Even Michael C. Hall wanted to know what happened to Dexter.

Showtime is bringing Dexter: New Blood to the network for a ten-episode season beginning November 7th and released the show’s first trailer at a virtual panel at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend. Speaking at a panel, Hall addressed why it was the right time to reboot the show while speaking at the panel, which also featured producers and Dexter newcomer Julia Jones, Hall said that it was wondering, “What the hell happened to this guy?”

Set to Del Shannon’s hit “Runaway”, the trailer reveals Dexter living his assumed life as a friendly small-town citizen. He seems happy, but as the trailer shows, he hasn’t been able to run from his past. Knives are prominent in the trailer as Dexter is seen tempted by or handling hunting knives at several points throughout. “Sometimes, I have an urge too strong to ignore,” Dexter narrates over a visual of a knife.

The revival will begin almost a decade after the season eight finale, something Clyde Phillips, showrunner of the first four seasons of Dexter, said star Hall pushed for. “One of the things that we all agreed on, and Michael really insisted on it — he was completely right — is that this not be Dexter season 9; that we acknowledge that this is not the next moment after the lumberjack moment; that we acknowledge the truth, that time has passed — almost 10 years have passed — and we pick up [with] Dexter in another place, in another world, actually, as far away from Miami as possible.”

Hall added, “I think enough time has passed, and the storytelling opportunities were a lot more interesting, I think, for having had some time between the end and now.”

Dexter now lives in Iron Lake, a small town in Upstate New York, where he is working as a sales associate at Fred’s Fish & Game store. Trying to stay anonymous, he is now going by the name Jim Lindsay (a nod to Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter novels.) Dexter’s chief rival will be played by Clancy Brown (Carnivale, Billions) who plays Kurt Caldwell, the ruthless unofficial mayor of Iron Lake. Will his repressed serial killer urge start rising up to the surface? (Let’s face it, the premise of the show kind of depends on it.)

New characters to be introduced this season include Goliath‘s Julia Jones as Iron Lake’s first Native American Chief of Police and Dex’s new romantic squeeze, Underground and Jane the Virgin veteran Alano Miller as an Iron Lake PD sergeant and Lovecraft Country‘s Jamie Chung as a famous true-crime podcaster from Los Angeles who finds herself a part of the show’s central mystery.

John Lithgow has been confirmed to return as Arthur Mitchell, aka the Trinity Killer (albeit only in flashback) and Jennifer Carpenter is also coming back as Deb Morgan, Dexter’s sister, again just in a fantasy or dream sequence.

Hall believes the negative reception to Dexter‘s 2013 finale played a role in the decision to revisit the series. He admitted, “It was a huge part of it…I think the ending was mystifying at best to people. Confounding, exasperating, frustrating, and on down the line of, you know, negative adjectives. And I think this is a show that is very important to all of us, and the chance to revisit it and maybe, in the process, redefine the sense of the show’s ending, the sense of the show’s legacy more broadly, was certainly a part of our motivation. No doubt.”

“Going back to the way the show ended, I think we see Dexter having made a choice to go into a sort of self-imposed exile,” Hall said. “And I think he’s doing a very, very long, protracted penance for the people who’ve died who were close to him, and not intended to be victims, because of how he’d been living, how he was playing fast and loose with the code.”