I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting on a Dexter prequel series since we were first introduced to the lovable anti-hero protagonist in 2006. As such, I’m super stoked to report to you that Dexter: Original Sin is righteously living up to the task. Though it’s early on in the series, it’s doing a bang-up job of satiating our curiosity to know more about Dexter’s life as a kid living with and learning to tame a “Dark Passenger”. Episode 2 takes us deeper into the vigilante serial killer’s young psyche and introduces us to more of his crucial first moments.
In the original series, we learn Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) is a top-notch blood spatter analyst for Miami Metro Homicide. He’s also a vigilante serial killer, who only takes out other killers. He’s lived with an urge for blood ever since witnessing his mother’s brutal murder as a small child. As he grew and his urge came to life, his adoptive father, a homicide detective with Miami Metro, helped him tame his "Dark Passenger" with a code to live and kill by, which was enacted to keep Dexter safe. And he was - for a while.
The original series ended openly, leaving us wondering if Dexter was dead or alive. 2021’s Dexter: New Blood cleared that up, then left us in the same position with its finale. Enter Dexter: Original Sin and boom. Now we know.
Original Sin episode 1 opens with Dexter lying on an operating table, dying from a gunshot wound to the chest. As he flatlines, Michael C. Hall narrates that it’s true what they say about your life flashing before your eyes when you die—a beautiful moment that serves as our segue into Dexter’s past. It’s 1991 and a young Dex (Patrick Gibson) is in med school desperately trying to satiate his urge but it’s not working. Neither is hunting animals. We also witnessed two crucial moments for Dexter when he first discovered forensics and when he made his first human kill, a hospital nurse who was slowly poisoning patients in her unit.
This week in episode 2, Dexter is indeed a kid in a candy store after his first kill, and he remains on that high as he starts his new job with Miami Metro Forensics, works his first crime scene, and locates his next victims. But that’s not all that happens. Through a series of flashbacks, we see the moment his adoptive father Harry (Christian Slater) first came into his life, and it wasn’t the moment we fans have thought this entire time. Let's get into the recap and our thoughts of the episode. SPOILERS BELOW.
Dexter works his first crime scene
It’s his first day at work, and Dexter is flushed with the glow of his first kill. He’s in heaven, not just from the kill but also with his new job. He has a special knack for looking at blood pools and spatter and finding the needed clues and patterns required to solve a murder. As he gets acquainted with the lab and departmental processes, he learns that Miami Metro has the highest murder rate in the country with a solve rate off 18%. That’s less than 1 in 5. This excites Dex. Now, he has a pool of victims from which to choose, who meet his code criteria.
Before he can linger too long at the thought, there’s been a reported homicide and Dexter is sent to his first crime scene with his dad. Harry tells him that maybe helping put murderers away will be enough to quell his lust for blood, to which Dexter replies, “kind of like methadone for an addict.” Will helping catch murderers be enough, though?
At the crime scene, a male lies motionless on the ground after a gunshot wound to the head. Dex is practically drooling as he revels at the blood, telling us how it felt like Christmas morning, and he’d been a good boy. He’s very perceptive at the scene, noticing every little detail about the victim. He’s a pro at guesstimating how a murder happened.
He follows the blood spatter. “Spatter matters” is his motto. When he excitedly offers up his theories, his team doesn’t miss the chance to haze the rookie. Dex doesn’t mind, though. What they don’t realize is that they’re teaching him how to blend in and divert suspicion, so he plays right along.
The next day at work, he gets acquainted with the Records Department and is enamored by boxes of unsolved cases stacked floor to ceiling. The idea that there are so many killers left on the street free to kill again made Dex feel like a kid in a candy store. So much blood spatter evidence to pour over, so many murder cases to go through, and so many worthy victims to satiate his Dark Passenger.
Deb's close call
Young Deb (Molly Brown) is foul-mouthed, sassy, and moody. And that’s what we loved about her in the original series. As a teen, she feels overlooked and unseen around her father and Dexter, especially now since they’re working together. She feels isolated since her mother passed away, like she doesn’t exist. This helps us to understand where a lot of that pent-up anger she carried in Dexter may have originated.
At home, she nostalgically pours over her mother’s things while searching for something to pawn and get her own money, an idea her friend Sofia (Raquel Justice) put in her head. Deb doesn’t want to get rid of her mother’s things, so she comes up with a better idea: find something of Dexter’s to pawn. And she does.
As she rifles through his videotape collection, she hears something inside one of the boxes and without knowing it, comes dangerously close to the work of Dex’s Dark Passenger. It’s the pair of gold hoop earrings Dexter took as trophies from the nurse he killed in episode 1, which he holds and ogles when he needs to do so. Not knowing whose they are, Deb takes them and tries to pawn them but can’t. They aren’t real gold. So, she gives them to Sofia.
The next victims
During a night out with Det. Angel Batista (James Martinez) at a Cuban bar, Dexter learns of a local unsolved murder and grows curious. So, Angel tells him about the death of one of the bar’s former bus boys named Renee. He came over from Cuba in 1980 and worked hard to make a living for himself and his mom. Well, he borrowed money from the wrong guy, who hit Renee with an interest plan so high, he couldn’t afford it. Before long, Renee was $20,000 in the hole to a bad man named Tony Ferrer (Roberto Sanchez).
One day, Tony showed up at Renee and his mother’s house to threaten Renee, and he fired a gun, barely missing Renee’s head. The bullet instead went through the wall and killed Renee’s mother, Carla. As he’s hearing this, Dex remembers seeing Carla’s case file in some of the records he went through, specifically the image of her on the floor after being shot in the head.
Angel then tells Dex that exactly one week after Carla died, Renee allegedly killed himself at her grave. Dexter doesn’t believe it was suicide and tells Angel, “so, there goes the only witness to who killed Carla.” Angel confirms that though everyone suspected Ferrer of the murders, they couldn’t prove it, and as a result, he’s still out there. He won’t be for long, though, especially not with Dexter around.
Dexter's second victim pops up when he's made aware of the abduction and mutilation of a young boy named Jimmy Powell, who is the son of a local prominent judge. In the beginning of episode 2, Jimmy is brought into a room and chained up at the ankle. Honestly, it looks as though he’s being held captive in old, abandoned submarine or something of the like. It’s dank, dark, and dirty, and he is scared. He is fed and given water, but there is no communication between him and his captor—that is until the boy retaliates. The result? His captor cuts off one of his fingers.
Back at Miami Metro, Captain Spencer (Patrick Dempsey) and Harry speculate that the kidnapping is likely a drug cartel retaliation related to a case the judge oversaw. When the department receives word of the boy’s mutilation and sees the evidence, Dexter is both in awe at seeing a severed finger but in disgust knowing it belongs to a child who is being tortured. In that moment, all Dexter wants to do is kill whoever is doing this to this kid. And as soon as he figures out whom to target, he will.
Harry’s flashbacks reveal a big twist
At the station as Harry and Captain Spencer speculate that Bobby’s kidnapping could be cartel related, Harry flashes back to a case early in his career, when he went undercover to try and bring down a cartel kingpin named Estrada. He remembers his first drug buy and arrests: a local dealer named Joe (John Pope), and a woman named Laura Moser (Brittany Allen).
Now, you might be thinking her name sounds familiar, and it should. Laura Moser is Dexter’s birth mother. Episode 2 reveals to us that, contrary to what the original series led us to believe, Harry met Dexter (and his brother Brian, who would become the Ice Truck Killer in season 2 of the original series) long before he ever found him sitting in a pool of his dead mother’s blood. Moser and Harry were connected when she ultimately became a police informant to help them take down Estrada in exchange for immunity and to keep her kids.
Harry’s flashbacks are super important in this series because they not only reveal to us details about Dexter’s life growing up, but also about Harry’s life during this time. Episode 1 revealed to us that Harry and his late wife, Deb’s mother, also had a son, but he ultimately died. A flashback in episode 2 lets us know they did try for another child but were unable to conceive. It makes sense now why Harry couldn’t let Dexter go when he found him at his mother’s crime scene.
Dexter: Original Sin episode 2 review
I have to say, Dexter: Original Sin episode 2 was beautifully pieced together. As the present plays out, it’s interwoven with flashbacks of the past that act as steppingstones leading right up to our past present-day plot, altering the perceptions we gained of Dexter’s future in the original series.
Now let’s talk Patrick Gibson. This kid is a fantastic Young Dexter. It’s uncanny and downright eerie how good he is at emulating Michael C. Hall as Dexter in voice, intonation, tone, and facial expressions. Gibson could literally pass for Hall’s own son in real life, so it makes sense how well he has adapted to his role as the budding vigilante serial killer. The synchronicities between Young Dexter and Adult Dexter will give you chills, and the more we watch Gibson, the more enthralled with him we become.
The rest of the cast is equally impressive. Show creators really went the extra mile to find actors who not only compare similarly in looks to franchise original characters, but who also slid right into the physical, mental, and emotional nuances of said characters.
I really like how Original Sin is taking us step by step through events in the order in which they happened instead of jumping back and forth between multiple timelines of past, present, and future. The insertion of new crimes and interests for Dexter as our discovery of the past plays out keeps our plot fresh. Oh, and Gen-Xers, and maybe Millennials, will appreciate the soundtrack, which is littered with hits from the 90s, such as Alice in Chains' “Man in the Box” and INXS’s “Unbelievable”, among others.
So far, Dexter: Original Sin is off to a super successful start full of plot twists and perceptional changes, so stay tuned, my friends. And buckle up. We're all kids in this candy store, and this Dark Passenger is sure to take us on one sweet, wild ride.
Dexter: Original Sin streams Fridays on Paramount+ with Showtime and airs Sunday nights on Showtime at 10 p.m. ET.