Review: Dexter: Original Sin, "Kid In A Candy Store" | Season 1, Episode 2
This was distinctly NOT euphoric, Dexter
Man, I was really hoping for improvement here. The first episode was such a rushed package of, “Okay, here we go, he’s finishing pre-med and Deb is in high school and Harry is still around and now we want to let him get to killing so let’s leapfrog over all this table-setting nonsense.” It felt like episode two would definitely get to the good stuff, right? Nope. Does it identify his next victim? Sure. Does it take the entire episode, interspersed with a lot of additional table-setting and flashbacks to stuff you presumably already know, only to delay any actual killing? Sure. Why the delay? Where’s a Luigi Mangione when you need him?1
“Kid In A Candy Store” at least does the work of showing what an unprepared dork Dexter still is, which is a nice step away from the first episode’s breathless appreciation of his cadaver-cutting skills as a means to inform us just how brilliant the skills are of this budding young monster. His self-presumed smarts at blood-spatter analysis, when he has never done it before in his life, are immediately and properly mocked by the entire Miami-Metro homicide team, a nice intro to his new life that suggests—far better than the pilot did—that this guy has no real idea what he’s doing, yet.
Still, this episode shows there’s going to be a couple of parallel narratives driving this first half of the season: the hunt for the kidnapper of little Jimmy Powell in the present—peppered with one-off manhunts like Dexter’s new plan to take out the brutal criminal Tony Ferrer—and the inevitable tragedy of Harry using Dexter’s birth mother as an informant in the past. The weakness of the flashback storyline is obvious, because it’s the same as its strength: we already know this story. Done well, it could acquire the strength of decent tragedy, as Dexter’s mother climbs the ranks, the danger increases, and it ends in the bloodshed we know is coming.
Unfortunately, thus far, this plot is struggling to gain much traction, simply because we’re not getting enough time to live with these characters and this arc. I called the show’s storytelling “Cliffs Notes” in last week’s pilot, and that still applies; without enough attention and care to building this up, it feels like drama on fast-forward, hitting the most important beats in far too perfunctory a fashion. Christian Slater is doing good work (though I can’t be the only one who finds the de-aging makeup job done on him a bit distracting at times), but it’s just missing depth.