First of all, before I start I have to say. Avoid reading about the Jimmy Smitts/Dexter news over at TV.com. It's a big spoiler that was not even marked as such. Sigh. At least it indicates an interesting direction for the show.

In Finding Freebo the Miami P.D. sets about trying to locate Freebo, a dealer who is accused of killing the baby brother of Assistant D.A. Miguel Prado. Meanwhile Dexter and Rita have to make a huge decision about their family.

Read about good luck charms, strawberries and the cavalry beyond the link...

It's been a while since I watched the leaked premiere of the show and this combined with the aforementioned spoiler reveal has made it a little difficult to get directly back on track with the show. Fortunately it only takes the opening credits and recap to get me back in the zone.

Overall it was a pretty interesting episode, I sometimes find myself wondering how many legs the show has left. Sure this is only the second episode of the third season, but without Doakes there is still that missing edge. On the other hand it seems that the show may be able to give something else up to provide that. Dexter is facing fatherhood and also Prado is the only living person to know that he's killed. The problem I have with assessing this episode is in my knowledge of the future events. It's hard to say more without spoiling stuff, so I'm going to close the speculation here and just focus on the episode.

Performances across the board were as solid as ever. I'm still not the least bit interested or convinced about the new cop, heck apart from looking a bit stupid and annoying Debs I'm not sure what the point of him is. It's probable he's supposed to become either an interest or a foil for Debra, hopefully it's the latter because he has prize turkey written all over him and it's about time Debs got a decent man (without screwing it up through paranoia).

The parallel investigations between Dexter and Debs/The Department added a nice level of tension to the show, it's just a shame that Debs is investigating something so directly linked to Dexter's own doings. She doesn't have a hope of getting that promotion through normal police work, which is probably where the IID/IAD angle comes in later on.

Vince and Angel were as fantastic as always, especially enjoyable was Vince's hollow use of religion, treating it like some kind of good luck charm and then discarding it without another thought. But the real star turn lands in the hands of Jimmy Smitts as Prado, he's effortlessly placed himself into the show without any kind of jarring effect. This is a great move and as he has such a large role in the episodes so far it was important that his appearance would feel natural. His reaction when discovering Dexter with the knife was both surprising and very real. Dexter's story felt a smidgen hackneyed but considering the circumstances (and the general suspension of disbelief the show requires) it worked.

Overall Finding Freebo was a better episode than Our Father, but the trailer for the next episode that was even more exciting to watch. It seems things are going to get very interesting for Dexter...