With a rifle slung over his shoulder, he’s barreling through a wintry wilderness, following a trail that leads him to it: a majestic white buck standing amid a sea of trees, like something out of a fable.
He’s receded into a solitary existence, and also a quiet one: Even the character’s signature voice-over is nowhere to be heard, as if listening to it could tempt him to break his streak.
The so-called Dark Passenger can be kept at bay for only so long, and at some point, the Dexter of old will emerge and plunge a knife through the heart of someone deemed deserving of punishment by his twisted moral code.
The medium was driven by complicated protagonists whose actions were morally reprehensible and yet impossible to look away from—and harder still to root against.
The character was, in essence, a vigilante serial killer, adhering to a code drilled into him by Harry Morgan, a former detective who adopted Dexter after he was found in a shipping container sitting in a pool of his mother’s blood.
Unfortunately, in what has become a recurring theme for Showtime, Dexter ran out of steam as it stretched across eight seasons and nearly 100 episodes, more than The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.
Dexter then pulled the plug on Deb, and, with a devastating hurricane looming over Miami, took her corpse out on his boat and dumped it into the ocean like so many of his victims. Having realized that bad things happen to everyone around him—an epiphany, it’s worth noting, that occurs four seasons after Rita is murdered by a rival serial killer—Dexter decided to drive his boat straight into the coming storm.
With the all-time awful ending in the books, Dexter had burned through basically all of its goodwill, and after dedicating their lives to the series for nearly a decade, the show’s cast and crew were left to survey the wreckage and decide what it all meant.
“The team had broken the code that we had so assiduously adhered to, and I think that the viewers were fed up and were hoping for something better at the end.
Yet despite the negativity around Dexter’s finale, the series was still considered the crown jewel of Showtime’s original programming.
On the one hand, a continuation of the story would allow the series to end on good terms—even the most cynical Dexter fans would have to admit that it’d be virtually impossible to outdo the sheer awfulness of Dexter Morgan: Sad Lumberjack.
For him, the amount of time that had elapsed since the series finale was the ultimate catalyst for Dexter’s revival, creating new storytelling opportunities for the character in a television landscape that has largely moved past the antiheroes who dominated the small screen after the turn of the century.
But even Phillips’s interest in returning to the world of Dexter would be of no consequence if the revival didn’t have its star on board.
“I went to New York, sat with Michael, had a lovely reunion, pitched him for about 45 minutes.
Here, Dexter works at the local fish and game store under the alias Jim Lindsay—a cheeky nod to Jeff Lindsay, the author of the Dexter book series that the show was originally based on—and is dating the chief of police, Angela Bishop .
“I felt this wonderful sense of freedom that I didn’t really need to concentrate in a traditional way, the way that I normally would, which would be to break down the story and make sure that I knew where the main through line was going and how I could support that,” Carpenter says.
At the store, Dexter has a run-in with an insufferable 30-something finance bro visiting Iron Lake for the holidays—the kind of person who knows that his status and wealth mean the usual rules don’t apply to him.
While part of Dexter is thrilled to be reunited with his son, Deb’s still nagging his conscience, reminding him that there’s a long and painful history of those closest to him getting hurt.
Given how much of Dexter’s original run centered on the character’s complex relationships with family—his serial-killer brother, his affection for Deb, the devotion to Harry and his code—Phillips wanted New Blood to be predicated on fatherhood.
After all, his childhood tragically mirrored Dexter’s: At the end of the fourth season, an infant Harrison was found lying in a pool of his mother’s blood.
But as New Blood progresses and Dexter learns more about the son he hasn’t seen in a decade, inklings that the blood-soaked apple doesn’t fall far from the tree begin to arise.
With Iron Lake’s sparse population, frigid weather, and complete lack of crime—police work involves finding out who swiped the local pastor’s pecan pies ahead of a town potluck—Dexter moved to a place that couldn’t be more removed from his old hunting grounds.
The girls are deemed runaways by the authorities, and given the lack of opportunities or things to do in the small town, the theory isn’t a stretch—while at the same indicative of how problems affecting marginalized communities are often ignored.
That there is a serial killer hiding in plain sight might also suggest that Dexter shouldn’t have any problems maintaining his own cover, but even in a rural area, the modern world has caught up to the character.
“He’s living under a different name and has disappeared his former self and as much as he’s able to do all that, I think he’s also making as earnest an attempt at authenticity or normalcy than he ever has,” Hall says.
He ignores Deb’s warnings about bringing Harrison back into his life, and, having found an ideal place to dispose of a body, implies that it could be useful in the long term.
In addition to the stellar prequel series Better Call Saul, which will debut its final season next year, the creators of Breaking Bad gave Jesse Pinkman his own epilogue with the 2019 film El Camino.
Clearly, there’s still an appetite for the morally conflicted protagonists that led the charge during Dexter’s original run—and as Big Little Lies can attest, limited series don’t have to stay limited if there’s enough interest.
Dexter, conversely, has been reduced to a lumberjack-laced punch line and has to win over a scorned fan base that doesn’t want to take a hypodermic needle to the neck again.
But whether New Blood is the definitive end to Dexter or the start of a new beginning, the series has already ensured that the audience’s parting image of the character will no longer be a mopey lumberjack from a universally reviled finale.
Having laid dormant for so long, the Dark Passenger is once again in the driver’s seat.