Summary
“Touched By An Angel” finds the net closing around Dex more tightly than ever, and it builds to a brilliant conclusion that will be a major milestone moment for long-time franchise fans.
Living a lie is a difficult thing to do, especially when you’re living several at once, but this is precisely the predicament that Dexter has found himself in all throughout Dexter: Resurrection. And he’s reaching the end of the road in Episode 9, “Touched By An Angel”, a penultimate outing that finds all of his many lives and identities, his past and his present, beginning to dangerously converge. And the one person who seems to be right in the middle of it all is Harrison, almost entirely against his will.
We start both as we mean to go on and where we left off, with Prater gatecrashing Dexter and Harrison’s dinner. Prater, still believing that Dexter is Red Schmidt, is surprised to learn he has a son, which of course gives him more leverage than Dexter is comfortable with. Even though Harrison is wildly impressed by his dad being on first-name terms with Prater, despite the first name not being quite right in Dex’s case, Dexter sees that a dangerous line has been crossed. Prater now knows too much about the real him, and with his and Charley’s suspicions clearly mounting, his offer to carve out some time with Red to learn more about his background and personal life feels less like a date invitation and more like a threat.
Speaking of mounting suspicions, we have Angel Batista, who follows Dexter and Harrison as they hurriedly leave the restaurant through the kitchen. Dexter gives Harrison a full rundown of the Prater situation — hilariously openly given they’re walking through the streets of New York and anyone could hear them — and then gives Batista the slip when he spots the tail. But the implication is clear. The net is tightening.
This becomes even more obvious immediately afterwards when Harrison shows up at work and gets a room service request by name from a room that turns out to be occupied by Charley, who wants to vet him, as she does anyone who is invited to Leon Prater’s home. She’s particularly intrigued by Harrison’s surname, Morgan, and since he wasn’t expecting the interrogation, what he tells her as an explanation is almost entirely the truth. This, he later relays to Dexter, who insists he stay with him for a few days until he can get all this straightened out (and there tends to be only one way in which Dexter Morgan straightens things out — on a kill table.)
As ever, this entails Dexter getting closer to his target, so he gets Harrison to dig through the hotel records to find Charley’s home address, where he discovers photos from her military service, the glass from the hotel that she has dusted for Harrison’s fingerprints, and her dying mother, who is being tended to in a room upstairs. Armed with this information, Dexter hides in Charley’s car and loops his Gigli saw around her neck, planning to scare her away from Harrison by threatening her mother. But Charley reveals that her visit to Harrison was explicitly on Prater’s orders, which, to be fair, should have been obvious anyway. Prater is paying for her mother’s care and keeping her alive; that’s how he keeps Charley on a tight leash. But that makes him the person who needs to die, not Charley. But he’s going to be much harder to get to.
Batista is also curious about Prater, since he saw and took a photo of him leaving the restaurant with Dexter. When Claudette summons him to the office to tell him about her conversation with Quinn and demand that he surrender his badge and leave New York immediately lest he be arrested for impersonating a police officer, he spots Prater in a gala photograph. Hilariously, he has to double-check his own photo to make sure it’s the same guy. I mean, he’s pretty distinctive looking. How much cross-checking does he really need?
David Zayas in Dexter: Resurrection | Image via Paramount+
Speaking of Prater, he’s pretty effectively creepy in Dexter: Resurrection Episode 9, which is fairly new territory for him. He has always been a little weird and off-kilter, but his almost turned-on reaction to Charley’s neck wound and his reflexive use of her mother’s health to blackmail her paint him in a different, more sinister light, as do Charley’s obvious discomfort and trepidation around him. By the time Dexter calls him to arrange that private chat the next morning, it’s a welcome relief that he might be finally about to meet his comeuppance. There’s even a part of you that hopes Charley might be a willing part of it.
But, of course, Batista gets in the way of things. Again. After seeing Prater’s picture, he tracks him down and tries to warn him about his life being in danger, clearly grossly misreading the situation. After assaulting three of his goons who get a little too handsy, though, he does finally get to see Prater and Charley, and tells them exactly who “Red Schmidt” is, blowing his cover. Dexter, none the wiser, arrives for his pre-arranged meeting with Prater only to be led into the creepy serial killer vault and ambushed. Batista is lying on a kill table. And Prater has a proposition. Now that he knows who Dexter is, he’s willing to be his benefactor — he’ll lure serial killers in, giving Dexter the chance to expand his collection. But the price of admission is killing Batista.
Of course, Batista, despite being the most perennial threat to Dexter, doesn’t fit the Code. So, Dexter makes a bold decision that backfires immediately in a moment of hilarious pitch-black comedy. Dexter’s knife slash frees Batista in the hope that they’ll renew their old partnership and take down Prater and Charley together. Instead, Batista starts strangling him to death. He only stops when Prater puts several bullets in his back. The next one is aimed at Dexter, but he misses as Charley whisks him outside. Dexter remains locked inside with a dying Batista, to whom he reiterates that, even though he’s the Bay Harbour Butcher, he didn’t kill James Doakes or Batista’s wife.
But it makes no difference. Batista blames him anyway, and indeed, for his own demise. Finally, after so many seasons, Angel Batista passes away, and his final words, fittingly, are, “Dexter Morgan… F*ck you.”
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