RECAP: ‘Dexter: Resurrection’ Season 2 Episode 3 — “Live Free And Die”

After two messy episodes that nonetheless showed promise, Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 ups the ante in a major way. Directed by series newcomer Erica Dunton and written by Alexandra Franklin and Marc Muszynski, “Live Free and Die” begins to bring together the running threads of the season in an extremely satisfactory manner. A moody, exciting entry, “Live Free and Die” is not only an early highlight of the season so far, but it also stands up there with some of the all-time great episodes of the original Dexter. Let’s get our apron, needle, and gloves ready because it’s time to dive in.

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 serves a lot of different plotlines, so we’ll try to break this up as cleanly as possible, starting with The Five Borough Killer (Dan Stevens). We revisit the sequence from the end of last week where Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) and Charley Brown (Uma Thurman) are planning out their murder of the Sleepy-Eyed Stranger (Gabriel Luna), only this time we see from the perspective of the Five Borough Killer, or FBK.

A trip to the glasses store provides Dexter with a major tip in Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3.

FBK finds a maintenance man in a nearby apartment building, telling him that his girlfriend’s AC isn’t working. Sensing it’s a problem with the air condenser, the maintenance man takes FBK up to the roof, where FBK pushes him off, saying his classic catchphrase, “Nobody cares.” Only this does not go according to plan, as Dexter makes eye contact with him. In a pulse-pounding sequence, Dexter attempts to catch FBK in the stairwell, but FBK narrowly gets away. 

FBK tries to run facial recognition on the image of Dexter he recovered from his glasses, but nothing turns up. Frustrated, he nevertheless airdrops the video to the public. At the scene of the crime, Harrison (Jack Alcott) spots Dexter. Dexter says that, while he can’t tell him anything on the record, he can provide him with as much info as he knows to help identify FBK.

Much of Dexter’s information isn’t helpful until he goes glasses shopping because of his failing eyesight. There, he comes across frames similar to FBK’s, which he relays to Harrison. Mercifully, the mostly flaccid Harrison storyline is kept to a minimum.

The Five Borough Killer stuff in Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 is just a small chunk of the pie.

Really, the Five Borough Killer stuff in Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 is just a small chunk of the pie. That doesn’t mean it’s not a tasty one. There’s an exciting game of cat-and-mouse going on here, with two expert serial killers circling each other, and I, for one, am more than happy to let this slow burn play out if it means an operatic duel between Michael C. Hall and Dan Stevens is in the cards. 

After getting caught in the middle of one of FBK’s murders, the brunt of Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 shifts gears to the Ray Ballard/ The Sleepy-Eyed Stranger, another killer who we’ll use a simple acronym- SES- for. Dexter receives a great deal of information about the Sleepy-Eyed Stranger via a podcast by deceased Dexter: New Blood character Molly Park (Jamie Chung), a nice little Easter Egg for longtime fans. 

Ray Ballard went no-contact with his family at age 14, more or less living as a recluse for the past 20 years, making his money off day trading until he becomes the SES at night. He stalks his prey for days on end, until killing them in their sleep with an ice pick to the neck. This is an excitingly wicked mythology built for the killer that Gabriel Luna sells in his dead-eyed (or sleepy-eyed, rather), flat-out unnerving performance. It’s matched by an equally wicked romance brewing between Dexter and Charley, played with palpable chemistry by Hall and Thurman. 

As SES gets on his way, their plan hits a snag when Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington) asks to meet up with Dexter. Over drinks, Quinn reveals that he suspects the very much dead Leon Prater is alive after finding the bank account Charley has been using, thinking Prater is hiding out in the brownstone Charley purchased for Dexter’s meeting with SES.

This is the good stuff that the more over-the-top first season of Resurrection was missing—Dexter needing to feed his dark passenger while evading a variety of factors trying to keep him down. In that way, it’s really starting to resemble the original series.

Of course, Dexter isn’t one to postpone for too long. SES arrives at the Browstone. Dexter gets back into his disguise as Red/The Dark Passenger, only for Ray to be incredibly unfriendly. Dexter is about ready to take Ray down to the “wine cellar” and kill him, only for SES to reveal that, for his “show and tell” for Prater, whom he believes to be alive as well, he’s going to slaughter a victim in front of him that he kept in his U-Haul. 

Dexter subtly alerts Charley, who then comes up with a plan on the fly: Prater is showing up tonight. A frantic SES goes to retrieve the live victim, but Dexter and Charley follow in separate vehicles. In one of Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3’s most thrilling sequences, Dexter spots Quinn heading toward the brownstone, adding another wrinkle to the night’s proceedings.

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 has a great, well-deserved kill scene.

While trying to find SES, Charley and Dexter bond over their past trauma. As Charley reveals that her mother sees her a monster, against Dexter’s inner voice’s best wishes he reveals that his father killed himself after seeing what he’d become.

This sort of oversharing to a dangerous individual like Charley, and Dexter’s general emotional intimacy with her, can only possibly lead to bad things. There’s not enough time to think about that, as Dexter and Charley find Ray in a parking garage, and Dexter whips out the needle. They anonymously inform Quinn about the man in the van, allowing Dexter to do his thing. 

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 then gives us a well-deserved kill scene. As Ray, strapped in cellophane to the table, boasts about being a “god” who controls the fates of the victims he stalks, Dexter, with sinister, subtle glee, says what Ray does isn’t mercy and what Dexter does is justice. He plunges his knife in and disposes of the body in the Hudson River as we see the hand of the Jaw Splitter, the next member of Prater’s club, examining his collection of jaws.

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 is engrossing in every way.

Before we wrap up, we have to talk about this week’s New York Ripper progress. At the FBK crime scene, Detective Wallace (Kadia Saraf) is taunted by Brian Cox as Don Framt/The New York Ripper, singing “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, the song that Wallace is known to listen to. She angrily asks him why he’s singing that song, but Framt fakes an injury, leading to Wallace being taken off the Ripper case. 

In an emotional moment, Wallace reveals to the precinct that on one of her first assignments she was called to respond to a noise complaint. In a beautifully shot, scuzzy sequence set in the ’70s or ’80s, we see Wallace walking in one of Ripper’s mutilated victims while “Stayin’ Alive” plays in the background. What truly disturbs her about that night is that she remembers seeing a man in the stairwell before going in, who she now knows is Framt. I’ve never been more happy to have my theories about Framt not being the Ripper confirmed like this, as well as getting a backstory to one of the most interesting character quirks in Resurrection.

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 is engrossing in every way. We see Dexter more absorbed in his “righteous justice” than ever, dealing with complications moment by moment—his relationship with his son, a new romance, an old friend on his trail. This delicate house of cards has to come crumbling down sooner or later, and with this only being episode 3 of a 10-episode season, I can’t even imagine how it’s going to play out. For a show called Dexter: Resurrection, the spirit of the original run of Dexter hasn’t felt truly alive until now.

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Episode 3 is now streaming on Paramount+.

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