Okay, I’m willing to concede that Dexter: Original Sin may have more of a plan than I gave it credit for last week. Those seemingly disparate storylines are starting to come together at the midpoint of the season, so things should wrap up in the next several weeks — or at least reach a satisfying enough conclusion until the inevitable second season. (Showtime is more in the Dexter business than ever before, with a fourth spinoff, a Trinity Killer prequel, just announced.) At the same time, the show is still struggling to hit the heights of the series premiere, with another episode that’s so heavy on its theme of “accidents happen” that it almost collapses under the weight of its plot contrivances.
We pick up right where we left off, with Dexter staring in horror at Mad Dog’s mangled corpse. Yes, the contract killer for the mob is definitely dead — in trying to figure out how long it will take for him to be identified, Dex notes that Mad Dog no longer has a wallet, ID, or face. By his calculations, it will take the cops 15 minutes to figure out who the body belongs to and show up at Anthony Moretti’s home, which does not give Dexter much time to disassemble the kill room and remove any other evidence. In fact, it seems downright impossible, and yet he’s somehow able to use a UV light to spot blood spatter and clean it up with a Q-tip in the 12 minutes before an unusually speedy Miami Metro shows up. Look, this show requires a staggering amount of belief suspension. I’m doing my best to just go with it.
Back at home, Harry is furious after hearing Mad Dog’s name on the police radio. Dexter calmly explains that he’s in the clear: Yes, Moretti woke up on the kill table and escaped, but he’s dead now, and there were no witnesses or evidence left behind. “If he woke up early, that is your fuck-up — it’s your responsibility,” Harry admonishes. “My fuck-up was letting you go after that nurse. It was too soon.” This is the throughline of the episode: People fuck up sometimes. It’s not exactly a major revelation, though here it leads to a fun development where Harry grounds his 20-year-old son. He’s not allowed to go to work (how does the rest of Miami Metro feel about that?) and no killing people. The tone of Original Sin is all over the place, but I do get a kick out of how often it slips into twisted family sitcom mode.
Dexter is very bored being stuck at home, but he realizes he has to play by his dad’s rules to gain his trust back. In the episode’s best Michael C. Hall line reading, his voiceover tells us, “I learned something about myself that morning. Death didn’t feed my Dark Passenger; killing did. And I was still … hungry.” Confusingly enough, he means that in a literal sense, devouring several obviously pot brownies in the fridge while ignoring the Post-It that says they’re for the volleyball team. This does lead to a nice bonding moment after Deb comes home and realizes how baked her brother is. She decides to join him, and while some of it feels pretty stilted — Debra saying they should talk more before bringing up their dead mom is so forced — it’s nice to see these siblings giggling while watching I Love Lucy. Deb also confides in Dex about Gio and suggests a double date with him and Sofia. Do you see what I mean about twisted family-sitcom mode?
The next day is the one-year anniversary of Doris’s death, and Harry agrees with Deb that they should pay their respects at her grave. Once the plan to meet at five is set, you can safely assume Harry and Dexter are going to leave Deb hanging. The father-son duo both have police work to do: Harry is testifying at the trial of suspected home-invasion serial killer Levi Reed, and Dexter has been ungrounded so he can fingerprint the driver who hit Mad Dog. Lucky for Dex, the very freaked-out kid does not recognize him; he’s mostly too busy having a breakdown about being a murderer. LaGuerta points out that accidents happen, and it’s what we do next that matters. “Our mistakes don’t have to define us,” Dexter’s voiceover helpfully translates. “If I wanted to kill again, I’d need to learn from mine.”
In his case, that means learning about horse tranquilizers, and no, I’m not talking about recreational ketamine. While Tanya is mourning the imminent euthanizing of Ginger Snap, the racehorse she bet on, she helpfully answers Dexter’s very specific questions about sedation. (I’m still not sure what they’re doing with Tanya as a character, but “I learned that from a jockey I used to ride” is a fun line.) This leads Dex to the realization that etorphine is the perfect drug to knock out his victims and ensure they don’t pull a Mad Dog and wake up before they’re fully restrained. He takes a field trip to the Hialeah Park Race Track, where he easily pockets a good supply of etorphine. Then he gets quite literally cornered by a horse, leaving him cowering and stuck in a stable and, therefore, unable to make it to the group cemetery outing. Twisted family sitcom!
Meanwhile, Harry has problems of his own. At the Levi Reed trial, he’s facing a tough cross-examination from Reed’s defense attorney. The situation gets even worse for him when the defense suddenly produces a cleaned-up Brandi, Levi’s girlfriend, whom Harry dismissed back in the second episode without ever entering her alibi for Levi into evidence. Although Harry defends himself by saying Brandi was high and clearly lying to save her boyfriend’s ass, the defense attorney argues that “willfully disregarding a good-faith alibi constitutes suppression of evidence” — and Judge Torres agrees right away! With an apology to Reed, the case is dismissed. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I have watched decades of Law & Order, and this whole thing seems to happen awfully fast. I guess we’re dealing with sitcom pacing, too. Captain Spencer is reasonably pissed at Harry’s case-destroying mistake (episode theme alert!), telling him to take the rest of the day off while Spencer figures out what to do with him.
Does Harry go home to spend time with his daughter and accompany her to the cemetery? He does not! Instead, he heads to a bar to get drunk. When Spencer finds him there, he tells Harry that he’s pulling him off the Jimmy Powell case. Harry will now be working on the lower-tier homicide cases with LaGuerta, which doesn’t seem like too bad a punishment given that Spencer could have fired him. But that reprieve doesn’t stop Harry from getting fully hammered — drunk enough, it turns out, to go after Levi Reed himself. Pulling a gun from his glove compartment, he comes very close to shooting Levi (or shooting someone; his vision is pretty blurry). Thankfully, he’s intercepted by Dexter, who has survived his horse encounter and has the etorphine he needs to knock out his dad and prevent a much more life-altering Morgan fuck-up.
When Harry wakes up, he’s strapped onto a kill table. Dexter isn’t going to murder his father — he just wants to prove his point about being fully prepared for the next time he kills someone. After parroting LaGuerta’s message about learning from our mistakes, Dex explains that he’s found the perfect tranquilizer and even has a convenient dosing chart to make sure to avoid any future accidents. (He notes that he made sure the etorphine wouldn’t conflict with Harry’s heart medication, but did he account for his dad’s blood alcohol concentration? I think not!) Dexter says Harry should never have gone after Levi Reed himself — that’s what Dex was trained for. Surprisingly, Harry agrees, even suggesting that Dex add smelling salts to his supplies to wake his victims up faster.
So, yes, Dexter is back on track, with Levi as his next victim. No need to find additional proof of his misdeeds, Harry says, since they already have ample evidence. (I really did think Levi had been falsely accused, but I guess I was just picking up on the police ineptitude that was going to result in a mistrial.) At his belated visit to his mother’s grave, Dex reveals what he misses most about her: the way she saw a chance at goodness in him that was never really there. “I could never be good,” Dexter says, “but maybe I could still do good.” Though these sound like cut Wicked lyrics, they’re actually yet another step on his path to becoming the serial killer who only kills other serial killers we all know and love. At this point, I’m just wondering how much more origin story there is to tell.
Blood Spatter Analysis
• Original Sin has been playing fast and loose with canon, but at this point, I think we can consider season eight of Dexter fully retconned since none of this matches what Harry told Dr. Vogel. This is very disrespectful to Charlotte Rampling.
• I didn’t include the flashback scenes in the recap because they are more of the same. Harry and Laura continue their affair, and Harry shares that he had a son who died. When he returns home, Doris reveals that she’s pregnant. Tell me something I don’t know!
• I also feel like I should at least mention the scene of Debra at her mother’s grave, which is most notable because she seems to suggest that her growing distance from her father and brother is pushing her to Gio. Poor Molly Brown is saddled with the line, “I know I wasn’t always the easiest kid — just ask the fucking swear jar.”
• Who is Gio anyway? He mentions that his dad has a yacht, which could mean he’s Mad Dog’s son. That would certainly bring him into the main plot, but wouldn’t he already know about his dad’s death? (I guess these things did take longer in a pre-cell-phone era.)
• There is still not nearly enough of Tanya, though she’s at least more present in this episode. “I wanted to punch him in his smug-ass face,” she says of the defense attorney. “There was a bailiff there and, you know, professionalism.” It’s her Buffy-est line yet.
• Grounded Dexter watches Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, another fun period detail. It’s a surrealist sitcom, which definitely fits the vibe of Original Sin. And because we know that Dex is fated to escape this prequel unscathed, it also made me wonder why this show didn’t opt for the title Dexter Morgan Can’t Lose instead.