‘Dexter: Resurrection’ Review: TV’s Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer Takes New York

Showtime’s Dexter enjoyed several rich seasons before bleeding out slowly in a final run that crawled toward an unsatisfying conclusion. Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) was dredged up, eight years later, for Dexter: New Blood, which traded bloody beachside fun for a grim, cold adventure without much of a pulse. Despite the fact that New Blood’s finale saw him shot at close range with a hunting rifle right in the chest, Dexter just won’t die.

Dexter: Resurrection begins by hurriedly explaining how Dexter has evaded both death and the murder charges he was facing at the end of New Blood. The answers given are all implausible—apparently getting shot in the heart isn’t too big a deal so long as it’s cold out—but they’re functional enough, allowing the series to quickly get Dexter back on his feet.

While Dexter is recovering, his physical therapist makes an offhand remark about a grisly murder that took place in New York City, invertedly tipping him off to the whereabouts of his son Harrison (Jack Alcott), whom we last saw tearily gunning his father down. It’s an extraordinarily lazy bit of plotting, up there with the cop in New Blood figuring out Dexter’s true identity after randomly bumping into one of his old Miami P.D. colleagues at a conference in New York, but it gives Dexter a mission and a new hunting ground to explore.

Dexter is barely in New York five minutes when he crosses paths with the Dark Passenger, a serial killer who targets rideshare drivers. Ignoring the faintly ludicrous fact that Dexter decides to go after this backseat butcher because he’s mad about having his nickname stolen, the Dark Passenger fits perfectly into the original show’s gallery of rogues. The idea of a rideshare killer has the hint of an urban legend to it, taking the reasonable fear of how readily we get into cars with strangers and making it real in the form of an outlandish bogeyman.

With the Dark Passenger in his sights, Dexter slips back into his old routine—stalking his target, setting up shrink wrap-covered kill rooms, and so on—and Resurrection starts to feel a lot like the original show. There’s still a dark thrill to watching Dexter work, accompanied by Hall’s sardonic inner monologue, and the series has a knack for throwing unexpected problems in his path and finding clever ways for him to solve them.

Where New Blood’s dour narrative got bogged down in Dexter’s guilt and regret, Resurrection gets him back in action and gleefully leans into the pulpier side of his tale by introducing Uma Thurman’s Charley. Her story is seeded carefully through the first few episodes, and she’s a woman of few words. But we soon come to understand that she’s out to recruit serial killers into some sort of secret organization. The series itself has recruited an impressive cast of stars to play this deadly bunch, some of whom are playing heavily against type while others are leaning into a psychopathic shtick that we’ve seen before. In both cases, though, there’s a sense of anticipation to see how they’ll interact with Dexter beyond the four episodes made available for review. No doubt it’s going to require a whole lot of shrink wrap.

With all the excitement Dexter encounters in New York, it’s easy to forget why he went there in the first place: to find Harrison. In truth, this part of the series is actually better forgotten. It’s no fault of Alcott’s, who gives a reasonably charming performance, but Harrison is a much less interesting figure than his father. He lacks specificity—the way that Dexter is both a bowling-loving, pancake-making dad and a ruthless, blood-crazed killer. There’s an intensity and an awkwardness that makes both sides of Dexter’s persona equally entertaining, while Harrison is just a normal kid who occasionally bludgeons someone with a cistern lid.

It doesn’t help that Harrison’s own adversary is a lot less compelling than the killers Dexter gets to cross scalpels with. Harrison is being chased down by Detective Claudette Wallace (Kadia Saraf), who compensates for her lack of social skills and emotional intelligence with savant-like investigative abilities. The character bears an uncanny resemblance to Abed’s mocking impersonation of “mildly autistic super detectives” in an episode of Community, giving some sense of just how worn-out that particular trope is.

Since Harrison’s return in New Blood, Dexter has gone back and forth over whether he wants to see his son follow in his footsteps. Regardless, Resurrection does little to suggest that the young man is up to the task. Fortunately, not only is the Bay Harbour Butcher proving to be extremely hard to kill, but it turns out there’s plenty of life left in him too.