I Watch TV: Bosch: Legacy Season 2

 

Bosch: Legacy Season Two

This season splits into two unequal parts, both with roots in last season. At the end of Bosch: Legacy Season One, Harry Bosch, former police now private detective, had been working with lawyer Honey Chandler. They had fallen out over Honey wanting Maddie Bosch, Harry’s daughter, newly an LAPD officer, to testify against another officer. However Maddie is kidnapped at the end of Season One.

The first two episodes cover this crime, bringing back several police characters from Bosch as part of the hunt. Harry himself pushes limits, breaks rules. And it’s help from Honey that gets Maddie back safe and the kidnapper caught, patching up Harry and Honey’s differences. Still, this is something of an epilogue to last season, or a prologue to this one; I continue to think the cliffhanger at the end of the last season ill-judged.

A strength of Bosch and Bosch: Legacy has been that left over bits of cases continue to intrude on the current one. So here; in the course of Bosch Legacy Season One Harry blew up an illegal oil pipeline, and Carl Rogers, a dubious businessman who tried to have Honey Chandler murdered, ended up dead in a cargo container as part of a complicated deal with Russian gangsters that went wrong. These events attract the attention of the FBI. Getting wind that they’re being investigated, Honey and Harry go back into business so that their communications are protected through attorney privilege.

Honey’s brilliant lawyering is one of the strands at the heart of this story; she can’t just claim Harry is working for her, she needs to put him on a case to prove it*. David Foster has been arrested for the murder of Alexandra Parks. She’s a city official and married to a Sheriff’s Deputy. There’s DNA, and his alibi is bad. Bosch grinds through this case, which leads through Foster’s complex sex life and previous drug problems, to corrupt cops running an extortion and protection racket with a fence for jewellery and watches. Bosch is actively opposed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, who think they’ve got their man, making this difficult and complicated.

Still not as difficult and complicated as the FBI who have taken the whole blowing-up-a-pipeline thing seriously, and are treating this as a domestic terrorism case**. Realising that the FBI must have an informant they discover one of the junior lawyers in Honey’s office is talking to them. Honey and Harry set out to confound what they know are the FBI’s usual tactics, both legal and surveillance. They bring in Mo, Bosch’s technical guy, but it turns out the FBI are looking at him from a different angle, trying to trap him using an undercover agent.

Meanwhile Maddie is recovering and back on the job in the LAPD. They start her off slow, on the front desk, but she’s eager to get things going and when a burglary is reported she goes out of her way to track down the stolen goods and so find the thief. She moves out of Bosch’s house and in with her boyfriend, another police officer in the same station so it’s dubious if this is within department policy. Impressing her superiors she’s offered the chance to join the Hollywood Crime Reduction Unit (CRU), mostly looking for criminals preying on tourists. Promoted to main character in the opening credits is Denise Sanchez, Maddie’s training officer. She notices that Maddie is extremely keen to catch criminals and takes them down hard, with more force than strictly necessary. Maddie’s also failing to write her victim impact statement for the court for her kidnapper.

The initial trajectory of the season is Maddie and Harry drifting apart as she gets into her job and doesn’t tell him she’s back on the street (he’s informed by Mank, the desk sergeant); meanwhile he deliberately doesn’t tell her about his problems so if the FBI question her she can honestly say she knows nothing. Later they find themselves thrown back together when the rogue cops discover Harry is on their tail and use Maddie to learn about him, then when Harry refuses protection, the LAPD use Maddie to track Bosch and thus the rogue cops. Their final scene, a much better cliffhanger, threatens father and daughter’s relationship in a way that the various serial killers, gangsters and law enforcement organisations never have.

With Harry Bosch no longer in the LAPD the show is able to reach deeper into the noir plots that it always flirted with. Harry is actively opposed by the FBI, the sheriff’s department and rogue LAPD officers. The authorities have it out for him, often because they’re corrupt. Even if Harry gets the truth it might not fix things! In turn Harry has to take chances and bend and break rules harder than he did when he walked the line in the LAPD. And this is what makes us believe that he might have done what it’s hinted he’s done at the end.

Maddie gets a barnstormer of a speech in court, and struggles with her own violent reaction to the events of the prologue episodes. Honey gets to do complex legal manoeuvres in both cases, but she may have outsmarted herself. She’s arrested and the FBI raid the offices, making the senior partner very unhappy with her. Mo gets his own storyline, not just acting as Bosch’s sounding board and gadfly, positioning himself in the hacking sub-culture. Although Sanchez gets main character billing, she doesn’t really get a story but that’s okay, it took them until the second season to find something for Mo to do that wasn’t about hanging around with the characters with a story. The Parks murder is convoluted mostly because the rogue cops are very eager to murder to clear up loose ends, only for this to reveal a new loose end. Still, we believe they’d have got away with it, as they always have, except someone who gives a damn keeps looking.

Watch This: Excellent neo-noir crime drama, though oddly paced with the 2 episode prologue/epilogue then the main story
Don’t Watch This: You haven’t seen previous Bosch; the prologue episodes bring in characters it assumes you’re familiar with and the main season is deep into the events of season one of Bosch Legacy

* In a fun bit of business the same one dollar bill as a retainer has been passed back and forth several times.

** Perhaps so legally, though as Bosch had no particular political or ideological goal I’d probably characterise it as extreme vigilante violence. Technically he was working for Honey Chandler (a retainer of one dollar) making him a heavily armed mercenary taking the law into his own hands, part of a group operating across Southern California.