When Dexter (Michael C Hall) returned for New Blood in 2021 he became the last of the great TV anti-heroes of the 2000s still standing. His unstable stable-mates were all gone. Walter White met the business end of a Nazi shoot-out, spending his last moments tenderly caressing a meth lab. Tony Soprano ascended to that great gabagool jewel in the sky after being gunned down in a diner (and, yes, that’s what happened: please ignore the outrageous blasphemies proffered by rival sects). And Vic Mackey, neutered and out-manoeuvred by his own greed and hubris, suffered a fate worse than death: a desk job.
All of these characters were afforded a reckoning that rang true with their trajectories and psyches, and the shows that spawned them got to close off their thematic circles in ways that felt earned, earnest and fitting.
Dexter Morgan, on the other hand, got to become a lumberjack.
Dexter’s original series finale (season eight, episode twelve, ‘Remember the Monsters‘) – the agony of which has now mercifully been dulled by the show’s successful second stab at getting things right – was a masterclass in poisoning the chalice. It retrospectively made the whole series weaker, and effectively removed Dexter from the lips of all those who might have recommended the show as a compulsive and accomplished piece of television. Game of Thrones‘ swan-song looks positively sanguine when set against the relentlessly wrong-footed, legacy-wrecking dreck that is ‘Remember the Monsters’.
The ending seemed ridiculous; incongruous; written with a shrug. What were we to make of lumberjack Dexter’s lot? That removed from his life, his friends and family, he would suffer as Vic Mackey did? Unlikely. He’s a serial killer with shallow affect and a lone-wolf outlook. This wasn’t hell for Dexter. Life would go on. Were we to infer that Dexter deserved his life more than Tony Soprano? More than Walter White (who at least chose to sacrifice himself, and in the process soften the worst excesses of his arrogance and murderous pride)? After all the damage that Dexter had done to those closest to him, after all of the good lives he’d taken or caused to end through obedience to his Dark Passenger… he just got to walk?
Thus, with a course correction that’s been a long time coming, Dexter: New Blood returns to the saga with the renewed convictions that not every expectation has to be subverted, and that just because Dexter’s death seems like the obvious choice… doesn’t mean that it isn’t also the right one.
The more things change…
New Blood tells a self-contained story, with a looping narrative that circles back snugly around on itself by the final episode, but it also serves to close off nine seasons worth of tragedy and legacy – The Bay Harbour Butcher; the Trinity Killer; Rita; Harry; Dexter’s old life at Miami Metro; his sister, Debs; his estranged and now returned teenage son, Harrison; La Guerta; Batista – in a way that’s emotionally and thematically satisfying. That’s not to say that this season isn’t without its fair share of crazy contrivances and cack-handed short-cuts, a trademark of Dexter that’s always remained constant, but when the end result is as powerful as the (new) series finale, Sins of the Father, it’s easy to forgive a few indulgences along the way.
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Dexter – now living in the snowy surroundings of the quaint little town of Iron Lake – isn’t even Dexter when we first meet him (again). He’s Jim Lindsay, a charming and unassuming man who works behind the counter of the local gun shop, and plays happy families with Chief of Police Angela Bishop (Julia Jones) and her daughter, Audrey (Johnny Sequoyah). Jeff Lindsay, of course, is the name of the man who wrote the novel series from which the show was adapted, so Dexter’s new moniker is both an easter-egg-y nod to his literary creator, and a hint as to the likely direction of the Dexter/Harrison dynamic – in the novels Dexter begins to mentor Rita’s young kids, the children he helps to raise, in the ways of the Dark Passenger.
Dexter’s dearly departed sister, Deborah, is now his Dark Passenger, a signal that Dexter is carrying a few hefty body bags of guilt following the long-ago events of season eight. Whereas Harry used to echo his role in life as Dexter’s enabler, Debs just wants Dexter to stop, calling bullshit on his web of self-serving justifications.
New Blood, then, is the natural conclusion to Dexter’s saga, but it’s also a different beast. That’s also patently clear from the title sequence: namely the lack of one. Dexter of old possessed one of the greatest title sequences of all time, one that spoke to the truth of Dexter’s duality, and of the brutality that lurked behind even the most banal of routines and gestures; all scored to a jaunty, slightly-sinister, plinky-plonk theme that encouraged us to revel in the more mischievous aspects of Dexter’s darkness. Not so here. This, we quickly learn, is no place for wry asides, coal-black chuckles or twisted hero worship. This is a new game: the endgame.
The idea of finality is baked into New Blood. The shadow of death casts its shape over every frame. Dexter’s new home of Iron Lake is entombed within snowy upstate New York, a far cry from the stuffy, sun-sheened streets of Miami. While the location further serves to separate the ‘classic’ Dexter from the ‘new’ – visually, tonally, and, of course, climatically – it’s also deliberately on-message with the series’ closing themes: it’s cold, isolated, redolent of death. Dexter might as well be living within Robert Frost’s most famous poem. Miles to go before he sleeps? Not as many as he’d imagine. Iron Lake is a town where ancestral ghosts haunt the hills, where the snow might just be human remains, and where hitch-hikers come to die.
The scenery also invites comparison with Walter White’s sojourn into a snowy wilderness late in the final season of Breaking Bad. Walt chose exile – a cold place to die – but a mixture of ego, shame and regret propelled him back to the only life that would have him, if only just long enough to secure his legacy, his family, and maybe even his ‘soul’. Dexter, of course, doesn’t have a ‘soul’. Or, rather, he does, but it’s only in, and through, death that he discovers it.
The end is the beginning
New Blood at first looks set to explore Dexter’s relationship with his estranged son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), perhaps even giving the semi-retired serial killer a redemption arc. But echoes of Dexter’s inevitable downfall are embedded in the narrative from the beginning.
One of New Blood‘s first scenes sees Dexter pulled over at the side of the road and ‘arrested’ by the Chief of Police. We quickly realise the two are a couple, and what we’re seeing is nothing more than good-natured banter and sexy role-play. Of course, in the finale Angela arrests Dexter for real, after discovering that not only is he the man responsible for killing local douchebag Matt Caldwell, but also Miami’s very own Bay Harbour Butcher.
In episode one of New Blood, Dexter falls off the whacking wagon in style, breaking the rules of his own kill-code by murdering Matt Caldwell in the woods for the crime of killing an innocent deer. In the finale, Dexter kills Sergeant Logan, a decent man, in order to escape from prison, and flee town with Harrison. This murder becomes the reason that Harrison shoots and kills his dad. Logan is to Harrison what the deer was to Dexter – innocent and undeserving of his fate. Unlike Dexter, Harrison is completely justified in pulling the trigger, at least according to Dexter’s ‘code’. In a way, the entirety of New Blood is the story of Dexter setting himself up as the perfect first victim for his son to dispatch. In teaching Harrison to kill Kurt Caldwell – both the father of the man Dexter murders, and a particularly prolific and heinous serial killer – Dexter is inadvertently leading Harrison towards fratricide, and himself towards symbolic suicide.
Live by the code: die by the code
In Dexter’s final scene with Harrison, and his final scene overall, the character is laid bare: to himself, and to the audience. We acknowledge that what Harry did to and for Dexter wasn’t good parenting, but warped, misguided and abusive – whatever gossamer-thin strands of good intentions may have been woven into the horror. Harry made Dexter into a serial killer, one who came to believe in his own twisted, sanctimonious notions of superherodom, which in turn caused Dexter to react to his own grown son’s anger and mental health problems not with tough love, understanding or therapeutic intervention, but by trying to mould Harrison into an avenging serial killer just like him. Not even Kurt Caldwell did that. And, in the final analysis, is Dexter really all that different from Kurt? Or Trinity? Or his own brother? Here, Dexter is stripped back to his irreparably damaged core: an addict and a narcissist who fools himself with rituals and others with his charm, but, ultimately, would turn on anyone who threatened his secret life or freedom, no matter how much he claimed to love or admire them. When Angela arrests him in his kitchen, there’s a moment where we see Dexter’s and Angela’s reflection in a metallic surface, a caddy of knives tantalisingly within reach, and it’s obvious that Dexter is calculating how to use them: on the woman he ‘loves’; on the woman whose daughter his son, Harrison, is very much in love with.
In the past we’ve applauded Dexter’s ingenuity in extricating himself from all manner of tricky situations, cheered him on in his dark endeavours. But the man being interrogated by Angela in the police station isn’t some righteous, charming, relatable, friendly neighbourhood serial killer, but a dangerous, ugly, manipulative psychopath who will stop at nothing to deceive and destroy both the innocent and the guilty alike. It’s impossible to root for him this time, if it ever was in the first place.
Dexter does, however, get his redemption – of sorts – in death. Harrison is headstrong. Angry. Zealous. But he’s still a confused teenage boy who just wants his dad to want him, to love him, to do what’s right. Dexter easily could have manipulated this final confrontation to his advantage, told Harrison what he wanted to hear in order to get close enough to disarm or kill him. And in the end, isn’t this the way that Dexter shows affection? By deciding not only not to kill someone close to him, but choosing to die at their hands in order to make things easier for them?
It’s fitting that as Dexter becomes his own final victim, surrounded by the faces and memories of his past victims, he finally realises the extent of his capability and capacity for love and selflessness.
As for Harrison… is his trauma at an end or is it only just beginning? Both Harrison and his dad were ‘born in blood’, as Dexter would say, witnesses at a young age to the horrific murders of their respective mothers (Harrison’s suffering compounded by the eventual realisation that Dexter’s lifestyle put a target on his mother’s back). But is Harrision suffering from PTSD that could be healed with time and effort, or does a dark passenger whisper within him, also? Did he kill his father because it was the right – or maybe the only – thing to do, or did he kill his father because Dexter satisfied ‘the code’ and Harrison wanted to feed his murderous urges? As good as Jack Alcott was as Harrison, I hope we never find out. Harrison’s final run from town was reminiscent of Jesse’s in the closing moments of Breaking Bad. Better to let what happens next to Dexter’s nearest and dearest live and twist in our imaginations, and not cheapen this very effective, very fitting finale by giving Harrison his El Camino moment.
Goodbye Dexter. You’re finally in prestige-show heaven; if not alongside shows like Breaking Bad, The Shield and The Sopranos, then incredibly close to them. And that’s something most of us never thought we’d get the chance to say.