With the season finale of Dexter: Original Sin literally sitting right on our doorstep, this week’s pre-finale episode drenches us in answers that pave a big ole bloody path for it to slide right on in and spatter all over the place. Episode 9, "Blood Drive," is full of eye-popping moments, so buckle up, kids. In this week’s recap, we’ll check in on Bobby (Reno Wilson) and explore the horrific aftermath of Laura’s (Brittany Allen) death as Harry (Christian Slater) solves the N.H.I. cases, Dexter (Patrick Gibson) takes down (then sets up) Captain Spencer (Patrick Dempsey), and … wait for it … we get a surprise peek at the origin of the Ice Truck Killer! It’s exciting, I know, so let’s get rolling.
Did Bobby survive?
Last week during Miami Metro’s raid on an Estrada cartel stash house in search of Nicky (London Thatcher), Bobby was shot in the neck during the explosion of gunfire that erupted thanks to Captain Spencer’s theatrics. So, did he survive? Yes, but he remains in a coma for most of episode 9 until a key moment when Harry goes to see him seeking answers … and lo and behold, Bobby slowly pulls out of his coma and gives them. More on that later.
At the hospital, Harry is pulled aside by LaGuerta (Christina Milian), who confronts him about the Brian Moser (Xander Mateo/ Roby Attal) file he stole from Tampa P.D. Harry comes clean, mostly, and tells her about the Estrada case, but he doesn’t give her the full truth. Instead, he tells her he was responsible for the death of an informant, who was Brian Moser’s mother, and that he stole the file because he wanted to know what happened to Brian. He never mentions one word about Dexter, and she believes him.
This, of course, strikes up a flashback to the moment when Harry and Miami Metro found the blood-drenched shipping container full of Laura Moser’s body parts.
The aftermath of Laura’s death
It's 1973 and the cartel has just kidnapped Laura and her boys and are holding them hostage in a shipping container with other traitors. Last we saw them, they sat huddled in the back, covered in blood spatter, trying not to watch as the other traitors were ripped apart with a chainsaw.
Episode 9 takes us through the search for the missing mom and her boys, up to the moment they are found. The cops find their needle in a haystack when, after 24 hours, they hear the faint voices of a child. Harry rushes to open the door, and when he does, a river of blood gushes out like something straight out of The Shining. It’s a horrific scene just to see all the blood alone, but then the camera pans into the container, and that’s when our hearts stop. Huddled together in the back left corner, covered in blood and surrounded by their delimbed and beheaded mother’s body, sit Dexter and Brian.
Harry runs in and scoops up Dexter, leaving Brian behind, and it’s a painful moment to see the look in Brian’s eyes as this happens. It’s like he’s insignificant, and Dexter is the only one who matters, at least to Harry. Bobby runs in and gets Brian, and as he leads the kid out of the container, Brian can’t stop looking at his mother’s severed head lying on the floor in a pool of blood, staring at him as he leaves her behind. It is a bone-chilling moment.
In the aftermath, Harry and Doris (Jasper Lewis) take in the boys. Brian is clearly jealous of the attention Harry gives Dexter and Doris gives Deb, which leaves him feeling left out and, again, overlooked and insignificant. One day in particular, when Doris puts Deb in her crib to go fix lunch and Deb won’t stop crying, Brian grows impatient and smothers the newborn with a couch pillow. It’s a moment that had me holding my breath, so, don’t forget to breathe.
When Doris stops him and asks why he did what he did, Brian responds, “Because she was too noisy.” He doesn’t care that he could’ve hurt or killed Deb, or that what he did was wrong.
“You’re not my dad!” he yells at Harry, then tells the Morgans he doesn’t want them taking care of him, he hates “this place” and wants to go home. “I hate all of you” he screams before punching through a window, then punching Harry in the face and running off.
The result? The Morgans call Barb (Kathleen Rose Perkins), the child welfare caseworker, and tell her they cannot keep Brian, who eavesdrops as they speak of how they’ve grown to love Dexter and want to keep him, despite the fact that the state does not want to separate the siblings.
See, in Brian’s efforts to protect his baby brother, all he wanted was to be with him, and in the aftermath of Laura’s death, everyone promised him that he would be. And now, here they are doing the one thing Brian feared most: separating him from his brother. While Original Sin has given us glimpses into the fact that Brian has a little beast of his own to contend with, it is this very moment breathes life to his own Dark Passenger.
Brian is sent to a Tampa youth facility, where we see in his file—the same file Harry stole in episode 8—that he spent his time there mainly obsessing over finding and seeing his brother.
Harry solves the N.H.I. cases
Back in present day, Harry pours over the evidence in the N.H.I. cases and adds in Brian’s file after noticing that Raul and Brian were in the same youth facility together, proving a connection: all victims were orphans (like Brian), all were in foster care (like Brian), and all were transients and alone (like Brian). Then Harry notices that in all the pictures taken from each crime scene, Brian is standing in the crowd watching.
In that moment, Harry puts it together: There is a serial killer preying on those Miami Metro consider to be non-humans, and his name is Brian Moser. But are these three murders his first? Surely not.
Harry rushes to Bobby's bedside, where he reveals that Moser is the perp in the N.H.I. cases, he hasn’t told LaGuerta yet, and he doesn’t know what to do. If he brings in Brian, he blows up everything they’ve worked so hard to protect (i.e., Dexter’s identity), meaning Dexter will, in turn, learn the gory details of his past. Who knows what that will do to him? At just the right moment, Bobby squeezes Harry’s hand and, through a forced whisper, says, “Save Dexter.”
Dexter takes down Captain Spencer
At the station, Dexter watches as Captain Spencer continues fooling everyone, demanding updates and barking orders about finding his son. He notes how, for Spencer, “pain is pleasure and the difference between the two is paper thin,” something he’ll be sure to keep in mind when he takes down “my first child killer … evil incarnate.”
Dexter decides it’s “stalk and kill day,” and he gets to work. At Captain Spencer’s bachelor pad, he finds numerous pictures of father and son at a local arcade, as well as the same Lunchable from the Jimmy Powell (Brayden Gleave) case—a “children’s charcuterie”. As he continues snooping, Captain Spencer unexpectedly comes home and isn't alone. Harry is with him, and Dexter barely manages to escape before being discovered.
The next day at work, there’s a blood drive being held for Bobby, and given that Dex was pre-med before coming to Miami Metro, he gets to play phlebotomist for the day. So, who better to wind up in his chair than the child killer he so desperately wants to torture and take down? This scene is one of the biggest homages to Michael C. Hall’s portrayal of his Dark Passenger, as Gibson gets unnervingly up close and personal with the captain, complementing his veins, roughly sticking him with the needle, commenting on the pain he and his wife must be going through—he’s good. Really good. It’s a searing moment.
That night, while Dexter sets up his kill room at the arcade, Spencer arrives home to a blackmail letter demanding $5,000 cash in exchange for not telling the world his secret. So, he grabs his gun and heads to the arcade.
He’s confused by all the plastic when he enters—the perfect distraction for Dexter to take him down. When Spencer wakes on Dexter’s kill table, Dexter applauds his acting performance in claiming he has the wrong guy, that he’s not a child killer. (I gotta give it to Spencer: He commits to his lies all the way.)
But Dexter doesn’t have the wrong guy, he tells Spencer while recounting all his mistakes and little trails of evidence he left behind, like the speck of blood on the box Nicky’s finger was delivered in and how the blood on Spencer’s forearm was the result of Nicky fighting back. Then Dexter brings up the hesitation mark on Nicky’s finger and asks, “Was it hard for an evil animal like you to cut off your own son’s finger?”
Again, a top-notch performance from Gibson with Michael C. Hall’s Dark Passenger written all over it. It’s probably the moment that connects our burgeoning Dark Passenger in Original Sin to our developed Dark Passenger in the original series. Major shoutout to Gibson’s acting chops here.
Spencer freaks out and asserts that he has never killed any kids, ever, that he’s not a serial killer, he’s a “g*****n hero.” Dexter says he thought so too, but good guys don’t kill kids. Captain Spencer takes the bait and yells, “She betrayed me! She betrayed my family, and she turned my son against me!”
And there we have it, folks: Captain Spencer did all of this for two reasons: a) to hurt his ex-wife and b) to show her he’s a hero and should’ve never left him in the first place. It’s the first time Dexter realizes that a single incident can turn a good person into a monster. It’s a sobering realization.
As Spencer bargains with Dexter to let him go so he can reveal where Nicky is, Dexter slices through some plastic around the captain’s arm and, in what Dexter calls “the worst case of serial killer blue balls” he’s ever had, cuts off the captain’s finger instead of plunging his knife into his chest. Then, he leaves the room and tells the captain he’s gonna give him some time to think about what he’s done.
Of course, it’s a trap, but Spencer doesn’t know it. He wiggles his way out of the plastic and off the table, then into his car and out of sight. But he isn’t in the wind. Dexter watches from his truck with a smile and follows, knowing the captain will lead him right to Nicky.
See, he knew the captain would never tell him the truth about where Nicky is, so he had to scare him and make him think he was in control, not Dexter, who really is the genius. As soon as Nicky is safe, Captain Spencer won’t be, and that’s the moment Dexter is so patiently waiting for.
The Ice Truck Killer strikes
Of all the places episode 9 could open, it does so at a bingo game, where a charming, handsome young man sits next to an older woman and chats her up while they play bingo. The woman is Brian’s former caseworker, Barb, but because it’s been years since she has seen him, she has no idea it's him. She probably doesn’t even remember how she, too, went to comfort Dexter first as a child in the aftermath of Laura’s death, but Brian does. He felt it. He still feels it. And he’ll never forget it.
Brian wins bingo and to celebrate, he invites Barb to dinner, and she shyly agrees. As they approach his van, Brian opens the back doors and tells her to get in, then reveals who he is. As Barb starts to panic, Brian punches her square in the face so hard, she falls back into the van. Brian closes the doors and disappears into the night.
When Barb comes to, she’s standing chained to a metal structure, pleading with Brian that she just did what she thought was best for him: “You needed help,” she says, to which he angrily responds, “What I needed was my family, my brother! You promised me you wouldn’t separate me and Dexter, but you did; so, now I’m gonna separate you.”
And he does, with a chainsaw, reveling in the blood spatter as much as his brother does when he plunges his knife into the hearts of evil. And here we have it, kiddos: the origin of the Ice Truck Killer. The N.H.I. cases are just what followed.
Dexter: Original Sin episode 9 review
What an eye-popping episode full answers drenched in blood, guys. Not only does all of the above happen, but we also learn that Nicky knows his father is the one who has him (and he lets his father know he knows), and despite her expulsion from school, Deb’s FSU scholarship is still on the table. But, when she accompanies Dexter to work to give blood for Bobby, she spends time with Tonya (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who inspires her to consider a career in law enforcement, piquing Deb’s curiosity.
Where episode 9 shines is in the display of Dark Passengers (Dexter's, Brian's, and Captain Spencer's), specifically in Patrick Gibson's portrayal. And if there’s one main message in episode 9, it’s that lies will get you absolutely nowhere, except in heaps of trouble and, if it's a certain kind of trouble, likely on Dexter Morgan’s kill table.
The episode also highlights the brutal effects of trauma on a young psyche in a new way, this time when it's left untreated ... and unacknowledged, really. Instead of being cared for like his brother was, Brian was sent away and punished, separated from the only family he had left, from his only responsibility as a big brother. Granted, he did something wrong, but he was a scared, confused, traumatized kid feeling overlooked, insignificant, and completely alone. He didn’t know how to deal with urges he neither understood nor was able to control
Episode 9 is an eye-popping bucket of blood that's sure to get bloodier with next week’s finale, so stay tuned.
Dexter: Original Sin streams Fridays on Paramount+ with Showtime and airs Sunday nights onShowtime at 10 p.m. ET.