Sarah Michelle Gellar is always wonderful, even when the series around her isn’t. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had high highs and low lows, but her performance was always tremendous, equal parts emotional and hilarious. This was also true while she carried the soap opera/thriller/fever dream Ringer in which she played estranged twins forever enacting the darkest and most absurd riff on a twin-switch sitcom plot. It was pretty hilariously terrible, but she was great. The point is, Gellar is an actor who can shine regardless of whether the series she’s on is great or terrible. This comes to mind as I watch Gellar’s performance on Dexter: Original Sin. It’s a thoroughly mediocre series overall and while Gellar is delightful in it, I must ask: what is it doing with Sarah Michelle Gellar?
Original Sin isn’t terrible and it has occasional moments of juice. Still, it’s too consumed with retreading plot points of Dexter’s past that fans already know without supplying a new angle or insight to be consistently good. Casting Gellar in a series set in the ’90s is a fun and clever choice that’s sadly rare among the show’s creative decisions. Gellar plays CSI Chief Tanya Martin, a mentor to young Dexter as he starts his fateful career at Miami Metro’s homicide department. She’s great: steely, sassy, powerful, and a sharp-tongued presence. She gets some really fun lines too. When she gives a surprisingly detailed explanation of how horses are sedated with etorphine (the drug that Dex will later use to sedate his victims), she explains how she knows all this: “I learned that from a jockey I used to ride.” In another episode, where Dex uses some melons to demonstrate blood splatter, Tanya puts a kind of amazing button by walking in and asking “Are those my cantaloupes?!” It’s one of those lines that’s even funnier without context; like I’d almost expect that to be an improviser’s response to the prompt “discarded lines from a sitcom.” Gellar nails the delivery and sells them for all they’re worth, but the trouble is that these scattered lines are all we get.
Original Sin seems to have brought in a big gun but is entirely unsure how to use it. The quips are a good place to start; sometimes the combination of the writing and her delivery evokes her work as Buffy. She seems to be there only to deliver these little one-liners and then recede into the periphery. It’s as if Gellar was hired without anyone realizing what else she can play. She’s proven herself to be one of the finest cryers in all of television and she can play pathos just as well as comedy.
I understand that Tanya isn’t a main character, that Original Sin is stuffed to the gills with plotlines, and that the show is mainly focused on telling us stories about the younger versions of characters we already know, but surely we can give Gellar more to do than glare and crack wise. Especially considering she’s set up as Dex’s mentor, it feels like we don’t get nearly enough mentor/protégé scenes. Maybe the series is hesitant to focus on things outside its main mission, but if that’s the case, why even create this character for Gellar to play? I fear Tanya is likely not long for this world, somehow. Most of the rest of the cast are characters we know survived until the time of the original series, so it feels like anyone outside that pool is fair game. Maybe she’ll be the unlucky cop who catches onto Dex and is killed in his attempt to stay hidden. I certainly hope not, but it wouldn’t be out of character for the franchise.
While all this might sound crabby, it comes from a place of being excited to have Sarah Michelle Gellar back on my screen. She’s an immensely entertaining performer and it’s natural to want her to get something fun to do. If nothing else, her role on Dexter: Original Sin serves as a return to television, one that might lead to other roles in other series. Especially if my hunch is correct and Tanya is killed off, that would leave her open to pursue other roles. I’m conflicted about the prospect of a Buffy reboot, but Gellar recently intimated that she was open to it, so maybe whatever heat she gathers from this role on Dexter could lend some support to that.