Dexter is bringing back one of its most iconic villains in the upcoming Showtime revival of the Michael C. Hall-led show. Deadline reports Monday that John Lithgow, whose portrayal of Season 4’s Trinity Killer won him an Emmy, is set to shoot a cameo in the 10-episode unofficial ninth season. It’s unclear how Trinity will return, being that Hall’s Dexter Morgan killed him in the Season 4 finale, but the show has played with flashbacks throughout its run, so that could be a possibility.
The revival, which picks up this fall nearly a decade after the widely-criticized 2013 finale, will follow Dexter’s new life in the fictional upstate New York town of Iron Lake. Starring alongside Hall in the revival are Clancy Brown as Kurt Caldwell, the unofficial mayor of Iron Lake and primary antagonist for the anti-hero, Julia Jones as Iron Lake’s first Native American Chief of Police, Alano Miller as an Iron Lake Police sergeant and Jamie Chung as a famous true-crime podcaster from Los Angeles who stumbled onto way more than she expected.
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Chung told PopCulture last month that fans of the original show would get “proper closure” for the characters as well as plenty of excitement. “I mean, you’re in for a ride. If you’re a fan of the show like I was, I read through every episode and I was like, ‘Ooh wow!’” she revealed.
On The Hollywood Reporter’s TV Top 5 podcast, showrunner Clyde Phillips said he didn’t plan on trying to revamp the critically-panned initial ending while making the revival but did want to build on the lore in a way that makes sense. “Ten years, or however many years, have passed by the time this will air, and the show will reflect that time passage,” he explained. “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.”
While Phillips said this was “an opportunity to make [the finale] right,” with the revival, he didn’t want to insult fans’ intelligence with any kind of overused television trope. “We’re not undoing anything,” he maintained. “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.” Dexter returns to Showtime in the fall.
