Legacy’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: “Whippoorwills”
It’s easy to stay silent when your daughter is asking you questions you don’t necessarily wish to answer. But how easy is it to do the same thing before a grand jury, in response to questions from an attorney? Turns out for Harry Bosch, it’s pretty easy. In Bosch: Legacy Season 3 Episode 4, he is cruising along at the hearing, but when the line of questioning drives toward his dealings with recently-paroled-from-Wasco criminal informant Curtis Dignan, Bosch immediately invokes his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Doesn’t this make him look guilty? Sort of, but with the subpoena and the hasty grand jury, it’s all Archer’s doing anyway, and the DA already thinks Harry is guilty. It’s the same as when he pressed his own mute button with Maddie: Bosch isn’t gonna speak to what he doesn’t know, and especially on the record. The subtext here is that he can see he’s being framed, but not who’s doing the framing. Which is more or less his message for Robertson and Lopez after his constitutional clam-up derails the hearing.
The grand jury was further sidelined, because when Preston Borders was asked who he called in the Hollywood Hills – i.e., where Bosch lives in his rad cantilever midcentury pad – the Wasco inmate at the center of all this Dockweiler murder conjecture took the Fifth, too. But for him, it’s not about self-incrimination. Borders was protecting his bigger plan.
Remember Rita (Juliet Landau)? When the police briefly questioned Borders’ wife as part of their double-secret investigation, nothing came of it. But we saw her meeting with a shady dude in a chop shop, and he’s the same guy Rita nods to outside the courthouse as Robertson and Lopez are transporting Borders back to holding. Because Bosch sees all, he clocked Rita and the other guy, too, and decides to follow the detectives’ route. Sure enough, Rita and her accomplices have orchestrated a get-out-of-jail-free card for her husband. The police vehicle is violently rammed, gunmen appear, and Borders is about to be forcibly sprung from custody when Robertson and Lopez return fire with Bosch on backup. Those who were trying to frame him are now actively trying to kill him.
This doesn’t go well for the framers or Borders, who all die in the shootout, with Robertson managing to shoot Borders just as he drew a bead on Bosch. (Preston Borders was pompous to the end. Even as he was about to murder him, he wanted Harry to thank him for murdering Dockweiler, the exact murder he was framing him for.) After the shootout, Harry and Jimmy exchange thank-yous for their mutual back-having. The detective also says he’ll work to shift the focus of the “Chief’s Special” from incriminating Bosch to clearing him. But it’s also like: how was this attempted bust-out planned? Who else was involved? And was their frame job on Harry the key piece, or simply a convenient and spiteful misdirect, to boost Borders from lockup and bust Bosch’s reputation at the same time?
Honey Chandler didn’t waver in her support of Harry, even after Archer brought up their connection at the debate in his attempt to do her dirty. And with the grand jury stunt blowing up in his face and resulting shootout in the streets, Chandler seizes the opportunity to go on offense. The district attorney, she tells the media, “has abused the power of his office, chasing a phony prosecution for his own political gain.”
Maybe the shootout will help clear Maddie’s name, too. But for now, an LAPD internal affairs inquiry still looms. “Fucking IA! Motherfuckers.” Speaking of back-having, Vasquez is in full support of her partner, and we like the bit of veteran cop savvy she imparts to Maddie, because it elevates her above all the nepotism and guilt by association. “You can’t let this fuck up your career,” Officer Vasquez tells Officer Bosch. “You only have to speak to what you did, not your dad.” Maddie’s no longer a “boot” rookie on the beat. But it’s still solid advice from a police department veteran to a relative young’un.
As the officers continue to pursue the follow-home crew – sale of the stolen goods has been tracked to Find Your Grind, a Hollywood recording studio – Harry and Mo are uncovering bigger and bigger pieces related to the Gallagher family disappearance. Like Finbar McShane selling backhoes and other heavy equipment on the cheap, and in the middle of the night, to criminal-turned-contractor Bing Crider (Ian Casselberry). And how cool is Stephen Chang as Mo Bassi? “Native son of East LA,” Mo says of Crider in his easy West Coast drawl. “Wild child. Anyway you slice it, Bing’s a dubious dude to be in business with.” We know season 3 of Bosch: Legacy is its last, and understand the requisite focus on Harry and Maddie. But we always want more Mo, too. Characters like Bassi’s give shows like Legacy a streak of much-needed unpredictability.
Bosch’s resulting conversation with Bing furthers the suspicion around Finbar. It’s becoming clear that he lied to Bosch in Season 3 Episode 3, when McShane tried to hang the improprieties at Gallagher Equipment around the missing Steven’s neck. But when Bosch returns to the business with the intention of leaning further on Steven’s business partner, he discovers all the clarity he needs to determine Finbar’s criminal behavior and likely involvement in the family’s disappearance. While Harry was with Bing Crider, Sheila Walsh was at Gallagher, snooping in Finbar’s executive bank accounts. And that same executive caught her doing it. Sheila won’t have to plead to Fifth to keep her silence about what she found. Because when Bosch arrives, he finds her dead on the floor of the Gallagher Equipment offices.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
