DEXTER’S SEVENTH WILL BE BLOODY SURPRISING.
When Dexter returns for an improbable seventh season Sunday, Dexter Morgan — blood-splatter-pattern analyst for Miami Metro Dade’s police department by day, vigilanteminded serial killer by night — has found himself in a bit of a pickle.
For six years, Dexter Morgan had dispensed his own kind of rough justice — killing murderers who somehow eluded the short, stubby arm of the law — in relative anonymity, with no one knowing, especially not those closest and dearest to him.
In last December’s sixth-season finale cliffhanger, however, it appeared he had finally been caught in the act, as it were, by his brittle, emotionally fragile adoptive sister and work colleague, Debra Morgan.
Dexter Morgan has some splainin’ to do. After his sister witnessed him in all his Dark Passenger fury at the end of that episode, portentously titled This is How the World Ends, his reaction — “Oh, God!” — is not going to cut it. And neither is, “This is not what it looks like!”
For seven-time lead actor Emmynominee Michael C. Hall, the 41-yearold Raleigh, N.C., performer who has played Dexter Morgan since the series’ inception on Oct. 1, 2006, it was time things were brought to a head.
Hall may have been nominated for the Emmy seven times — six for Dexter, including this past season, and once for Six Feet Under, in 2002 — but playing the same emotional beat year after year can get tiresome. Now that Dexter’s secret has been revealed to the one person in his life he is closest to, and the one person least able to forgive him, there’s a whole new shade of hidden meaning to the coming season.
And Hall, for one, finds the challenge welcome.
“Her finding out makes the end game feel a little more real and imminent,” Hall told reporters at last month’s meeting of the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles.
Parent network Showtime has revealed this season will be the second from the last: The series will end for good in December 2013 with its eighth season. However Dexter ends, that ending must be foreshadowed to some extent during the coming season.
“The plan is to do this season and a final eighth season,” Hall said.
“To really tell this story of the two of them renegotiating their relationship, with this new knowledge, requires about that much time.”
Jennifer Carpenter, the 32-yearold Louisville, Ky., native who plays Debra, concurred. Her character has been put through the emotional wringer in Dexter’s six seasons so far, with one unhappy coincidence piling on top of another, both on the job and in her home live, but Carpenter is looking forward to tackling her character from a whole new angle of angst and self-doubt.
“I had been looking forward to it, to be honest ” Carpenter admitted. “All the anxiety I’m feeling as an actor is exactly where I think Debra is supposed to be. I didn’t want Debra to lose credibility with the audience. She’s supposed to be good at what she does; that’s how we’ve always seen her. And from what I’ve seen so far, I think the writers are doing it so that I don’t have to shape-shift or anything to make it fit, just for the sake of the show.”