Who Is the New York Ripper?

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “And Justice for All…,” the Season 1 finale of “Dexter: Resurrection,” now streaming on Paramount+.

Longtime fans of “Dexter” should be pleased with the Season 1 finale of “Resurrection,” after missing the mark with the ending of the original series (and with the recent “New Blood”) — but this season-ender capped off the franchise’s return to form. With a finale that featured thumbprints, hallucinations in vaults and more father-son angst than a Shakespearean tragedy, it was solid enough to warrant more Dexter adventures in Manhattan.

Leave it to Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) to get trapped in a billionaire sociopath’s museum room for serial killers, alongside his former colleague and now-dead friend Angel Batista (David Zayas) lying on the floor. Quintessential hallucinatory conversations take place, as always, with Dexter’s dead father Harry (James Remar, who later delivers a funny “fucking kill him” line later in the episode), who reminds him of his code, and a surprise cameo by Brian Moser — the Ice Truck Killer (Christian Camargo), aka Dexter’s older brother whom he killed back in Season 1 .

In the episode, Peter Dinklage’s Leon Prater finally goes full Bond villain. With a mansion filled with files, cameras and an army of waitstaff, Prater reveals himself as not just a collector of killers, but an eager applicant to the Dexter School of Dark Passengers after he commits his first kill by murdering Batista. The plan by Prater and his resourceful sidekick Charley (Uma Thurman) is to leave Dexter in the vault for three days without food and water until he dies. Of course, he’s holding a gala to raise money for local police just downstairs.

One thing Prater and Charley didn’t count on was Batista still having his cellphone on him, which begins to ring with a call from his former partner Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington), who leaves a voicemail saying he’s worried about him after the NYPD called and learned that Batista was retired and no longer a cop, and still pursuing the Bay Harbor Butcher case. Quinn has no idea that Batista is dead, but that will surely be a factor next season.

So with a cellphone in hand, Dexter calls his son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), who is currently in the midst of intimate relations with his girlfriend Gigi. Harrison goes to the gala, where he was hired to work, but declined after he’d met Prater two episodes ago. While Dad tries to give Harrison directions from inside a vault, with the camera on FaceTime, Harrison is busy using waiter routes and vault codes to navigate the mansion. Their whispered phone tag turned power play — Dexter wanting him to run, Harrison doubling down — is fun (but also frustrating), and the finale (mostly) cements Harrison as a worthy strategic partner.

Harrison gets to the vault area and has to input an eight-digit code that you only get one chance at before the alarms go off and the police show up. Good thing Dexter is in the room with a file cabinet containing a treasure trove of documents on every serial killer in the world, including the ones Dexter has killed this season. One file is on Prater himself, which has the clue Dexter thinks will unlock the door.

So Harrison, with FaceTime on, springs into action. Meanwhile, Charley has spent all season in chic jackets and moral quicksand, and once she runs into Harrison and looks like she’s about to kill him, Dexter dangles bait, telling her Prater is pulling the strings, as he has a file on her too. Dexter threatens to send it out, and her counteroffer is he doesn’t send it out, she won’t kill Harrison, but Dexter must still stay in there and die. She walks out to deal with Prater.

Charley’s final conversations — with Dexter, and then Prater — are loaded with possible teases for more of her in future seasons (perhaps?). She escapes with her ailing mother and tells her they’re going back “home,” wherever that is.

From the vault, Batista’s cellphone is dying (thanks Apple!), and after Dexter changes his mind about which numbers Harrison should enter, it dies. But don’t worry, the door opens and the two are reunited. The father-son escape — sneaking through service corridors and improvising under the noses of NYPD brass — which was pure “Dexter” and kind of hilarious in a time of technology being everywhere.

Dexter decides to gather all the files on him and other killers to take with him. He tells Harrison to leave, but Prater sees him, just moments after Charley goes up to him and quits. Prater goes to his head of security, tells him to turn off all the cameras in the mansion and goes after Harrison. He calls Dexter back upstairs, and has a gun to Harrison’s head. After he pleads for Prater to kill him instead, which he declines, we find out the “protection” that Dexter slipped his son two episodes ago, which led us all to believe was a condom for his shenanigans with his girlfriend, was one of his signature needles to put his prey to sleep. Harrison sticks Prater with it, and he goes down.

Dexter sets up a kill room in the vault and delivers a closing narration on par with Season 4 when he killed the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow), which reframed Dexter’s arc. A very audibly whiny Prater is killed by one of the knives in the room. Dexter cleans up (so fast, by the way that my wife was impressed), sets the alarm off and goes off into the night with Prater’s bloody thumb so he can get out of the room, and to his boat to dump his body right in front of the Statue of Liberty (there have to be cameras there, though, right?). He leaves Batista in there for the cops to find, and the gun with Prater’s prints on it. They think he did it, which he did, but also, is no one going to check Angel’s phone logs and see he called Harrison Morgan after he died? Maybe that’s Quinn’s clue for his arc next season. Is everyone from Miami Metro about to come to NYC one at a time, and end up dying because of Dexter? Remember: Eric Stonestreet’s ponytail killer is still out there after bailing out of the intermission of “Hamilton.”

In a very fitting internal monologue as he gets rid of Prater’s chopped up body, Dexter puts the series back into focus. Once resigned to isolation, he now admits he needs Harrison — not just as a son, but as a confidant. “I’m exactly who I need to be. Exactly who you want me to be,” he tells the audience in voiceover.