When Dexter: Resurrection premiered, I wrote that Paramount+ had the opportunity to resolve a lingering plot hole from Dexter: New Blood. Instead, the series ignored it, and according to showrunner Clyde Phillips, I shouldn’t hold my breath for them to address it in season two.
I’m talking about the whereabouts of Dexter’s stepkids and Harrison’s half-siblings Cody and Astor.
If you need a refresher, Cody and Astor were Dexter’s stepchildren from his marriage to Rita Bennett. After Rita’s death, Cody and Astor left Miami to live with their grandparents in Orlando but made occasional returns to Miami to visit Dexter and their younger half-sibling Harrison.
When a teenage Harrison shows up in Dexter: New Blood, he tells his father that he spent years in Miami’s foster care system. This begs the question of why his older siblings didn’t take care of him. They certainly adored him in the original series. It also raises the question of why Harrison didn’t track down Cody and Astor when he was hunting for Dexter.
Whatever the reason, New Blood didn’t address this, and Cody and Astor’s absence was even more awkward in Resurrection. There’s a scene in episode 5 ‘Murder Horny,’ where Harrison and Dexter say that they’re the only family they have left. This is on brand for Dexter, who was quick to push Cody and Astor to the side in the original series, but Harrison is another story.
Cody and Astor are Harrison’s blood siblings. Whenever they appeared in the later seasons of the original series, they made a point of asking for their younger brother. There is no way Cody and Astor, who are now grown, would have left Harrison live as a vagrant in New York City. With the death of Debra Morgan, Cody and Astor are the last living family Harrison and Dexter have left.
If Harrison and Dexter aren’t thinking of Cody and Astor, they aren’t alone.
“In all honesty, we don’t even think about them,” Dexter Resurrection showrunner Clyde Phillips tells Love it Film. “They’re not part of our internal conversation in the writers room. I know online everybody has all these theories that Cody’s going to come back and he’s really whatever bad guy you want to think on, or he’s going to kill Dexter or whatever it is. They’re not in our thoughts.”
With all due respect to Phillips and the Dexter: Resurrection writing team, this is a huge oversight. One line of dialogue would go a long way in answering some of the lingering questions fans have had since New Blood. Plus, Resurrection made a point of bringing back countless characters from the original series as ghosts, including James Doakes, Miguel Prado, Arthur Mitchell, and Brian Moser. Would it be so hard to bring back the two characters who are still alive?
Apparently, the answer is yes.
