I really could not believe what I was hearing, that Dexter: Resurrection, what would be the third try of bringing the series back to life, is now considered one of the best seasons of the franchise ever. But after binging nine out of ten episodes this week, including last night’s penultimate one, I have to say wow, they really nailed it.
We might as well start with spoilers, as Resurrection has both connected to Dexter’s past life, but now has severed nearly all ties with it. The death of Angel Batista now joins Doakes, LaGuerta and Deb as the old cast shrinks dramatically, now really just with Quinn and Masuka left, though I doubt that they’re about to go attempt to hunt down Dexter, even after their cameos this season. They did mention Batista’s daughter briefly, I suppose.
Batista is not the villain of the season, but to Dexter, he became one, determined to prove what he already knew, that Dexter really was the Bay Harbor Butcher. But Dexter, rather brilliantly, painted Batista to the NYPD as a crackpot conspiracy theorist, albeit the coincidence that his son was adjacent to the victim of a killed-in-the-style-of-the-Butcher murder is still raising some eyebrows.
Batista dies finally unraveling the full mystery, but going too far when he stumbles into Prater’s connection with it all, who I have been blown away by this season thanks to the incredible performance from Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage. Dexter attempts one final moment at vindication by freeing Batista, rather than killing him, but instead Batista attacks him rather than Praeter and Charlie who have them imprisoned. He’s shot and killed by Prater and now Dexter is locked in a vault with seemingly no way out. It was a tragic end to Batista’s tale but a genuinely great arc captured across both this season and New Blood previously. (This season is also using Harrison in a much better way than we saw in New Blood)
The “back to basics” premise here of hunting down multiple serial killers while being lectured by the ghost of his father has worked well. It also helped that the killers were an excellent string of actors from Neil Patrick Harris to Krysten Ritter to I would argue the best one, the boastful Gemini played by David Dastmalchian (twice).
We have one more week to figure out how all this is going to end with Prater, who I’m almost certain will die rather than be carried forward to a new season. I’m less sure if Charlie will be killed, as I think it’s more likely she turns on Prater than not at this point, given the set-up for all this.
I really have been taken aback by this series. I thought New Blood and the recent prequel series were fine, but Resurrection really brought Dexter back to life (no pun intended) in a way that I genuinely didn’t think was possible at this point.
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