Warning: SPOILERS for Dexter: New Blood episode 8.
While the Bay Harbor Butcher had to adjust his M.O. to fit with his new life in Iron Lake, Dexter: New Blood has seemingly retconned the original drug he used to subdue his victims. While acting on his vigilante serial killer urges in Miami, Dexter Morgan routinely kept to his M.O. of wearing his classic green long-sleeved shirt, drugging his victims with a syringe full of M99, making a “kill room” with a table and plastic tarp, taping his nude victims down, and stabbing them in the heart before dismembering them. Dexter’s new surroundings have led him to change nearly every aspect of his original M.O., but a minor detail from New Blood episode 8 seems to retcon that his “new” drug of Ketamine isn’t new at all.
Surprisingly for a sequel series set a decade after the original, Dexter: New Blood has yet to retcon any major details about Dexter’s life in Miami. Even with cameos from John Lithgow’s Trinity Killer and Angel Batista, New Blood has kept faithful to the original series. As a proper continuation, New Blood has also answered long-held Bay Harbor Butcher mysteries from Dexter’s season 8 finale, such as how Miami Metro never discovered Dexter to be the real culprit. Instead, the police remain under the impression that James Doakes was the Bay Harbor Butcher, with plenty of content online summarizing his many killings and, most importantly, his M.O.
As Angela does online research on the killer in Dexter: New Blood episode 8, one major aspect of Dexter’s original M.O. has been changed from the series, whether that be a retcon or mistake in police reports. While suspecting Dexter of suspicious activity by injecting Iron Lake criminals with Ketamine, she searches “Ketamine Miami Homicide” on Google, with the search engine results explicitly stating, “[Doakes’] victims were… rendered unconscious with Ketamine injected into their neck.” The accompanying results in Angela's Dexter: New Blood search also stated that the Bay Harbor Butcher drugged his victims with Ketamine, which is wrong, as Dexter routinely mentioned using M99/Etorphine, a large animal tranquilizer, to subdue his victims. The drugs aren’t synonymous with one another either, as Ketamine is a powerful medication primarily used for anesthesia on humans, whereas Etorphine is legally only allowed for veterinary use.
This seems like an odd detail for Dexter: New Blood to mistakenly include in the Bay Harbor Butcher’s M.O., as Dexter himself mentions having to go about different ways to get drugs after losing his access to a police department. In Dexter season 1, he explains that he attained his M99 from the DEA by using the fake alias “Patrick Bateman, M.D.,” a clever reference to American Psycho. As he no longer had access to such databases sources in New Blood's reboot series, Dexter instead goes to his vet and asks her for Ketamine to use on his goat, which he used on both Miles and Jasper. This adaptive change isn’t a retcon of Dexter’s original M.O. in any way, but the Google search results in New Blood episode 8 claiming he used Ketamine back in Miami certainly is.
It’s possible that this error in New Blood’s search engine is due to a mistake in Miami Metro’s police records, which wouldn’t be surprising when recalling the perfunctory formal policework by Dexter’s old colleagues. On the other hand, Ketamine can at times be confused with M99 by coroners in autopsies, so it’s possible that Dexter's original series serial killer victim reports mistakenly attributed the drugs in their systems to Ketamine instead of Etorphine. Since Dexter: New Blood doesn’t seem like the type of series to retcon such an important detail in the Bay Harbor Butcher’s M.O., it’s much more possible that this was a mistake in the coronary reports, but this tiny error also conveniently led to Dexter’s connection to the killer.
Dexter and Dexter: New Blood are both streaming on SHOWTIME.