Dexter has always been one of my favorite characters. I started watching this new season while I was in Canada and finished it in Singapore, which feels unintentionally fitting for a character who has always lived between versions of himself. Every time there is a new spinoff or continuation, I do the same thing without negotiation. I rewatch all eight seasons again. Not to prepare. To remember what the relationship actually is.

Dexter Resurrection works because it understands that this story is no longer about cleverness. In the early years, the fantasy was control. A code. A system. A belief that discipline could organize darkness into something acceptable. Watching it now, that fantasy reads differently. The show is less interested in whether the code works and more interested in what it costs to keep pretending that it does.

This is a quieter Dexter. Older. Worn down. Still precise, still dangerous, but no longer insulated from the gravity of his own history. The series slows itself down and lets silence do real labor. It allows guilt and unfinished business to sit in the room without being tidied up. That restraint is where its confidence lives.

At the same time, the show does something more uncomfortable. It never fully lets Dexter stop being central. We are still inside his head. Still asked to understand him more than the damage he leaves behind. And that tension matters. Because it raises a harder question. Is this a reckoning, or is it a refined version of the same fantasy. Control, now softened by regret. Structure, now wrapped in age and self awareness.

Both readings hold. And that is why the show is interesting.

Movement does not automatically equal transformation. Crossing borders does not erase patterns. Canada to Singapore. One life to another. Same body, same mind, different context. Dexter mirrors that truth. Change without absolution. Continuity disguised as growth.

Dexter Resurrection is not trying to shock its way back into relevance. It trusts the audience to bring history with them. It assumes we are older too. More skeptical. Less impressed by cleverness. More curious about consequence.

So yes, this is my TV pick of 2025. Not because it answers everything, but because it refuses to pretend the questions are simple. Some stories endure because they resolve. Others endure because they trap us in the same unresolved space we are still negotiating ourselves.

And that discomfort is the point.