Somewhere in New York, a rideshare passenger is about to make a serial killer feel his age. That small, petty insult is the engine of “Risky Business”, the “Dexter: Resurrection” Season 2 premiere, which streamed on Paramount+ on Friday, October 30th, at 12 a.m. PT, 3 a.m. ET. It hands Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) a problem far more ordinary, and far more awkward, than a serial killer is used to. The story picks up three years after the first-season finale, with Dexter still working through the files of living killers he took that night. The series is a little grubbier and a lot funnier about it than a franchise this old has any right to be, because its hero would like, just once, to be thanked.
Paramount’s logline puts Dexter between two killers, one notorious and the other terrorizing New York in ways nobody saw coming, and has him “battling his greatest enemy yet: a midlife crisis”, a phrase that sums up the season’s pitch. The notorious one is the New York Ripper (Brian Cox), a retired murderer who now spends his time taunting the survivors of his old crimes, and the new one is the Five Borough Killer (Dan Stevens), who in the network’s description works like the Zodiac, phoning in threats and then making good on them. Longtime Dexter director Marcos Siega is behind the camera, and the premiere lands in the franchise’s twentieth anniversary year, which Paramount made a selling point in its Season 2 announcement. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Dexter: Resurrection” Season 2 and the ending of “Risky Business.”
Somewhere in New York, a rideshare passenger is about to make a serial killer feel his age.”
The premiere opens inside a dream, and the dream is a buddy-cop movie. Dexter and Angel Batista (David Zayas) burst into a hideout, subdue the New York Ripper, and tie him to the table. Angel picks out the knife and hands it over, only for the victim to turn into Angel the moment the blade goes in. Dexter wakes up carrying the guilt of the man he could not save last season. According to But Why Tho?, Kane Hodder of the “Friday the 13th” films plays the Ripper in the dream, with Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” playing over the raid, and the site found the tone “all the way off”. Harry (James Remar) is waiting when Dexter wakes, to tell him Angel’s death was not his fault, an absolution that Dexter has, in effect, issued to himself.
Then the show remembers what it is. Dexter, it turns out, has spent the gap working through the files he took from Leon Prater (Peter Dinklage), and the Midnight Mangler and the Yonkers Slayer are already dead. But Why Tho? describes a stylish montage of those kills, with wrestler Chris Jericho and Shavo Odadjian of System of a Down playing two of the killers on his list, and counts it among the better stretches of the hour. Between kills he drives for a rideshare service, where a passenger who is unhappy with his driving calls him a boomer on the way out. The opening titles then return as a homage to the original series’ morning-routine sequence, a nod that But Why Tho? says fans have been begging for.
Harrison (Jack Alcott) is about to graduate from the police academy, and the father and son have settled into weekly catch-ups that feel warmer than anything they managed in the first season. The two agree to share locations, a detail that is almost certainly there to be used against Dexter later, and he promises to be at the graduation ceremony. The warmth in these scenes is real, which is what makes the setup cruel, because a promise that clear in a series like this is rarely kept, and the episode goes on to make the gap between what Dexter says and what he does the sorest spot in his week.
Across town, detectives Claudette Wallace (Kadia Saraf) and Melvin Oliva (Dominic Fumusa) are working from the NYPD’s haul from Prater’s vault, and the files name Don Framt as the New York Ripper. Framt is now an elderly man in a wheelchair, and by Vulture’s count this is the ninth time the detectives have questioned him without getting anywhere, while he keeps leaving taunting messages for the families of his victims. Captain Mixon (Bokeem Woodbine) wants him in prison but tells his detectives they need real evidence. Cox plays Framt as a gleeful troll, and Vulture notes that he spits in his coffee cup in case the police want his DNA again.
The Five Borough Killer is the attention-seeker. He phones the police to announce that he will kill someone at a baseball game the next day. When rain cancels the game, he strolls through the parking lot in smart glasses that record, says “nobody cares”, and shoots a woman as she reaches her car. Later he AirDrops the footage to people in a park, and he has crossed only one borough off his list. It is the Zodiac routine updated for phones, and Stevens plays it cold and tidy, a killer who treats the whole city as an audience, which makes him the mirror image of a Dexter who has spent years making sure nobody connects him to his kills.
The rest of the hour belongs to Al Walker (Eric Stonestreet), the ponytail-collecting Rapunzel who left town last season, and to Dexter’s decision to go after him. Harrison and Harry both warn him he is taking more risks than he should, and Vulture quotes his reply to Harry: “I’m not even supposed to be alive, Dad. Let me live a little.” He drives to Pennsylvania anyway, finds Al on a family RV trip, searches the camper and takes the trophies, and introduces himself under the alias “Red” that got him into Prater’s circle. Al’s family-man act ends fast, and Vulture quotes him on his wife and kids: “I tell them what to do, and they do it.” Dexter says the deaths of the others have rattled him, and Al agrees to meet at an abandoned auto body shop that Dexter has turned into a kill room.
The kill room does not go the way Dexter planned. Al realizes his trophies are gone, and what was meant to be a controlled execution becomes a floor fight in which Rapunzel nearly kills him, leaving Dexter winded and sore, a man whose eyesight is failing too. He finally gets a chain around Al’s neck and hoists him, and rather than follow his usual routine he leaves the body hanging in the shop. Back in New York, Harry reads the whole episode as a dangerous midlife crisis, and Vulture has Dexter bristling when a search for news of Rapunzel’s death turns up nothing, which is the show’s neatest way of saying what he wants.
Harrison, meanwhile, gets Dexter’s all-caps text, “NOT GOING TO MAKE IT, BUDDY”, according to Vulture, graduates without his father in the room, and hooks up with Fiona (Nona Parker Johnson), who turns out to be a cop in the Homicide unit and Captain Mixon’s daughter. But Why Tho? says the two meet while Harrison is out drinking with his academy classmates, and it calls his thread easily the episode’s weakest. The coincidence is a lot to ask, but it does tie Dexter’s son to the family of the homicide captain, which will probably matter once Dexter’s hobby comes under scrutiny.
The final scene brings back an old face. Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington), the Miami Metro detective with a long history with Dexter, walks into the NYPD and asks to speak with Wallace about Batista’s death. Paramount upgraded Harrington to a series regular for this season, so the visit is clearly not a one-off, and the premiere leaves what Quinn knows, and what he wants, entirely open, which is perhaps the smartest place to leave it. For a Dexter who has just killed a man in Pennsylvania and left him hanging, the timing could hardly be worse.
Taken whole, “Risky Business” is a set-up episode, and it knows it. The craft problem is tone, since the dream and the rideshare gag play broad and the premiere’s first stretch can feel like a different show. Yet the Al fight gives the hour a jolt, because it is one of the rare moments when Dexter’s careful kill room fails him. IGN’s Matt Fowler called the premiere “a fun, twisty start” and wished Season 2 “had just been given a whole new subtitle”. The pairing of Cox and Stevens seems built to bracket Dexter’s own anxiety, one a man whose notoriety has outlived his body and the other a man who manufactures an audience, and Dexter, caught between them, wants the attention without the consequences.
Episode 2, “Young Blood”, arrives Friday, November 6th, and the ten-episode season runs weekly through Friday, January 1st, 2027. Paramount+ Premium is where it streams first, and Decider reports that Showtime airs the premiere on Sunday, November 1st, at 8 p.m. ET.
What Do You Think? Was the buddy-cop dream a brilliant way to show Dexter’s guilt, or the wrong note to start on? Is the Five Borough Killer the kind of rival who can finally make Dexter feel his age, or will Brian Cox’s Ripper turn out to be the bigger problem? And with Joey Quinn in the building, how long can Dexter leave a hanging body in Pennsylvania without it coming back to him?
See you on the next binge!
