By Couch Baron
Dexter visits Hannah in prison, who confesses that she did poison Deb while bitterly reproaching Dexter for choosing her over Hannah. She does promise not to tell anyone about him, if only to lord it over him, and he almost has a breakdown about how he's going to miss her, but he won't consent to getting rid of the poisoned pen, which would result in her release, so they say goodbye. Hannah then calls Schram for help, and we don't hear her request, but she's feeling good enough that when Deb shows up to her arraignment, she rubs her hypocrisy in covering up Dexter's crimes in her face extremely gleefully. In the hearing, Schram uses a fake breakdown to hug Hannah and slip her something that Hannah ingests; soon enough, she's having some kind of seizure in the back of an ambulance – only to escape the hospital once she comes to and everyone's back is turned. She stops by Dexter's to leave him a remembrance, and even though these seasonal contracts rarely vary their routine, I hope we haven't seen the last of her.
Within the first few minutes, LaGuerta turns up to Dexter's place and personally arrests him…for Estrada's murder, and him being perp-walked through MM was no dream sequence, which is truly amazing. She goes on to interrogate him, revealing her personal stake in the investigation; Dexter turns fairly ugly in exploiting that, and things get worse for her when it turns out the evidence on which she arrested him – Estrada's shirt and wallet – were planted by Dexter to make it look like she was trying to frame him. With things having gone south for her, LaGuerta calls Deb in to apologize – but soon Deb realizes she's the fly in LaGuerta's parlor, as she just now got a package from Anderson's widow. Remember when Deb went out to get that gas to light the fire in the church in which Dexter killed Colin Hanks? It so happened that Anderson had ordered the security footage of all gas stations in the area, which means Deb was caught on tape. Deb tries to cover, badly, which only makes LaGuerta press her advantage, and although nothing's resolved, Deb now knows it's just a matter of time before she as well as Dexter are exposed. When Deb tells Dexter what's up, he breaks into her place and finds a warrant to search his and Deb's phone records, which will prove that they were at the church that night, and Dexter, out of ideas, goes to the "LaGuerta needs to die" place.
Meanwhile, Estrada, it turns out, is still on the loose. By tailing his ex-wife, Dexter finds the man in question, and, through a little subterfuge, captures him. He has him call LaGuerta and tell her to come back to the shipping container at which she almost caught Dexter, and when Dexter tells him he's going to kill him anyway, he points out that he killed Dexter's mother the same way Dexter's about to kill LaGuerta. Dexter acknowledges the parallel before taking his revenge, while Deb, having a sixth sense about what's going on, gets the location of LaGuerta's vehicle and figures out what he's up to. Dexter drugs LaGuerta and plans to set it up so it looks like LaGuerta and Estrada shot each other – but Deb gets there before he pulls it off. LaGuerta then comes to and tells Deb to shoot Dexter, and Dexter tells her to do what she has to – AND SHE KILLS LAGUERTA. I mean, it's probably where we should have figured the show was going all season, given how much it's been taking pages out of Breaking Bad's playbook, but oh my God, what an entry into the show's New Year.
On top of all this, there's a series of Doakes "flashbacks." Great to see Erik King and every MF he utters again.