DEXTER: ORIGINAL SIN – Season One

Showtime’s Dexter (2006–2013) has sustained a remarkable afterlife, despite the award-winning serial killer drama ending on a sour note, capping a four-year run that never surpassed the heights of its most celebrated 2009 season where John Lithgow played the Trinity Killer. But those first four seasons were so entertaining, and the performance of Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan so compelling, that the show was revived for a 2021 miniseries intended to make amends—Dexter: New Blood. And despite ending on a more conclusive note, fans were even more disappointed by how things wrapped up. So, later this year, we’re getting Dexter: Resurrection. You just can’t keep a good serial killer down…

But before then, we have the intrinsically difficult prospect of a prequel TV series —Dexter: Original Sin. Given how the original series often coasted on the strength of Emmy-winning Michael C. Hall in the lead role, any attempt to replace him with another actor seems doomed to failure. So the biggest hurdle this prequel faced was finding someone audiences can take seriously as a “young Dexter Morgan”, but without it feeling like a bland impersonation. Fortunately, hiring Irish actor Patrick Gibson (The OA) to play everyone’s favourite blood-spatter analyst turned vigilante, taught by his cop father Harry (Christian Slater) only to kill criminals, turned out to be a wise move.

Gibson accurately imitates Hall’s accent and mirrors many of Dex’s mannerisms in social situations, but he feels like a plausible younger version you can invest in. He even looks like Hall, with his pale complexion and deep-set eyes. It also helps that creator Clyde Phillips — who masterminded the best days of Dexter and returned for New Blood —managed to get Hall himself involved as a producer to continue his iconic narration. This avoids being an unwanted distraction, or a reminder of who we’re not seeing on-camera, as it binds everything together in your mind and lets you believe you’re seeing an untold story from Dex’s memories unfold.

Dexter: Original Sin takes place in Miami, Florida, in 1991, just as 20-year-old Dexter Morgan joins the police department to work in the forensics department. At this time, his adopted father Harry— previously played by James Remar as a figment of Dex’s imagination —is very much alive and well, so involved in helping his son channel his ‘Dark Passenger’ into a means to keep the city free from scumbags the law can’t touch. Dex’s potty-mouthed sister Debra (Molly Brown) is still in high school, but is as rebellious and sexually promiscuous as ever, while many of Miami Metro’s recognisable characters are back in svelte youthful forms: detective Angel Batista (James Martinez), forensics analyst Vince Masuka (Alex Shimizu), and boss Maria LaGuerta (Christina Milian).

As a prequel, this series aims to return fans to the comforting milieu of the original series, which became a no-go area after Dexter finished. So we’re back in balmy Florida, which was always a fun way to juxtapose gruesome murder with its gorgeous palm trees and turquoise ocean. Dexter always felt like a pulp “airport novel” you’d read on a beach, vividly come to life, and its incongruous setting had a lot to do with its off-kilter tone. The series also reuses the iconic music composed by the late Daniel Licht, with Pat Irwin handling the job after taking over for New Blood, giving Original Sin a similar atmosphere. Even the opening sequence is a new version of Dexter’s classic intro, with the Morgan family getting ready to start their day with hints of blood and murder in their morning routine.

It’s creatively the same show, only now with an added retro vibe —mostly signposted by needle drops from the 1990s, a lack of mobile phones, and enormous CRT televisions and old-fashioned computers.

The decision to effectively make the same show again, only set 15 years before the original, means fans can enjoy slipping back into this world like an old pair of shoes. But it also means we’re not seeing anything new in Original Sin, which we got with New Blood’s snowy location change and different social dynamics for Dexter, as it can’t avoid falling victim to its status as a fixed-in-time prequel. We know certain characters can’t die, that Dex’s killings aren’t going to be discovered by certain people yet, or that many other surprises can’t happen yet. The original series also utilised flashbacks (especially in its earlier seasons), so Original Sin often reiterates stuff we already knew. It does flesh out established events better because it has more time to do so, but not to a degree that feels worth the time and effort.

The oddest decision is giving Harry Morgan weekly flashbacks to 1973, explaining over the entire 10 episodes how Dexter became his adopted son in the first place. (All visualised by a garish colour-grading that makes it look like someone set your TV to ‘Vibrant’ mode and cranked up the contrast too much. I hope we never get flashbacks to Harry’s childhood for fear of my retinas being burned out.)

However, we already know how Dex became part of Harry’s family, as this was an integral part of flashbacks in Dexter’s first season. Granted, my memory of the specifics is hazy as those episodes were broadcast nearly 20 years ago now, but I’m not sure we learned much new here. The 1973 flashbacks also conflict with the “facts” we learned before, as Dexter was only three when he witnessed his mother Laura Moser (Brittany Allen) get dismembered by a chainsaw, whereas in Original Sin he seems closer to 10. They undoubtedly changed it because they wanted a child actor to perform in scenes as little Dexter, of course, but it makes no chronological sense. If Dexter is 20 in 1991, why does he look 10 in 1973? And how could he have forgotten those formative and tragic memories by the time 2006 rolled around? It made sense he’d forget about his brother Brian Moser if he was a traumatised toddler, but less so given their apparent ages here.

The show is arguably stronger in the present-day investigations, involving the kidnapping of children who have their fingers cut off by their captor and mailed to the police department. Eventually, Miami Metro’s very own Captain Aaron Spencer (Patrick Dempsey) becomes personally involved in the case when his own son is taken. Plus, a series of murders around the city draw Dexter’s suspicions that they might be connected and the work of a budding serial killer trying to find his preferred modus operandi.

Weaving through all of this is the anticipated “prequel” concerns of showing audiences how Dexter Morgan developed into the man we met in 2006, so we’re treated to scenes of his first kill and how some of his preferred methods came to exist (i.e. the use of tranquiliser to subdue victims). Although he seemed oddly prepared with his notorious shrink-wrapped “kill rooms” from the beginning! Maybe he had a long time to consider how best to go about things.

Dexter was always a faintly ridiculous show in terms of its bold and divisive concept, and occasionally that silliness is brought into greater relief now we’re seeing a time previously only hinted at. The concept of Dexter being the adopted son of a respected detective who trained him to murder bad guys, rather than innocent people, was always ripe nonsense… but it seems even more bizarre when portrayed in Original Sin.

Harry’s previous involvement as a “ghost” kept enough distance from the background to Dexter’s origins, but now we see how the everyday relationship between Harry and Dexter worked. And it’s not always convincing or believable that Christian Slater’s middle-aged version of the character would go along with any of this. Incidentally, it amuses me that Slater played a similar “ghostly” role in Mr Robot (2015–19) to how James Remar first portrayed Harry Morgan.

Also, no spoilers, Harry’s decision made in the penultimate episode, “Blood Drive”, shows he has zero tolerance for creepy kids who might be killers, so how on earth did he show leniency with Dexter’s bloodlust? Maybe it’s just how Slater’s being asked to play Harry, but I think he needed to be considerably odder and someone you can believe might train a teenager to kill people. Then again, over a significant arc of episodes, Harry barely raises an eyebrow that his 17-year-old daughter Deb is sleeping with a 24-year-old man who turns out to be a criminal. He’s not a good dad, at least that’s established.

There’s a decent cast in Original Sin, with no actor tasked with playing a younger version of the original line-up failing in that challenge. Alex Shimizu’s version of creepy nerd Vince Masuka is scarily accurate, complete with his signature laugh. The only disappointment is the decision to hire Sarah Michelle Gellar to play a new character, Tanya Martin, the head of the forensics division, only to give her almost nothing of note to do the entire season. It feels like stunt-casting that wasn’t necessary but helped with the promotion of the show. There’s a belated hint that Tanya might be the person who inspired Debra Morgan to become a police officer, but it’s a shame that wasn’t woven into the season better. And not to give away too much, but ever since they hired John Lithgow to play The Trinity Killer in Dexter’s fourth season, the producers of the show are forever ruining their mysteries by having us always suspect the “famous face” of being the Big Bad. It’s time to ask little-known but incredible actors to play those parts, guys.

Overall, Dexter: Original Sin succeeds in the biggest challenge of making a prequel to a series that worked mainly because of an incredible central performance. Michael C. Hall will always be the Dexter Morgan in everyone’s minds, but I can accept Patrick Gibson as an alternative younger version just fine. And in terms of its basic construction, this first season is certainly a lot better than many latter Dexter seasons — even if it ultimately comes to rely on past glories too much. The downsides are the mostly pointless flashbacks that waste a huge amount of time revealing information we already knew, a feeling that Dexter’s insane backstory seems stupider when you have a front-row seat to events that were hazy beforehand, and the underlying problem that no prequel can do things that conflict with future events.

USA | 2025 | 10 EPISODES | 16:9 HD | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Clyde Phillips, Katrina Matthewson, Tanner Bean, Safura Fadavi, Nick Zayas, Alexandra Franklin, Marc Muszynski, Terry Huang, Mary Leah Sutton, Johanna Ramm, Scott Reynolds & Alex Kellerman.
directors: Michael Lehmann & Monica Raymund.
starring: Patrick Gibson, Christian Slater, Molly Brown, Christina Milian, James Martinez, Alex Shimizu, Reno Wilson, Patrick Dempsey, Sarah Michelle Gellar & Michael C. Hall (voice).