Dexter Revival Will Have “No Resemblance” to Original Finale

Dexter showrunner Clyde Phillips has been talking about using the show's revival to end the series in a satisfying way.

According to returning showrunner Clyde Phillips, Dexter’s new 10-episode limited revival at Showtime will seek a more fitting ending for the series, after fans were left largely disappointed by the Season 8 finale that saw Michael C. Hall’s serial killer retiring to the Pacific Northwest to become a lumberjack.

Phillips, who was in charge of the better first half of the Miami-set crime drama, says that the revival won’t exactly “undo” what happened at the end of Season 8, but instead “basically start from scratch.”

“We want this to not be Dexter season nine,” Phillips informed THR on its Top 5 podcast via NME. “10 years, or however many years, have passed by the time this will air, and the show will reflect that time passage. In so far as the ending of the show, this will have no resemblance to how the original finale was. It’s a great opportunity to write a second finale for our show, and Showtime was very gracious about that.”

Filming on the revival is set to begin in early 2021, with Hall returning to star in the central role. It’s not yet clear how many other former Dexter stars will choose to take another ride with the now-iconic-for-probably-the-wrong-reasons serial killer and his ‘dark passenger’, but Phillips has indicated that Hall came back onboard the show because he was “not completely satisfied” with the way it ended.

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“This is an opportunity to make that right, but that’s not why we’re doing it,” he explained. “We’re doing this because there is such a hunger for Dexter out there. We’re not undoing anything. We’re not going to betray the audience and say, ‘Whoops, that was all a dream.’ What happened in the first eight years happened in the first eight years.”

Showtime announced Dexter’s surprising revival last week, and fans have been vocally curious about how the show plans to write its way out the Season 8 finale with a new and sudden TV swansong. The Jeff Lindsay book series adaptation was fairly beloved in its first four seasons, following Hall’s Dexter Morgan as he specialized in bloodstain pattern analysis for the fictional Miami Metro Police Department by day, and hunted his prey by night.

Dexter is such a special series, both for its millions of fans and for Showtime, as this breakthrough show helped put our network on the map many years ago,” Showtime Entertainment president Gary Levine said in a statement about the revival. “We would only revisit this unique character if we could find a creative take that was truly worthy of the brilliant, original series. Well, I am happy to report that Clyde Phillips and Michael C. Hall have found it, and we can’t wait to shoot it and show it to the world.”

Marvel Comics was behind a Dexter limited series towards the end of its run in 2013. It was later followed by another batch called Dexter: Down Under in 2014. In 2015, a hidden object mobile game called Dexter: Hidden Darkness was released where you could play as Dexter as he solved crimes and hunted down other killers.