While Dexter was massively popular back when it first aired on Showtime from 2006 through 2013, a lot of people came to the blood-soaked serial killer party late. Some fans, in fact, didn’t start watching until they caught wind of the series recently, once it started streaming on Netflix. Thanks to this resurgence, an influx of spin-offs has been announced, including Dexter: Original Sin, which is closing out its first season. As a proud, die-hard fan of the show from the start, I thoroughly enjoyed Dexter: Original Sin. So much so, in fact, that it drove me to re-watch the original series. It has, after all, been almost 20 years. (Seriously, he has a tiny flip phone!)
At first, I just thought it would be a great way to compare and contrast how the moments between Harry (Christian Slater) and Dexter (Patrick Gibson) in Original Sin compare to the flashbacks originally seen in Dexter, depicted by an aged-down, scruffy-haired Michael C. Hall and James Remar. But I quickly realized that there are so many other small yet crucial details I had completely forgotten about or remembered incorrectly. But in hindsight, they’re really important to remember.
- Release Date
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2006 – 2013-00-00
- Network
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Showtime
- Showrunner
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Clyde Phillips
- Directors
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John Dahl, Steve Shill, Keith Gordon, Marcos Siega, Michael Cuesta, Romeo Tirone, Ernest R. Dickerson, Tony Goldwyn, Nick Gomez, Rob Lieberman, Tim Hunter, Adam Davidson, Alik Sakharov, Brian Kirk, Holly Dale, Jeremy Podeswa, Michael Lehmann, Milan Cheylov, Seith Mann
- Writers
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Scott Reynolds, Jace Richdale, James Manos, Jr., Drew Z. Greenberg, Jim Leonard, Karen Campbell
Highlighting Some of the Easily Forgotten Details
While these small details might have seemed insignificant at the time, they are worth rehashing now that Dexter’s story will be told both in the past and the future.
Maria Flirted With Dexter, Disliked Debra, and Was Very Opportunistic
Right from the start of season one, there’s a lot about the dynamic among the staff at Miami Metro P.D. that slipped my mind. For example, Maria LaGuerta (Luna Lauren Velez) was oddly flirtatious with Dexter. In some instances, it got to the point of being inappropriate in the way she looked at him or cozied up close. In fact, it was her fondness for Dexter that helped get Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) promoted. Dexter would often make a discovery about a case using his “insight” and tell Debra so she could pass it off as her own to impress the boss and get the credit. Maria’s weird attraction to Dexter and her disrespect of Debra, hinted at in their first meeting in Original Sin, dissipated by the second season. But she always had a soft spot for Dexter, which is what made her death so much more tragic in the end.
Maria is further painted in a bad light when viewers learn just how opportunistic she is. After being replaced as captain by Thomas Matthews (Geoff Piersen), she covertly works in the background to take down her replacement, Esmee (Judith Scott), all while behaving as though she’s in her new boss’s corner. Esmee becomes deeply paranoid that her boyfriend Bertrand (Kiko Ellsworth) is cheating on her, to the point that she has a public outburst and is removed from her position. It’s later revealed that Maria was sleeping with Bertrand purposely to drive that wedge and stoke the fire. When Bertrand realizes that he was just being used, he calls Maria a “cold-hearted b***h.”
Rita’s Pivotal Role
Dexter chose Rita (Julie Benz) as his partner because of how damaged she was, as he said. Having been abused by her husband for so long, she had no interest in sexual contact at first, which worked perfectly for Dexter. However, when she finally decided it was time and tried to seduce him, his reaction was perfectly Dexter-like. What fans might forget is that he also discovered he enjoyed it. What he did fear, however, was the thought of losing control.
I remembered Rita’s ex-husband, Paul (Mark Pellegrino), coming back into the picture and eventually dying. But I had wrongfully thought Dexter killed him when that wasn’t the case. While Dexter knew Paul was a horrible person, he couldn’t bring himself to kill him, knowing what that would do to Rita. Plus, since Paul hadn’t murdered anyone, he didn’t technically fit Harry’s Code. Dexter did knock Paul over the head, took him to another location, injected drugs, and left him to appear as though he overdosed.
Paul survived but was sent back to jail since the drug use violated his parole agreement. Soon after, Paul started to recall what happened and tried to warn Rita. But he was beaten and killed in jail. His death, however, had nothing to do with Dexter aside from Dexter being the one to get him sent back to prison in the first place.
Lundy Might Have Known The Whole Time
Special Agent Frank Lundy (Keith Carradine) was called in to help when the body parts in the Bay Harbor surfaced, and the police force knew they had a serial killer on their hands. He was known for his skills in bringing serial killers to justice, and it seems he might have known that Dexter was the Bay Harbor Butcher the whole time.
This is evident when he first asks Dexter to come to a crime scene with him after installing cameras at the marina, which Dexter doesn’t know are there. He quizzes Dexter on the killer, noting personality traits that are similar to Dexter, like that he’s clean, surgical, precise, even compulsive. The looks he gives Dexter suggest he knows but doesn’t want to hurt Debra. He may have approved of Dexter’s victims and let it go, knowing that beyond this vigilante nature, Dexter was also a good person with a moral code. He was a rare breed of killer that maybe Lundy felt he could live with, especially after all the heinous people he had come across in his life.
Further, while my recollections suggested that it was ridiculous to think that Sergeant James Doakes (Erik King) could have been the Bay Harbor Butcher, there was far more evidence against him than I remembered. Not only had Lundy discerned that the killer had a background in law enforcement, but Doakes hid Dexter’s blood slides in his trunk after he found them, which made it seem like they were his. His charred corpse was found in a remote cabin with the dismembered body of another bad guy. And he had a reputation from Special Forces for a high kill count and violent behavior.
So, while Maria was sure it could not have been Doakes, and Lundy even seemed to have his reservations, the evidence spoke too loudly. It was worth closing the case and ending that chapter. Further to this, it was also easy to forget how close Dexter was to being found out. So much so, in fact, that he had decided to turn himself in before Doakes’ death in a fire caused by Lila (Jaime Murray) saved him from making that mistake.
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How Well ‘Dexter: Original Sin’ Ties in With the Original
It’s only when re-watching Dexter that I fully recognize how great a job Gibson does at portraying a younger version of the character made popular by Hall. It’s also evident how wonderfully the show is paying homage to the original and keeping with its canon. Hall evolved the character over the series’ eight seasons, but his version of Dexter in Season 1 is very close to what Gibson portrays. He’s socially awkward, still doesn’t quite understand how to handle women, even a long-time girlfriend, and he struggles with finding the best ways possible to seem “normal.”
Debra is another character who fans have a hard time reconciling with Molly Brown’s interpretation of her. But like how Hall evolved Dexter, Carpenter’s Debra grew leaps and bounds from Season 1 to Season 8, even if she still had the same insecurities. The version of Debra in season one of Dexter is more like Brown’s version than fans might give her credit for. She lacks confidence and is desperate for attention.
There are other small but impactful scene tie-ins as well. The episode where Dexter remembers his first kill of Nurse Mary (Denise Crosby in Dexter, Tanya Clarke in Dexter: Original Sin) will leave your jaw dropped. Dexter: Original Sin matches it almost frame-for-frame, doing a fantastic job of recreating a moment that we originally only saw from Dexter’s imagination. From the moment Harry tells Dexter to do what needs to be done to stop Nurse Mary, to Deb happily twirling her father around in a wheelchair in the hospital when he’s discharged, is so beautifully redone. You can only appreciate it by re-watching the original.
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Then, there are the flashback scenes of Harry and Dexter, even Harry at work. In one scene, for example, when Dexter stalks Santos Jimenez (Tony Amendola/Randy Gonzalez), the man who killed his mother, Santos admits that he followed Laura Moser (Sage Kirkpatrick/Brittany Allen) to a park where saw her and Harry and that’s how he knew she was working with the feds. This moment plays out in Original Sin right before Laura’s tragic death.
Even the flashback scene when Harry finds a terrified Dexter in the storage container surrounded by his mother’s chopped-up remains and blood is replicated down to a tee. His uniform? Explained away by revealing the affair with Laura to Captain Aaron Spencer (Patrick Dempsey). Spencer then allows him to join the search, but only if he gives up his detective badge and goes in his police uniform to join the others.
Stream Dexter on Netflix and Dexter: Original Sin on Paramount+.