[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Dexter: Original Sin series premiere, “And in the Beginning.”]
The series premiere of Dexter: Original Sin, which arrived on Paramount+ with Showtime on Friday (December 13), achieves a lot in its less-than-one-hour runtime. First, it answers the question about Dexter’s fate after the events of New Blood and leading up to Resurrection. Then it takes us back to 15 years before the events of Dexter to show how Dexter Morgan (this time, played by Patrick Gibson) first came to be Miami Metro P.D.’s esteemed blood spatter analyst and, ya know, a serial killer in the first place, revisiting his first kill of Nurse Mary. It also offers something completely new to the Dexter lore: the death of Harry Morgan Jr., a character who did not exist in the prior series.
That’s right. Harry (Christian Slater in this iteration) had a biological son long before adopting Dexter, and it didn’t go so well for either of them. In a flashback to the ’70s, we see him watching football and drinking a beer before he realizes his son isn’t in the room with him, and the back door is open. He rushes to find the tiny child from the bottom of the pool and jumps in to save him, but it’s too late. When Doris comes home to find her child being carted away in a body bag, both parents are visibly destroyed.
“I think that tragedy would be something that’s just unrecoverable from,” Slater told TV Insider of the devastating development. “And I think it motivates so many of his choices with Dexter, choices with Deb… As we went from episode to episode, it was really interesting to follow the choices that he makes and some of the mistakes that happened, and it’s hard to predict the future. You’re trying to do one thing, and then this happens. You can’t plan for everything, but I think all of those elements and aspects certainly led to who Harry ends up becoming and expressing unconditional love for Dexter.”
Patrick Wymore/Paramount+ with Showtime
Creator Clyde Phillips said the idea for this gutting new wrinkle in the Morgan family history struck him at an inopportune time (in the video interview embedded above). “I thought about the swimming pool sequence in the middle of the night, and I just wrote down — I do this thing called ‘midnight notes,’ it drives my wife crazy — and I just scribbled, ‘Swimming pool.” Luckily, I remembered what it meant the next morning.”
Phillips agreed that the effect of this development will be felt going forward in Harry’s journey on the prequel. “It is such a formative and transformative moment in a person’s life, in a father’s life, in a marriage. They struggle to stay married, and it also shows why Harry wanted another son so bad, and there’s a tug of guilt that lives inside Harry because Harry is responsible for that. He left that door open. He’s watching a football game, not paying attention to what’s going on outside. And that just so informs and helps Christian Slater play the scenes that he subsequently plays in 1973 and in 1991,” Phillips explained.
As for whether Dexter will find out about the elder brother he never knew about? “Not in the first season, and so when we get picked up, that’s something that we intend to explore,” Phillips said.
Another new element of the prequel series is, of course, the intro, which presents a new morning ritual with some familiar elements — the music, squashing mosquito on Dexter’s arm, a morning shave (this time, by Harry), shoe-tying, and a stretched t-shirt — along with some new features, like a mixed tape, toothpaste, scrambled eggs and bacon, and nail polish, to name a few.
“If you’ve never seen the show before, we want you to enjoy the opening credits. If you have seen the show before, you can enjoy them even more,” Phillips explained of the creative choices there. “They were shooting some promo stuff, and we were watching them. We were behind the behind-the-scenes people, and we were watching this [and said], ‘Wait a minute.’ And then we asked them to get a couple of pick-up shots for us. And then we built that sequence as if it’s 1991, not 2006, so it’s instead of the French press coffee maker, it’s a Mr. Coffee, and she’s making it. It’s Deb is making a mix tape, and all the stuff that happened in the early ’90s. So we got to mix and match both of them. And then the music by Ralph Kent… it just brings you home again. You know where you are.”
Dexter: Original Sin, Fridays and Sundays, Paramount+