1x02 Storm of Fuck

[5.8/10] The part I like about this one is the hangover from the original run of Dexter. The awkwardness between Dexter and his son as they try to forge a new relationship, any relationship, is palpable and understandable. I particularly like one of the closing scenes, where Harrison asks the $64,000 question -- why did you abandon me?

His story is a heartbreaking one, of thinking his father was dead and missing him every night, only to discover something worse -- that maybe his father left because of him. The emotional turmoil of that would be hollowing. It’s a hard conversation, the kind that a child and absentee father should have in this situation.

And Dexter’s oddly sympathetic here, explaining that he wasn’t worried about Harrison, a small kid with a big heart, but worried that his own “demons” would screw an innocent child up. Deb is the voice in his head reinforcing that fear, which reflects a specific and unusual concern, but also a more universal worry from parents that they’ll pass on their own damage to the kids they love. Having Dexter own up to that, want to make up for it, want to have a relationship with his son, is all good, strong material.

Unfortunately, it’s only maybe twenty percent of this episode. The rest of it is building up the situation and players in Iron Lake, and despite us only being two episodes in, I gotta tell you, I just don’t care.

On a smaller scale, watching Dexter clear off his tracks before the cops find them is pretty dull stuff. It’s episode 2. We know he’s not going to get caught. And none of the ways he stages the scene or misdirects the police is especially clever or interesting.

On a larger scale, you can feel the show clumsily laying the groundwork for the tensions with the Seneca, and the raft of missing girls, and the influence the Caldwell family and the petrochemical billionaire dude have on the town. Part of me wants to commend the show for this stuff. There’s tons of shows out there that don’t bother to establish the elements of their story or why they matter, and New Blood is definitely taking the time and space to do so. It’s just so transparent and blunt in how it does so that it’s hard not to see the strings the whole time it’s happening.

I’m also not terribly interested in the season-length plot that's forming. Maybe I’m inured to this stuff after eight seasons of Dexter, but you can see where this is going. The seemingly bad rich guy is probably fine. The seemingly good rich guy is probably bad. They’re almost certainly behind the disappearing girls a la the poor hitchhiker who’s drugged and trapped in a room here. So meanwhile you have Caldwell or the cops getting closer to figuring out that Dexter killed Matt and you have Dexter getting closer to figuring out who’s behind the girls’ disappearance. Plus, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Audrey turns out to be the secret daughter/grandchild/niece of someone involved, because that's how Dexter goes. (Hello Christine from season 4!)

The whole thing just feels so rote. You can feel the writers try to draw out some interesting themes about jet-setters imposing their will on the working class, and how indigenous people are disrespected and disregarded. But it largely comes off like window dressing.

Likewise, the show also tries to develop Anjela, and I just don’t care. Again, it’s a laudable thing to do in episode 2 -- sketch out one of your new characters more. But the performance is mild and passable at best, and the whole “I adopted Audrey after losing my biological daughter” dynamic comes off pretty facile. Right now, she’s a big nothing of a character, without the more interesting dynamic and chemistry that Dexter had with Rita (or god help us, even with Lumen).

Oddly enough, I do kind of like Audrey as a character though. Funnily enough my wife called that she and Harrison would have a flirtation without having watched a single second of the episode, which speaks to how cliched it is. And her bog standard teenage rebellion is no great shakes. But between her activism, her resistance to searching for Matt Caldwell because the guy was an asshole, and yet her empathy for someone like Harrison who’s been through a lot (even shutting down her jerk teenage friends), gives her the kind of shading and depth I wish we saw elsewhere. Even if I don’t love their scenes, which hit a lot of predictable beats, there’s potential there.

On the whole, though, this is a pretty boring episode despite the nominal threat of a town wide search for Dexter’s victim. Very little here is interesting or exciting on a scene-by-scene basis, which ought to be difficult given the premise. But so much of this comes off desultory or generic in the early going, outside of one piercing conversation between a young man and the father who abandoned him.

Though hey, Hannah’s dead! So even if New Blood fumbles everything else, at least it did one thing right.