Angel Batista is dead. David Zayas was still spotted filming with Michael C. Hall in Times Square.
Deadline has reported that Zayas will return as Batista in the next season of Dexter: Resurrection, which is a genuinely odd thing to report about a man who took a bullet from Leon Prater in Season 1. Batista tried to bring Dexter to justice. The season’s antagonist shot and killed him for it. That was the whole point of the arc: Dexter wanted everything, and the show made him pay by taking the one Miami Metro colleague who’d known him longest.
So the question isn’t whether Batista’s back. It’s what he’s coming back as.
The Hawaiian shirt is the tell
Zayas was photographed on set in a considerably more colorful outfit than the one he died in. A Hawaiian shirt. His signature hat. The gun holster.
That’s not a wardrobe accident. That’s Batista as he looked when he was a detective in Florida, which points hard toward Zayas returning as one of Dexter’s ghosts, frozen in an earlier version of himself.
And if you’ve watched any meaningful amount of this franchise, you know how that works. Characters have turned up after their deaths to guide or antagonize Dexter before, but they’re not literal ghosts. They’re manifestations of his conscience. Which means Batista may be showing up as some form of internal guilt for the titular serial killer this time around.
He’s not the only cop coming back
Joey Quinn, another cop from Dexter’s past, will also return this season. That makes Batista’s inclusion track, structurally speaking. Two Miami Metro faces, one season.
How the Quinn story unravels is unclear. Here’s hoping the writers are smart enough to recognize they can’t run Batista’s arc a second time with a different Miami Metro detective. There’s only so many times you can watch a good cop get close to the truth and eat a bullet for it before the trick stops working.
Either way, another suspenseful season looks like what’s coming.
And there’s a second one
Batista isn’t the only dead character returning in Dexter: Resurrection. The other one may not be as dead as we all thought, which is a distinction worth sitting with for a minute. No spoilers here.
Season 2 is expected to premiere sometime this fall. Picture Zayas in that Hawaiian shirt, standing in the middle of Times Square, watching Dexter work.
