. At its best, the show was a crackerjack powder keg of tension and release, alternating between intriguing setups, exhilarating kills, and edge-of-your-seat, “how’s he going to get out of this jam?” anxiety. (At its worst, it was a dunderheaded disaster, but let’s not dwell on the negative.) Dexter strode a clever line between network-style procedural and lurid pay-cable thrills, so its popularity wasn’t hard to discern.

Yet even at its best, no one would mistake it for one of the all-time greats. At the apex of its quality (season four, for anyone who doesn’t remember John Lithgow’s delightfully scenery-chewing turn as the Trinity Killer), I still remember describing it to people as, “a show with an A-plus star surrounded by a B-team.” Michael C. Hall held it all together with his fantastic performance, while everyone around him was uneven at best (ranging from the strong work of Jennifer Carpenter and James Remar to…well, you’ve probably seen it if you’re reading this, no need to be unnecessarily rude). Hall’s work, when paired with strong scripts, could deliver knockout television.

So when it ended so ignobly (I’ll direct you to Joshua Alston’s very funny and unflinching takedown of the series finale2), I was among those who was actually happy to see the Dexter: New Blood revival take a crack at fixing what had spiraled so depressingly into treacle. If you haven’t watched it, that series takes the ridiculous premise of the original’s epilogue—Dexter changes his identity and reinvents himself as Jim Lindsay, a mountain-man gun shop owner living in upstate New York—and uses it to revisit the ultimate hypocrisy of its hero’s “code.” The expected soap opera dramatics (his son returns and ultimately kills him after realizing what his father is—yes, really) deliver, if not a good conclusion, at least a justifiable one. And Original Sin picks up immediately where that show left off: Surprise! He’s not dead yet! Brought back on the operating table, we’ve got a “life flashes before your eyes” premise that justifies this journey into the early years of Dexter Morgan, budding serial killer. Well, maybe not “justifies,” but provides the requisite flimsy cover.3

So after that preamble4, let’s delve into what’s going on here. And the answer is…exactly what you’d think it would be. It’s Dexter, only younger. Normally, when a prequel happens, it’s because we don’t know what took place, and the story has a Shakespearean bent, beginning from a position of hope only to arc unavoidably into tragedy. (See: Better Call Saul, Godfather Part II, Rogue One, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, etc.). But the original series covered this in flashbacks—a lot. We know what happened. We know how Dexter went from troubled kid to clever killer, aided by his father Harry Morgan (now played by Christian Slater, giving more than is required) and the all-important code that helps keep him safe and free from suspicion.5 We know the family dynamics, the tragic story of Dexter’s mother, all of it. There’s even less reason for this to exist than usual. So what’s the draw?

I think the answer is simple: We like to watch bad people get their just desserts. It’s as clear as that. Dexter is a popular, well-known character who does something we all have a good time watching unfold, and so they’re going to give us more of it, whether there’s an artistically valid reason to do so or not. If you’ve already seen this story (spoiler alert: you have) and you don’t need any more of it, fair enough. I would strongly advise against watching. But for those of us who are fascinated by the mechanics of TV storytelling, intellectual property, and the ins and outs of a weirdly negotiated method of reviving the past of a long-exhausted idea (populated with fun actors!), Dexter: Original Sin is a solid case study.

I’m maybe being too generous with the term “solid.” Throughout “And In The Beginning…”, I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching the Cliffs Notes version of the story—something the creative team felt like they had to address, but didn’t want to, so they rushed through it as quickly as possible, the better to begin the tale of Serial Killer Dexter: The Early Years. Dexter is pre-med, the result of his father’s hope that cutting up bodies would satiate his “Dark Passenger” and preclude the need for any actual killing. Guess how well that works out?

So when Dexter shows an aptitude for detective work (through one of the most ham-handed excuses imaginable6), he’s invited to join the team at Miami Homicide, where the Muppet Babies version of all our old friends are waiting to welcome him. There’s Detective Batista (James Martinez), literally dressed his same duds from the first pilot! LaGuerta (Christina Milian) is here! Masuka! These are only characters insofar as we remember them from the original, which helps explains why the newbies (Patrick Dempsey as Captain Aaron Spencer and Sarah Michelle Gellar as forensics head Tanya Martin) barely register as people yet.7 To be fair, they’re only in this episode to show that police work is happening, Harry Morgan is part of it, and now Dexter is, too, so let’s wait and see how they get fleshed our.

Especially because there are clunky family dynamics to race through at a similarly breakneck, subtlety-be-damned pace. After a brief intro of Dexter being good at cutting open bodies in class (all we need, it seems, to establish that he’s one of the “most gifted students ever”), we get Deborah Morgan (now played by Molly Brown as an extra-annoying teen, which honestly fits the character) being forced to drag Dexter with her to college parties, where he saves her from being sexually assaulted, just in time for Harry to have a heart attack, but not before we see a retcon flashback of Harry losing his first son in a drowning accident while he was drinking beer and watching the big game. Again, subtlety: not this show’s strong suit. This all occurs in maybe 15 minutes? We race from big moment to big moment so quickly that it all becomes a slurry of “Drama! It’s Happening!”

It may sound like all this is pretty dumb, and that’s because it is, but I also can’t help feeling like this entire episode was, as I said before, treated like an ungainly but necessary precursor to the actual narrative showrunner Clyde Phillips and his team want to be telling—Dexter doing his thing. This is evidenced by the fact that the only fun part of this premiere is exactly that—Dexter discovering his dad’s nurse is actually a serial killer who administers slow-acting poison via Potassium Nitrate injections into patients she deems unworthy of survival. There’s a hint of unrealized irony here that Dexter’s first victim is a funhouse-mirror version of himself, playing God as to who lives or dies. But none of that is explored, or even acknowledged, in the rush to get him signed up with the cops and into the familiar orbit of what we theoretically know and want from the character.

All of which is to say that this was a bad episode and a clunky start to Dexter: Original Sin, but also possibly (hopefully?) an admission that the series doesn’t give a fuck about any of this world building, because in their heart of hearts, Phillips and company know we don’t need it. This has all been built out before; no one is asking for the Ultimate Spider-Man version of these events to walk through Dexter being bitten by the equivalent of a radioactive arachnid for the second time. And yet they felt like they needed to do it, which was a dumb choice. I’m very curious to see how the second episode goes, because my hunch is that they could’ve begun there with nary a beat missed, and nobody watching would have minded in the slightest. Whether that will be a good or bad thing creatively, I have no idea; but with luck it will be fun to watch.

Stray observations

• Maybe the most important thing to admit here is that Patrick Gibson has some actual charisma as young Dexter. Most of us probably know him best from either The OA (speaking of shows that actually deserve a continuation) or more recently Netflix’s better-than-expected adaptation of Shadow & Bone, and while I was ready to groan at a subpar Michael C. Hall, there are moments which suggest Gibson is taking his impression-level performance and trying to do something interesting with it. Not that he’s given much opportunity, yet, but the opening is there.
• The music cues are nigh-overpowering at times in their hectoring efforts to let us know THIS IS THE EARLY ‘90s, BABY. “Good Vibrations” is the most obvious, but even here, it’s a little uneven. I’m not convinced the dawn of alternative rock would’ve featured a volleyball team hitting the court to Poison’s “Nothin’ But A Good Time” from 1988. That’s an eternity in teenage pop-culture years.
• If there’s one thing Phillips is an ace at, it’s Dexter’s voiceover mannerisms picking up right where they left off, with the same tone and style, such as after the doctor tells Harry to avoid stress: “Unfortunately, I was the stress.”
• Just a quick note about Easter Eggs. There are a metric ton of them, and the creative team has publicly announced they will be shoveling a boatload more of them down our throats over the course of the season. While I could not possibly care less about that kind of thing (oh, look, it’s a photo that we saw on his desk in season three!), I get that it’s a fun game for some fans, so feel free to call them out in the comments.
• That being said, they’re really hanging a hat on a hat with some of the wink-wink references. “I really hate mosquitos.” You don’t say, Dexter.
• Episode director Michael Lehmann, who helmed a couple installments of the original series, does some nicely elegant work, especially with the cross cutting between scenes—the segue between Nurse Mary’s heart racing and the foot stomping at the volleyball game, for example.
• Welcome to the reviews of Dexter: Original Sin! I want everyone reading, whether they watched the original series or not, to feel like this is accessible. That being said, if you’re watching this without having seen the original, I could not urge you more strongly to at least check out season one to see what a good show it was in the early years—and also to understand why it continually feels like this series is nudging you in the ribs and going, “Eh? EH?!”