On Friday, the finale of the first season of Dexter: Resurrection—the sequel to 2021’s Dexter: New Blood, which was itself a sequel to the eight-season original series—aired on Paramount+ Premium. Dex’s midnight writers, Ben Lindbergh and Miles Surrey, were watching. Much like Dexter himself, The Ringer’s resident Dexheads—who wrote about New Blood both separately and together—have returned. They’re here to discuss the end (for now) of Resurrection, the season as a whole, and the future of the ever-expanding Dexterverse.
Ben Lindbergh: In the closing seconds of “And Justice for All …,” Dexter sums up his arc in Resurrection. “I used to wish that I could be different,” he muses on Leon Prater’s commandeered yacht in New York Harbor, with Lady Liberty in the background. “Normal. A life without my Dark Passenger. But who am I kidding? This is who I am. What I am. I’m Dexter Morgan. I’m exactly who I need to be. Exactly who you want me to be.”
As he speaks that last line, Michael C. Hall stares directly at the camera, much as he did when we left lumberjack Dexter long ago. Even without that fourth-wall-straining choice, it would be tough to interpret that ending as anything other than a snippet of Hall’s internal monologue. The Dexter star advocated for wrapping the original series, then underwent a Dexorcism to distance himself from the part, consistently maintained that he had little interest in reprising the role, and even expressed that he wished Dexter had died—as he seemingly did at the end of New Blood, which appeared to give the actor closure. Yet Hall himself later pushed to revive his signature serial killer. And I’m glad he did, because it’s been a blessing—and a Blessing—to have Dexter back in my life.
After years in Miami and a shorter stay in Iron Lake, Dexter relocated to our fair city, where he reconnected with the (Harri)son who’d tried to kill him, tried to stay one step ahead of an avenging Angel, and met several serial killers, most of whom died at Dexter’s hands. In addition to Batista (David Zayas) and the ghost of Harry (James Remar), a who’s who of legacy characters made cameos—including Miami Metro legends Doakes (Erik King), Masuka (C.S. Lee), and Quinn (Desmond Harrington), plus former Dexter nemeses Brian Moser (Christian Camargo), Miguel Prado (Jimmy Smits), and Arthur Mitchell/Trinity (John Lithgow)—alongside some fresh yet famous faces: Peter Dinklage as serial-killer-curious billionaire Prater, plus Uma Thurman, Krysten Ritter, Neil Patrick Harris, and Eric Stonestreet, among others, as Prater’s coterie of well-compensated accomplices and slayers.
As usual, Dexter took on all comers and emerged mostly unscathed, though the same can’t be said for Batista. To paraphrase another iconic character from 2000s TV: The streets of heaven are too crowded with Angel tonight.
Miles, we actually liked the send-off New Blood gave one of our favorite fictional characters. But are you, like me, pleased that Hall and Showtime decided not to let sleeping serial killers lie?
Miles Surrey: If you asked me before I hit play on the first episode of Resurrection, I would’ve invoked Kylo Ren: Let the past die—inject it with etorphine hydrochloride before stabbing it with a knife, if you have to. Dexter (and Dexter) has, incredibly, been on our screens for nearly two decades, and while there’s been plenty of good over the years, the franchise doesn’t have anywhere near the stellar track record of, say, the Albuquerque Criminal Underbelly Extended Universe. When Showtime has the urge—or shall we say the Great Yearning?—to revive Dexter, it can go one of two ways: We could get a classic season of television à la Season 4’s Trinity Killer, or we could get more of this:
Thankfully, I think we can both agree that Resurrection’s first season falls much closer to the former. Turns out, Dexter taking a stab at life in the Big Apple—featuring overly friendly rideshare drivers with vacant basement apartments, billionaire venture capitalists creating underground serial-killer meet-cutes, landlords so scummy they almost fit the Code, Krysten Ritter as the woman I’m ready to risk it all for—works like gangbusters. Much of this comes down to Resurrection finding a happy middle ground between nostalgia and reinvention. Yes, Dexter is back in a major city where he can rack up a kill count and add some fine additions to his blood slide collection. But Dexter is also in the curious predicament of revealing his true nature around other serial killers—even if he’s pretending to be someone else—and playing a game of cat and mouse with his fedora-wearing bestie who finally sees the monster behind the mask.
Really, Resurrection has so much going for it that I was a little underwhelmed by “And Justice for All …” wrapping things up so tidily: Prater is the first of what could be many bodies Dexter dumps into the Hudson; Thurman’s Charley skips town with her ailing mother; detectives Claudette and Melvin catch a break on the New York Ripper case; Harrison finds Gigi’s G-spot (sorry, I deserve to be bound in the kill room for that one). But this series of events is also classic Dexter: efficiently (ruthlessly?) dispatching with all the season-long arcs before starting fresh with a new big bad come Season 2 (which is, thankfully, about to open up its writers room).
Ben, where did you stand on Resurrection, and where do you think things are headed next season? I doubt this is the last we’ll hear of the New York Ripper; finding a case file on the killer’s identity in Prater’s vault feels too good to be true. Have we already met the Ripper? According to the Dexheads on Reddit, the Ripper could be Melvin (I’m listening) or Blessing (cursed). Compelling theories, but my galaxy-brain take is that we shouldn’t discount Gigi: The Ripper is no longer active, and she’s got severe nerve damage in one of her arms. That can’t be a coincidence!
Lindbergh: Melvin (whose name I definitely didn’t know until now) being revealed as the Ripper might explain his presence on the show, which has heretofore been limited to chuckling knowingly whenever Claudette—a cookie-cutter caricature of a quirky network procedural character—tries to do her job. I thought New York’s Finest were a weak point this season, which could be partly because they hardly interacted with Dexter. Nothing against Jack Alcott, but I’m more into Harrison’s relationship with his dad than I am into Harrison himself. (I can see why Harrison’s solo spinoff failed to launch.)
Frankly, I’ll follow Dexter wherever he goes—even to Wisconsin, for that belated coffee klatch with Al. Dex still has a lot of loose ends (and loose serial killers) to tie up, though the conceit of this season will be tough to top. Prater’s serial-slayer salon was audacious, to say the least, and Dinklage’s performance sold the far-fetched concept. (Thurman, meanwhile … well, she didn’t have much to work with.) Plus, I couldn’t help but be invested in Angel’s fate, predictable as his demise may have been. Batista was a dead detective walking as soon as he picked up Dexter’s trail, but at least he inverted the trope of a detective dying shortly before retirement by dying shortly after retirement instead. I’m sorry to see him go. Though, as Zayas observed, death doesn’t mean the end on Dexter.
I’m with you on the finale being a bit anticlimactic, though this isn’t the first Dinklage-starring season to peak in an Episode 9. And I’m disappointed, though not surprised, that Resurrection neatly resolved Dex’s age-old dilemma—the tension between the Code’s prime directive, “Don’t get caught,” and its second precept, “Never kill an innocent”—in the usual way. Just as Lila killed Doakes and Deb killed LaGuerta, Prater killed Batista. Each of Dex’s saviors soon meets their end, while Dex sails away (sometimes literally) scot-free, aside from whatever semblance of guilt he’s capable of feeling. At least Batista’s last line—“Dexter Morgan: Fuck you”—held our antihero accountable on a moral level. To be honest, I probably would see Dex differently if he killed purely out of self-preservation, so if this cycle of close calls is stale, I suppose I’m part of the problem.
Part of me wishes that the denouement hadn’t been so abrupt. Maybe Dinklage wouldn’t have signed on for a second season, but I would’ve liked to see his serial-killer crush on the newly unmasked Bay Harbor Butcher play out a little longer. Prater hand-delivering killers to Dexter’s table actually sounded like a pretty sweet setup for Dex, though there wouldn’t be much drama for viewers without the thrill of the chase. And the well of living legacy characters has run pretty dry; I can’t imagine Quinn coming north to search for his old partner would provide the same spark that Batista’s Morgan manhunt did. (I won’t cry for Quinn if he becomes collateral damage. If Dexter gets Masuka killed, though, we riot. Forensics/Bowl Till You Bleed buddies for life.)
I’m just happy that there’ll be a second season, whatever it looks like. For fans of The Late Show, Colbert was the most costly casualty of the Paramount Global–Skydance Media merger; for me, it was the cancellation of Dexter prequel Original Sin a few months after its renewal was announced. I didn’t (and still don’t) see a need for an origin story of a character whose history was well-established already, but damned if I didn’t enjoy that series also, and not just because it carried on the Dexter tradition of ridiculous flashback wigs.
Maybe I’m just in the tank for this franchise—no, I know I am—but once I got over the prequel’s uncanny valley, look-alike/act-alike casting, I was shocked that I took a liking to the lone season, which got stronger in its second half and started to develop an identity as something more than mere fan service. (It also had a pretty wild twist.) I even found it affecting when Resurrection reused footage from Original Sin; the latest series’ salutes to the prequel, the original series, and New Blood reminded me that I’ve cared about this character for half my life.
I never thought I’d see the day when we disagreed about Dexter, but I’m sad to say that we differ on Original Sin, which was a spinoff too far for you (and, ultimately, for Showtime). Do its shortcomings and subsequent cancellation suggest that there’s no future for this franchise that doesn’t feature Hall in an on-screen capacity?
Surrey: In all fairness, I did tap out of Original Sin after the fourth episode, so I never got around to the back half, where the series, in your estimation, improved. (The peak, for me, was young Dex chasing pantsless Joey Pants through the streets of Miami, which, if it weren’t for his untimely demise, could’ve meant that Dexter takes place in the same universe as Bad Boys.) Unfortunately, I could never shake the feeling that I was watching some well-cast fan fiction—Christina Milian and James Martinez were dead ringers for LaGuerta and Batista, respectively—rather than a paradigm-shifting prequel. Better Call Saul, this was not.
That said, what I love about Resurrection is that it doesn’t really aspire to be prestige TV. Dexter’s original eight-season run might’ve nabbed 24 Emmy nominations (and four wins), but treating the show as a worthy contemporary of Difficult Man antihero dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad has, over time, proved as ill-fitting as Dexter trying to act normal. Dexter was a Showtime original series through and through, overstaying its welcome and ruining much of its goodwill with the audience along the way. (We’ll always remember the monsters.) Instead, Resurrection was the TV equivalent of tearing through a trashy airport novel, which, given Dexter’s literary origins, feels appropriate.
I know this sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I do think Dexter fires on all cylinders when the franchise fully embraces its sillier, pulpier elements: a long-lost brother who’s also a serial killer, internal monologues with your dead dad, literally every scene with Doakes. Dexter infiltrating a serial-killer cabal orchestrated by none other than Tyrion Lannister—featuring Neil Patrick Harris’s criminally bad Southern accent and a Zodiac Killer wannabe—while Harrison evades a cop who’s apparently been Manchurian Candidated by the Bee Gees falls right into that wheelhouse. I don’t want a version of Dexter that’s overly dour and self-reflective; I want our Dark Passenger throwing all caution to the wind and setting up kill rooms in the middle of Manhattan.
That doesn’t mean that Resurrection wasn’t capable of delivering moments of genuine pathos; anyone with an emotional attachment to this series will be crushed by Batista’s death. (A true Miami Metro legend; hang his fedora in the rafters.) But any show that begins with its protagonist surviving getting shot in the heart with a hunting rifle is best served leaning into the ridiculousness of it all, which Resurrection did time and again.
To answer your question, I believe much of the show’s pulpy appeal is tied to Hall, who’s somehow managed to find a middle ground between making Dexter monstrous and magnetic over the years. He’s become one of those actors who’ll forever be synonymous with that one role. Just as we’ll always associate Ellen Pompeo with medical scrubs, we’ll always think of Hall wearing tight-fitting Henleys while inhaling Cubanos. Hall playing Dexter for decades also brings to mind Hugh Jackman: Just because you can technically recast Wolverine doesn’t mean it’s ever going to work. Like the rideshare edition of the Dark Passenger, Patrick Gibson’s brief turn as Dexter Morgan was a pale imitation of the real thing. (Would Original Sin be a better series if they just slapped another wig on Hall instead? I’m not not saying that.)
In other words, I want the Dexterverse to end with Resurrection. Even if Dexter is, as former Showtime CEO David Nevins once said, the network’s version of Batman, I’m not sure you can build an entire universe without Hall on board. (Voice-over work doesn’t count.) Of course, I could be wrong; perhaps the Trinity Killer prequel series will be as beloved by critics as The Penguin. But as much as I’m loving Resurrection, and will gladly inhale as many seasons as Clyde Phillips and Co. have in them, not even Dexter Morgan would be immune to overkill.
Lindbergh: You’re getting at why I’m so accepting of additional Dexter seasons (and series), even though I’m more discerning where some other IP is concerned. For one thing, I trust Phillips not to massacre the character—figuratively, at least. Phillips stepped down as showrunner of the original series after Season 4, so his hands are mostly clean of the story’s worst sins. I don’t know how many different Dexter series one man can make, but in my mind, Phillips hasn’t helmed a Dexter season that wasn’t watchable at worst. I’ll take that track record of quality control.
Even if Phillips slips, though, there isn’t a lot to lose. For almost a decade, I thought Dexter was done, after having a hated ending. Since then, any good Dexter we’ve gotten has been gravy. We’ve already seen what it looks like when Dexter runs off the rails and flubs the landing, so why worry about it happening again? I’m not stressing about sullying a legacy that’s far from spotless as it is. YOLO! (Or YOLT, in Dexter’s case.)
As to the question of overkill: In Episode 5 of Resurrection, Dexter’s ghost dad says the Bay Harbor Butcher has “killed over 150 serial killers.” That’s roughly equivalent to the number of known serial killers who were active in the entire United States in the 2000s and 2010s combined, so Dexter, who spent most of that time in Miami, has been an improbably busy boy. (“Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be?” the headline of a 2023 article asked. Answer: Dexter.) The point is, Dex has compiled an incredible kill count, so the prospect of more carnage doesn’t excite me. I’m staying tuned to see different sides of this serial killer. But is there anything for Dexter to do that he hasn’t done before?
We’ve seen him settle in big cities and small towns. We’ve seen him live as a loner and try to be a dutiful friend, boyfriend, husband, brother, and son. We’ve seen him be a doting dad and an absentee one. We’ve seen him date murderers and law enforcement officials; reveal his true nature and bury it deep; give in to his urges and go cold turkey on killing. We’ve seen him fake his death and actually die (or so it seemed at the time). The franchise has already played (and retracted) the mortality card, so the threat of Dex dying again holds no narrative power.
So, can this character, or the circumstances he finds himself in, still surprise us? And if not, will we be satisfied with more of the same?
Surrey: Phillips once said he wants Dexter to go the way of lethal injection, which, even with the advance warning, would be a shock to the system. Maybe that’s where Dexter’s story is headed, eventually—there’s only so many times that the most beloved Dexheads can accept the Bay Harbor Butcher weaseling his way out of getting caught. (We’re losing capable detectives by the season; no, Claudette doesn’t count.) In the meantime, I wouldn’t mind if Dex stuck around in New York, which is teeming with narrative possibilities. Could Dexter ever find himself needing to kill someone in the middle of a Mets game? Will he go full Patrick Bateman on Wall Street? Does his carnivorous appetite bring him to Peter Luger’s? Is he voting for Zohran?
I also think the Prater story line took a fresh approach to our collective obsession with true crime: Instead of Dexter’s latest adversary being another serial killer, he basically squared off against a superfan. And for all the issues with Harrison when the character has his own subplots, it’s always fascinating when someone knows about Dexter’s Dark Passenger. (Plus, if the likes of Trinity and Miguel Prado can appear in Dexter’s mind, couldn’t Rita or Hannah do the same for Harrison?) The Harrison spinoff was a terrible idea, but as a catalyst for Dexter getting himself into more trouble? That could be a bloody good time.
Lindbergh: Phillips’s original ending came to my mind too: Dexter has been killed, but he hasn’t been caught. I know the Doakes edition of the Bay Harbor Butcher is already infamous, but can you imagine how huge a story the real Butcher’s arrest would be? Or the culture war that would break out if Dexter confessed or stood trial, laid out the Code, and became a vigilante-justice folk hero? Just imagine how many Dexter docuseries the streamers in this universe could commission.
There may be more meat on the bone here, or an opportunity for future Dexter seasons to Say Something About Society. (Though that path leads dangerously close to prestige territory.) But even if we’re headed for yet another serial-killer boss battle—Butcher vs. Ripper—we can’t change who we are any more than Dexter can. So however and whenever new Dexter drops, I know what we’ll say: I’m watching you, motherfucker.
