Furthermore, with a handful of new characters added to the mix such as Jamie Chung ( Lovecraft Country) as true crime podcaster Angela, and Julia Jones ( Wind River) as the town’s chief of police and Dexter’s girlfriend, Dexter seems to be dancing on the edge of danger and complacency more than ever. A small-town setting offers less protection, fewer places to hide, and a greater risk of someone discovering that Dexter is not who he claims to be. But in the small, woodsy town of Iron Lake, it stands to reason that Dexter, by necessity, has to be more careful with his eventual kills. Among the 400,000 people of Miami, Dexter had a little more breathing room to hunt, kill, and hide.
This is especially evident in the new setting. For the first time since we’ve last seen him, Dexter appears to be fully on his own in terms of hiding his secret life and covering his bloody tracks. Although Deb will appear in the revival in some fashion and could possibly provide her brother with sisterly love and advice through dreams, visions, or hallucinations, any help in physically covering Dexter’s tracks that she might have been able to provide ten years ago is off the table. His son, Harrison, is removed from his life, his girlfriend, Hannah ( Yvonne Strahovski), is out of the picture, and his sister, Deb ( Jennifer Carpenter), is dead. In the original series, Dexter faced constant risks of his Dark Passenger being revealed to those closest to him here, the sense of risk is further heightened given that Dexter, according to Phillips, “has no connection to his previous life,” including any friends or family who might have been able to help him keep his Dark Passenger in check. “I kind of have a thing about blood”), these new stylistic flourishes and changes give the impression that both viewers and Dexter himself have greater reason to be on edge. It’s almost as if, through this new visual language, the show is letting us know that it’s only a matter of time before Dexter is swallowed whole by this new town and his new life comes crashing down, even if Dexter himself is not yet aware.ĭespite the return of Dexter’s dark humor, as seen in the trailer (“Easy there,” Dexter says with a knowing smile as he recoils from someone waving a knife in a sporting goods store. The trailer depicts scenes where sunlight has been omitted in favor of cloudy skies and faces and locations draped in murky shadow, giving the show a more somber and suffocating atmosphere. The frigid visuals seem to seep their way into viewers’ bones.
There are snow-covered landscapes, darker colors of muted greens and blues, and scenes set in vast forests that convey a deep sense of isolation.
The revival omits familiar elements in favor of a chillier season, both in climate and visuals, taking place in the fictional small town of Iron Lake, New York. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the revival is subtitled New Blood.
As returning showrunner Clyde Phillips told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, “the moment the first frame comes up, you can see we’re in a whole new world… This is a completely, wholly new environment.” While Dexter devotees might have grown accustomed to the same stylistic flourishes and setting year after year, these bold changes to Dexter’s “house style” actually give the show a chance it never had before: to break free from the confines of its previous iteration and transform itself (and the character of Dexter Morgan himself) into something new and fresh. Gone is the Miami setting, with its vibrant colors, tropical crime scene locations, beachside bars, and yes, Dexter’s signature short-sleeved Oxford shirts. The initial trailer showed that things are definitely not what we’re used to seeing in the Dexter-verse. RELATED: 'Dexter: New Blood' Set Image Reveals First Look at a Grown-Up Harrison Now that we’re approaching the revival’s fall 2021 premiere, its promotional materials are hinting at a drastically different iteration of Dexter than we’ve seen before.
When it was announced in late 2020 that the show would be returning as a 10-episode limited series set 10 years after the 2013 finale, fans began to speculate about the revival’s plot. And for a time, it seemed like the only ending the character would receive. It was a depressing ending for a show and character that was fond of black humor.
When fans of Showtime’s Dexter last saw the titular forensic blood spatter analyst/vigilante serial killer Dexter Morgan, he was living off the grid as a lumberjack in Oregon, far away from his family and Miami roots.