Bosch: Legacy Season 3 Finale is Thick as a Brick

Noted photographer Susan Ressler implored me to watch Amazon’s hit TV show Bosch.

Ressler’s most famous series, “Executive Order,” captures office culture in the late 1970s, and the aesthetic is very much Lumon Industries — just shot in black-and-white.

“Bosch is the only show I watch,” she demurred, when I suggested her corporate high-art pics might have inspired the look and feel of Ben Stiller’s Severance.

A few years later, I’d shotgunned nearly seven seasons of the Titus Welliver led-series about Harry Bosch — a veteran homicide LAPD detective.

Where the regulation seasons end, Bosch: Legacy, the spin-off, begins. Allegedly, it’s to showcase Maddie Bosch’s rise through the ranks (Harry’s daughter has taken up the family business), but it’s really just an excuse to continue the franchise — maybe to prove that a man like Bosch could never really sit still in retirement (or is it more a “resignation,” from the force)?

There’s a recurring theme spread across the (all-told) ten seasons: Bosch’s mother was once a Jane Doe prostitute found murdered. It sent young Harry to a series of orphanages, and Marjorie’s killing likely led him to a career in law enforcement. Ultimately, he becomes obsessed with closing this cold case from 1961.

Which he does.

The problem is that this thread, one that dominates Season 2 (of Bosch), gets transposed to the series finale of the spin-off (Bosch: Legacy) Season 3.

There, in the most random and abrupt way, we are introduced to a new character — Detective Renee Ballard, played by Maggie Q — who is clearly Bosch’s counterpart. Ballard is the focal point of the episode. She is initially thought to be a “he” (by Bosch’s spotter and goateed tech-guru, Maurice). She breaks into his office, gun raised. She commands him to drop his weapon. He demands to see a badge.

If this weren’t “the end” (which it’s not), it’s obvious Bosch and Ballard will become lovers — maybe even marry.

But then something happens: a prostitute serial killer cold case heats up. The Filipino Flower Girl slasher — a dude who uses an untraceable instrument to cut through a great many human trafficking victims in an immigrant Los Angeles neighborhood — has resurfaced after a thirteen year hiatus.

This was not a callback to a prior season of Bosch. We had no emotional connection to this killer — to this case — no memory of a cat-and-mouse tet-a-tet between Bosch and the slasher.

Even worse.

The showrunners (Eric Overmyer and Tom Bernardo) feel they must wrap-up ten seasons and a (potentially) epic storyline in under an hour. And throughout the episode, I kept hearing some variation of the following phrases: “We must solve this case before there’s another victim,” and — in the end — “You saved her life, and the lives of many others.”

But saved them from what? It’s explicitly laid out that these “Filipino Flowers” are young women forced into prostitution. They are sex-slaves without any scrap of agency or self-reliance. They will likely die from a John’s beating, a dread disease or a heroin overdose. Their lives are not their own; they are living a fate worse than death; yet Harry Bosch has saved them?

I’d imagine there are countless problems ending the long-distance run of a popular character like Harry Bosch — even more difficult is bringing some kind of closure and cohesion to an ensemble cast (Harry does briefly reunite with Detectives Moore and Johnson to nail the killer).

Overmyer and Bernardo overreached by connecting the memory of Harry’s dead mother to a series of nameless, faceless Filipino sex-workers who couldn’t really be “saved” anyway. Moreover, there seems to be no effort on the part of the LAPD (the Vice Squad, I’m assuming, or perhaps - federally - ICE), to break-up the human smuggling ring, nor squash the countless houses of prostitution forever cropping up around LA like a Hydra’s head of pernicious STDs.

It seems that selling sex, and using women who have been sold into the business, made dependent on drugs by wily pimps, is a victimless crime. Until you murder one of them (or - more accurately - a number of them).

It’s a strange trope, this Damsel in Distress. In Season Two of Bosch: Legacy, Harry has to save his own daughter from a serial rapist nicknamed the Screen Cutter.

While Maddie is brave throughout, and plays a key role in leading Bosch to her desert dungeon, it’s Harry who liberates her.

In the wake of that kidnapping (and rescue), Maddie begins to question so much about her father’s morality. When she hears an old war story that reads more like a war crime, she wonders not so much if dear old dad had lost his moral compass —- but if he ever had one to begin with.

He’s the protagonist of the story, yes, so Harry Bosch is the unqualified hero. Of that there is no question.

His final act (for now, anyway), is saving the hooker from a bloody end, where she’d be tortured and violated all the while.

But the next day, she’s back at work.