Was Dexter worth bringing back?
Showtime could have let sleeping dogs lie but New Blood satisfies more than it frustrates.
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Wow…they really did that, huh?
SPOILERS FOR DEXTER & DEXTER: NEW BLOOD (obviously)
We’ve been in the age of streaming for more than a handful of years at this point and while it’s been a breath of fresh air in many ways, it’s also exactly what we’re used to with TV. “Content” is split into two definable camps: there’s the original series that pulls new users in from word of mouth — good or bad — and then there are the remakes of pre-existing works.
This is an observation everyone and their da has made but while streaming may have the edge in terms of convenience, the silver screen may have just embarked on a path I’ve been hoping media would tread for quite some time — second chances.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Dexter Season 7 was bad. It’s as commonplace a take as “Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars” and much like that opinion, it’s a popular one because it’s right. So when word got out that Dexter would be returning for a ten-episode run in late 2021, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say many felt as cold as the corpses in a certain Miami Bay.
Not me though.
Maybe that’s a bit of a lie. After how badly burned I was by ‘Remember The Monsters’ all those years ago, no one would have blamed me if I looked the other way and watched literally anything else.
That being said, I’ve always been an advocate of what I’d like to call “make the bad thing good”. After all, if you’re going to put the GDP of a small country into a redo of something, is it not more sensible if the source is something in need of redemption rather than sullying the good name of a beloved work?
So on paper, I was happy to see Dexter make a return. I wasn’t going in expecting anything on the earlier seasons level but I told myself if all we got was a good Michael C. Hall performance, I’d be totally fine with it.
What I wasn’t expecting to watch for the past few months was a flawed but fantastic revival that, while not as good, certainly went head to head with Season 4.
Let’s get the bad out of the way before I start gushing like one of Dexter’s victims. While I wasn’t as angry about it as some folk, the way New Blood was shot wasn’t the best. A town in the middle of nowhere during Winter gave us some lovely blood red on pure white snow imagery but outside of that, I was yearning for the vibrancy and style of the original run.
And while I don’t want to get into it now, have a gander over on Reddit for a laundry list of goofy details. Some are worse than others and I personally like a little silliness in my slasher shows but New Blood certainly wanted to look prestige without doing the homework at times.
While New Blood wasn’t a home run — as I’ve mentioned already, the number of people expecting as much stood as a healthy 0 — there was a lot to love about it. In fact, not only was it worth bringing back, it may have done enough to wash the taste out of my mouth from that dreadful original finale.
Rather than babbling on about every minute thing I liked about New Blood, I’d be better off splitting it into two main points. The first would be the dynamics on show. In later seasons, Dexter began to feel repetitive, nothing of much interest going on and anything that was happening had been done before.
This time around, the small, tight-knit town of Iron Lake leads to a fair few bouts of interesting chemistry. You’ve got the show’s father-son connection that serves as its crux and is the provider of so many of New Blood’s best bits. There’s also Dexter versus the baddie of the season, the Robert Hansen inspired Kirk who reminded me a lot of Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre in terms of charm, vulnerability and the not being alive part.
That’s without mentioning Dexter’s relationship with police chief Angela Bishop or the numerous foster fatherhoods Harrison has with the likes of Coach Logan or the aforementioned Kirk. There’s very little in the way of filler, each week having enough to chew on. There may be little in the way of kills but New Blood doesn’t suffer as a result — plus when those scenes do happen, they’re maybe the most macabre they’ve ever been.
The second reason why I dug New Blood as much as I did was simple — VINDICATION!
I’ve danced around the subject a bit but the reason that Dexter’s original finale went down as bad as it did was ultimately how unfulfilling it was. A life of solitude, however mundane, didn’t seem like a fitting punishment for a man who repeatedly broke his code, offences that led to the unnecessary deaths of innocent people. The self-importance Dexter put on his vigilanteism had worn thin over seven seasons so that infamous Lumberjack ending was worthy of the hate it’s garnered.
That couldn’t be further from the truth with New Blood’s finale, titled Sins of the Father. What could have been a painfully blunt way of making preparations for a future season ended up being the poignant, brutal and satisfying conclusion we should have got in the first place.
It got to a point where I had to pinch myself, thinking that the writers had to screw up at some point. I honestly thought there was no way they’d bring Dexter to justice but not only did they do that, but they also made him die via the son who he— best intentions aside —repeatedly let down. It only adds to the agony that makes this a Dexter finale that’s memorable for all the right reasons.
I may be alone in this view — as seems the case with Twitter and the episode’s 4.3 IMDB rating — but I feel this comes down to a common faux pas from viewers these days when it comes to finales. Equating good with “what I wanted to happen” leads to disappointment more often than not, back-patting being the best-case scenario.
Immediately after the aforementioned disaster that was Season 7’s finale, a pal that sat beside me in history and I concocted our own version of Dexter’s final season. Being teens, there were far more setpieces, twists for the sake of it and outright goofiness but there was a core to all of it: accountability. Almost a decade later and while it might be more prestigious than our vision, New Blood certainly delivered one thing -
Justice.
