Dexter: Resurrection Recap: Red Dead Redemption

I know nostalgia is a prison, but I felt genuinely giddy when the third episode of Dexter: Resurrection opened with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Batista having a drink with Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington) and Vince Masuka (C.S. Lee). Thankfully, we do get a full scene later in the episode, and because I missed Harrington teasing his return to Dexter, it was a pleasant surprise. It’s also, admittedly, fairly brief. After getting a call from Teddy about Dexter’s truck being sold in New York, Batista decides to pack it up and head to New York. That also means he’s retiring from Miami Metro after 40 years. Seems a bit abrupt to me, though it’s clear his only focus now is taking down the Bay Harbor Butcher. “You ever had that one thing you just can’t let go?” he asks his friends. Based on nothing but my own speculation (and many, many years of Dexter viewership), I’m guessing this single-minded pursuit does not end well for our pal Angel. What are the odds Quinn picks up the mantle next season if Batista doesn’t survive this one?

I’m jumping ahead, in large part because that rush of nostalgia was the most amped up I felt all episode. So far, Resurrection is solid — and for Dexter, that’s not a given! — but the Harrison murder investigation storyline can’t compete with his dad’s more dynamic return. I’m ready for the two Morgans’ paths to cross again so that we can move things along. Dexter, however, isn’t there yet. What he is ready to do is get back to killing, first by procuring the etorphine he uses to knock out his victims from a very unscrupulous veterinary prescription service, and then by doing a background check on Ronald Schmidt, the man he identified as the (imposter) Dark Passenger in the last episode. Dexter’s easily able to get his address and inadvertently follows Charley’s footsteps from the season premiere to locate the serial killer’s hidden trophies. He learns that Ronald actually goes by “Red” — how many aliases does one man need? — and that he’ll be at Rockefeller Center the next night, presumably cruising for UrCar drivers he can decapitate. “Kill you soon, Red,” says Dex, who may have lost a little of his wit when he was in a coma for 10 weeks.

Dexter’s pursuit of Red has largely felt too easy, but that’s in line with the franchise as a whole, so I can’t really knock Resurrection for staying true to the character. And it’s certainly more compelling than drama over Dex’s incipient career as a rideshare driver, which is in crisis because of a low rating that could get him kicked off the service. As much as Dexter has always focused on the title antihero’s tortured attempts at normalcy, this whole plotline is a means to an end, so do we really need a scene of Blessing explaining that you have to anticipate your passengers’ needs by having water and snacks at your disposal? Blessing is also not totally there as a character. At this point, he exists mostly so that his tight-knit family can remind Dexter of how fractured his own is. There is currently strife in the Kamara clan because Blessing’s daughter, Joy (Reese Antoinette), wants to move to California with her boyfriend, and Blessing wants her close to home. Later in the episode, Dexter lets Joy do acupuncture on him to relieve some of his post-coma pain. She tells him how much she loves her father, even when he’s driving her crazy, and that she’d miss him if they were apart. This, of course, makes Dex think of his own estrangement from Harrison, though in the very next scene, he opts not to reveal himself. “A boy needs his father,” Harry insists to no avail. I don’t know if I always agree with that, particularly when the boy shot his father and left him for dead, but we’re definitely overdue for a family reunion.

And Harrison could use the help, because he’s predictably awful at being the subject of an investigation. Wallace and Oliva have footage of him helping carry the visibly drugged Shauna up to Ryan’s room, and then nothing after that. That’s suspicious before Harrison makes it worse by lying that he went to a bar after and had a sleepover with a one-night stand. Sure, he’s worried that the cops will find out he doesn’t have a home address because he’s been secretly living at the hotel, but it’s a lie that invites further complications. He seems genuinely surprised when Wallace asks for the woman’s name, since she’s Harrison’s only alibi. “You are not not a suspect” are the most comforting words the detective can offer. In Harrison’s defense, he’s new to this kind of police pressure, and Wallace, in particular (as I noted last week), is more competent than your average Dexter detective. After finding out that Shauna’s rape kit was negative but that she did have traces of Rohypnol in her system, Wallace is instantly able to determine what happened: A good samaritan intervened and stopped a sexual assault, then bashed the attempted rapist over the head with a toilet tank lid. She knows the body was taken away on a room service cart. She knows it was dismembered in the kitchen. She even knows where the blood spattered — and would have seen that spot on the ceiling, if Dexter hadn’t cleaned it off.

It doesn’t help Harrison’s case that there’s no footage of him leaving or coming back to the hotel in the time between Ryan’s murder and his shift the next afternoon. Wallace confronts Harrison with an accusation. She thinks he killed Ryan, and she also understands why he did it. She and Oliva are both playing some version of good cop, suggesting a murder one charge could be reduced to justifiable homicide. It looks like Harrison is going to confess, but what he actually reveals is that he’s homeless and crashing in vacant rooms at the hotel — he lied to protect Elsa, who has been facilitating his living arrangement. Wallace wants to talk to her so Elsa can corroborate the story and give Harrison a real alibi. His friend and budding love interest (they watch Drag Race together; it’s cute) confirms that she lets Harrison sleep in empty rooms, and bizarrely, Wallace and Oliva have no further questions. Harrison’s living at the hotel accounts for his whereabouts, but it has no bearing on whether or not he murdered Ryan. Wouldn’t they want to know if Elsa saw him that night? This is not an alibi! Maybe her insistence that Harrison is a good person who would never hurt anyone is simply very convincing.

For the time being, at least, Harrison is out of the hot seat. The same can’t be said for Dexter, who is ready to end the Dark Passenger’s reign of terror, but is still not back to 100 percent. How else to account for his clumsiness when he drops the etorphine needle in the dreaded space between the driver’s seat and the center console — just as Red gets in the car? As we’ve seen, Red wastes no time before striking. He has his barbed chain around Dexter’s neck before Dex can reach the needle. “The kill tables have turned, and I hate it,” his voiceover concedes. This is the moment Red normally torments his victims by making them talk about the family they’ll be leaving behind. Dexter is surprisingly candid, though, noting that Harrison wouldn’t miss him if he were gone, because he’s already dead to him. “I pushed him too hard to be like me, but in the end, I wasn’t even being true to myself,” Dex tells his assailant. Not getting the psychological torture he’s after, Red makes Dexter pull over and almost immediately starts sawing at his neck. To his credit, Dex has thought ahead and hidden a piece of protective metal under a turtleneck. (Chic and functional!) He’s also finally able to grab the needle and inject the so-called Dark Passenger. “Don’t you know nobody likes backseat drivers?” he says after Red has passed out. Why waste a good joke on someone unconscious?

Dexter has transformed Red’s apartment into a kill room — a familiar sight, down to Red plastic-wrapped to a table. It’s here that we discover the serial killer’s true motivation. While I detected an anti-immigrant motive last week, it turns out Red’s really just anti-UrCar drivers because his dad spent his life savings on a taxi medallion that ended up being useless once rideshare services took over. Red’s father jumped into the East River, and when his body was found, his head had been severed by the dredger that was looking for him. Now Red takes the heads of the drivers who (in his mind) pushed his dad to suicide. As origin stories go, it’s a silly one (not that rideshare services aren’t evil), but it helps continue the “daddy issues” throughline of the episode. It’s not enough for Dexter to reconsider killing him, of course, and neither is Red’s mention of an invitation and a backpack filled with cash. “I’m Dexter, and there’s only room in this world for one Dark Passenger,” our hero says, before plunging his knife into Red. But what was that about an invitation?

In a scene earlier in the episode, we see Charley oversee the preparation for a very fancy dinner party with six VIP guests. Now, Dexter has the invitation in his hands. “You are cordially invited to a dinner party for like-minded individuals who share similar passions,” he reads. “An opportunity for conversation and camaraderie and to share your craft with colleagues.” The money is a “good-faith offering,” with more promised if he sells his trophies. Dex has the obvious response to finding out about a dinner party for serial killers: “Only in New York.” Before he disposes of Red’s body in a furnace he’s found in a part of the city no one goes to — convenient! — he notes his resemblance to the Dark Passenger. It looks like Dexter must have missed the part about the invitation being non-transferrable, because soon enough he’s cutting off Red’s thumb, which he’ll need to use for fingerprint access to the dinner party. “My path must be walked alone,” his voiceover notes, “but who says I can’t meet a few folks along the way?” Marqus Clae’s “This Is the Beginning” plays, and it does indeed feel like the real story of the season is finally getting started.

Blood-Spatter Analysis

• I smiled when Dexter used his Patrick Bateman alias again, but could have done without his voiceover spelling it out. “American Psycho was a formative read when I was 19,” he says, more shameless Original Sin promo.

• Sometimes Dex is brilliant and sometimes it feels like he was in a coma for much longer than 10 weeks. When he learns about a background check website, he wonders, “If it can find me, can it find the Dark Passenger?” How is this new information for him?

• I was also surprised he didn’t seem concerned when he cut himself on the barbed chain murder weapon in Red’s apartment. This is someone who should be keenly aware of DNA evidence.

• Speaking of murder investigations, I’m still stuck on the detectives treating Elsa as an alibi for Harrison without trying to get any more information out of her. He’s basically their only suspect at this point, and they really should be going at him a lot harder.

• I’m not sure if the show is trying to diagnose Wallace, but she’s coded with some overused neurodivergence tropes that I don’t love. “I have been told I am not good at showing empathy, but I hope that you know that I understand what happened,” she tells Harrison.

• What does one serve at a dinner party for serial killers, and is it people?