"Dexter: New Blood" Review: A Return Worth Having, and One Bad Ending
Ten episodes, ten years later, and the showrunner of the original's best seasons is back in charge. New Blood swaps Miami sun for upstate snow and gives Dexter what he never had: a son old enough to judge him. Then it ends in a way that undercuts the reason for reviving him.
It was great to have Dexter back. Ten episodes, ten years after he vanished, and for nine of them, this is the best the franchise has been in a very long time.
The Right Person Came Back
The most important detail is behind the camera. Clyde Phillips ran the original show for its first four seasons and left immediately afterwards, which is exactly when the original series starts to slide. For this revival, he returned as showrunner.
You can feel it straight away. The habits that made the later seasons frustrating are gone. Dexter no longer walks away from everything unscathed, the villain is not a retread, and the writing has weight again. This is what the show looks like when the person who understood it is in the chair.
Hall and Clancy Brown
Michael C. Hall is reliably excellent, and the years have done something useful to the character. This is Dexter after a decade of abstinence, working retail under the name Jim Lindsay, out of practice at the deception rather than effortless at it. Hall plays the rust well.
Clancy Brown as Kurt Caldwell is perfect casting. He has the small-town-patriarch warmth that makes people trust him instantly, and he can drop it between one line and the next. The show gives him local goodwill and lets him operate from behind it, which is far more unsettling than menace would have been.
Deb as the Voice in His Head
Bringing Jennifer Carpenter back was the smartest structural decision in the whole revival, and the way they did it is better than a flashback would have been.
In the original series, the voice in Dexter's head was Harry, his adoptive father, who gave him the Code and told him how to survive. Here that role goes to Deb. The switch changes everything about how the internal monologue functions. Harry was permission. Deb is accusation. She found out what he was, and now she's the commentary running under every decision he makes, which means Dexter spends ten episodes being judged by the one person whose judgment he cannot dismiss.
Carpenter plays it with the same profane wit she always had, and it is very funny, right up until it is not.
The Snow
The setting deserves credit. Iron Lake in the depths of winter is the precise inverse of Miami, and the original's entire visual identity was heat, light, and saturated colour.
Strip that out and replace it with grey trees, white ground, and a town where everyone knows everyone, and the character has nowhere to hide. Miami was a city you could disappear into. This place is not.
The Finale
My one real problem, and it is a large one.
I am in the minority on the original ending. I thought it followed from what Dexter had been telling us about himself for eight years, and I defended it. So my objection here is not that New Blood gave him a different ending. It is that it gave him a terminal one.
If you bring a character back after a decade, killing him off is a strange destination to have chosen. It leaves the obvious question hanging: why revive him at all? Doing it at his son's hands compounds it. Harrison was the most interesting new element in the show, and the finale ends him on a full stop.
I wanted more of this. Another season in Iron Lake, or wherever he went next, with this team writing it.
The Batista Problem
The other thing the finale wastes is Angel Batista.
David Zayas turns up in the closing stretch, and his arrival carries years of history: the last colleague still asking questions about the Bay Harbour Butcher. That is a confrontation the franchise had earned twice over.
Instead, he functions mainly as a plot device, a way to bring the extradition threat into the room. The reunion happens without the showdown, and I would have traded a good deal of the finale for it.
The Verdict
Eight out of ten. The mark comes off for the ending and nothing else.
Everything before it is a genuine return to form, worthy of the original at its best, and I will watch it again knowing exactly where it lands. A revival that fixes the problems people complained about for years, and then closes a door nobody asked it to close.
