Recap: Dexter Season 3, episode 12

Dexter Season 3, episode 12: “Do you Take Dexter Morgan?”

Air date: December 14, 2008 on Showtime

A solid season finale, with a few surprises and some great action scenes.

We open on Miguel’s dead body, left in a park. A jogger finds him. Cops arrive and set up an investigation scene. Angel, Quinn and Deb investigate. Ramon looks on, while Maria makes the sign of the cross. The M.O. matches the Skinner. Deb wonders why he’d want Miguel Prado. Dex plays the role of the grieving friend who buries himself in work.

Ramon grabs Dexter’s arm and tells him to stay away from Miguel’s body. Ramon vows to find out what happened. Later, he pushes Dex out of the funeral, drunk and angry. Dex and Rita talk about it. Rita says she feels awful for Syl, who insists on coming to the wedding and the rehearsal dinner.

Dex opens a card from Rita’s mom, who isn’t coming to the wedding. It says “hope the third time’s the charm.” Rita claims that means the third child. Dex is sure she’s lying.

Photo: Peter Iovino/Showtime

On his way home from Rita’s, Dex gets a call from a detective who says his house has been broken into. When he gets there, a forensics team is all over the place, dusting for prints and other evidence. A neighbor told the cops she saw a burly goateed guy near the mailboxes. Ramon. In an imaginary conversation with Harry, Dex realizes he needs to do something about Ramon. He decides to confront Ramon with the evidence of Miguel having killed Ellen Wolf, hoping that’s enough to get Ramon to back off. Dex checks with Ramon’s wife, who hasn’t seen him since the funeral. Dex looks into whether sheriff’s department staff has seen him.

In the meantime, Dex runs a record check on Rita and finds that she was married another time, at 16, and divorced a few months later.

On the Skinner case, Angel says George King was really a Nicaraguan torture expert – King is just an alias.

Angel takes Deb aside and says the department got a little extra money in the budget finally, and he’s going to recommend to LaGuerta that Deb be made detective, since she saved the life of a CI who helped them ID the Skinner. Deb tells Dex, who says Harry would be proud. A little later, Deb goes down to the records department and checks on her request into Harry’s CI liaisons. The clerk doesn’t have anything yet.

Dex visits Maria, who’s freaked out about a highway interchange near her house being named after Miguel. She wants the truth that he was a murderer to come out, but Dex persuades her to stay silent, for Miguel’s family.

Deb’s ordering lunch when Anton stops by the station to get a few things from evidence.  She tells him about her shield. He tells her that’s great, then cuts the conversation short. It’s awkward now that they’ve broken up.
When Deb returns, Angel pulls her aside. He’s angry because he found out that the DA’s office was investigating Deb’s ethics and now Angel knows she slept with Anton. He says it’s a huge conflict she should have disclosed and now he’s not sure what will happen with her shield. Deb gets angry back, saying how he should talk since he met Barbara when he was trolling for hookers. Angel goes and confesses that sin to LaGuerta, who says he should keep his skeletons in the closet. Then he tells her about Deb.

Dex picks up the kids from school. Ramon’s tailing him. Dex gets mad about that, given he has the kids in the car. He punches it through an orange light and Ramon follows as it turns red. He crashes into another car.

That night at the rehearsal dinner, Ramon comes stumbling in, drunk and disheveled. He pulls a gun and says he should take Dex out so everyone else can know how it feels to lose someone. Dex starts to talk him down, but Deb and the other Miami Metro cops are already on it. The cuff Ramon and call the sheriff’s department to arrest him.

The next day, Deb keeps working on the George King investigation. Turns out the car tailing Dex was driven by George King, not Ramon.

Dex and Ramon talk at the county jail. Ramon says Miguel hired him as a bodyguard to protect him from Dexter. Dex wants to know what the end game is for Ramon. “To hurt you,” Ramon says. He claims everything was fine with the Prados until Dex came along. Dex tells him that’s not true. Oscar had a drug problem, Miguel had his “darkness.” Ramon says all his troubles – brutality, trouble on his record, was from cleaning up after Miguel’s mistakes. Now, Dex sees Ramon in a different light. He urges Ramon not to carry on the legacy of mistakes his family has made. Dex decides not to show Ramon Ellen Wolf’s ring, but instead to show him mercy.

Vince looks at forensic material from the Skinner’s car under a microscope. It’s a tobacco leaf, he tells Quinn and Deb. They race off to check out the lead. They search a cigar factory, hoping to find King there but turn up empty.

Dex picks up his tux and imagines Harry telling him how to tie a tie. When he leaves the tailor, George King is there and knocks him out.

On Saturday, Deb comes into the office to check some paperwork. Matsuka is there, rechecking evidence from the Skinner’s car. LaGuerta is there too, and she talks to Deb about Anton. If Deb wants their relationship to continue, LaGuerta says she can take away the case. Deb says fine, she can take away the case, take away the shield. She wants to be with Anton. Good, Maria says. That means you won’t sacrifice your personal life for work. She hands Deb her shield. What about the DA’s ethics investigation, Deb asks. The DA is dead, Maria replies.

Dex wakes up shackled to a table. Such a familiar situation, such an unfamiliar perspective, he thinks. King looks on. Dex imagines Harry, who tells him he did the best he could. Dex says he knows, and he hopes he’ll do the best he can for his son, too. I forgive you, Dex tells Harry. Dex realizes he wants to live, to be with Rita and watch his son grow up. He’s never felt that way before and now it’s going to be taken away from him.

Deb goes over to Anton’s. They’re totally different, she says. But he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. She gave up the case for him. They’re embracing when the phone rings. Vince says the tobacco in King’s car was more than 12 years old.

King, meanwhile, is eying Dex with a predator’s cold glare. Dex, knowing King likes control, tells him all about how Dex killed Freebo, hoping to take control away from King, who he calls a killer and a monster. He tells King Miguel was just using him by saying Dex had info about Freebo. King goes to get his tools and Dex dislocates his fingers to get free of his shackles. He has King in a headlock when Deb and a posse of uniforms come screaming into the warehouse. Dex drops King over a ledge and Deb runs over him with her car. Dex takes a rope and belays out the upper story window. When  Deb looks at King, the officer riding with her says she scraped off his skin. Serves him right, she says.

Dex arrives late at the wedding, in a cast for his broken hand. He tells Rita and Syl he fell down some stairs. Rita looks lovely, Dex says. Astor’s worried that him seeing the bride before the wedding is bad luck. Dex holds up his cast and says he already took care of that.

Deb, in a dress and serving as best man, says she feels like a transvestite. She and Dex share some warm memories about Harry, then it’s time to go.

Dex, who has procrastinated writing his vows the whole episode, turns to Rita and promises to be the best husband and father he can be. A completely honest vow, he thinks.

A married man, soon to be a father. What does he have to offer a child? Just me. Maybe I’m making the biggest mistake of my life, but who’s perfect? Imperfect as it may be, he thinks as he dances with his bride, “life is good.”