After faking his death ten years ago in a hurricane, serial killer Dexter Morgan has moved to the small town of Iron Lake, New York. There, under the assumed identity of Jim Lindsay, a clerk at the local wilderness sporting gear store, he has successfully suppressed his homicidal urges for a full decade.
Which is definitely not to say that he is "better". He continues to feel those urges, and his longstanding practice of speaking to an imaginary representation of his dead father continues ... though now it is an imaginary representation of his dead sister, whose demise was Dexter's fault.
Still. It finally seems like Dexter has his 'dark passenger' under control. He's gone ten years without a kill. He won't break that streak now, right? And even if he did, there's no-one around to tie him to his old life, right?
Well, I bet you can guess what happens next.
Season eight of Dexter is notoriously bad. Particularly the ending, which comes in at #3 on Screen Rant's list of Most Hated Series Finales. It's so reviled that when word of New Blood got out, the initial reaction was "it's the revival no-one asked for". Certainly, when I sat down to watch it, it was with a sense of morbid curiosity rather than hope.
But you know what? Dexter: New Blood is actually pretty good. It takes the original series baffling ending and uses the decade of elapsed time - both in fiction and in the real world - to develop sometime much more entertaining and satisfying.
I suspect that the return of the original show runner, Clyde Phillips, was a major factor in the uptick in quality. Philips left the original show at the end of season 4 - considered by many 'the last good one', though I'm actually not its biggest fan - and has brought the character and the show back toward the tone of the earliest seasons.
I also think that the switch of locale from sunny, metropolitan Florida to snowbound, rural upstate New York works well. What seemed one of the most random elements of the series finale - "what, Dexter's a lumberjack, now?" - has been used to create a very different visual and cultural dynamic to the show. That helps it feel fresh and different even as the show returns to its thematic and narrative roots. All in all, it's a smart blend of different and familiar.
Then there's the switch to having Dexter's sister, Debra, become the on-screen face of Dexter's internal struggle. It makes sense that Dexter would personify these things as her since her passing: even more-so than his father, Debra was the most important person in his life, and in many ways his anchor to something approaching normality. The two actors also always had great chemistry (they were actually married, for a while), and Debra's foul-mouthed energy works really well for the self-loathing Dexter experiences.
Finally, the show does a good job of creating a volatile, dangerous situation and then following through on that. Gone are the original show's many convenient escapes from consequence: characters both major and minor genuinely feel at risk here, and Dexter's mistakes have consequences for him and for those he cares about. Which is not to say that the entire thing is misery and failure: it's not. But it feels much more organic, and far less contrived. And it has a real ending. One that feels like a proper send-off for the character.
I'm not sure I would come back for a season 2 of New Blood - it would very much depend on the concept behind it - but I am glad they made these ten episodes.
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