When the Los Angeles Police Department
once again gets in its own way instead of
protecting and serving, there’s only one thing for
Detective Harry Bosch to do.
He has to stick to his code — and he’ll take down anyone
who tries to stop him from getting true justice.
“Can’t let it go, Jerry.
I keep thinking about that little girl, Sonia.”
This is the Takeaway, a series brought to you
by the Take,
where we break down the endings of
your favorite films and TV shows
to get at their deeper meanings and messages.
In this episode, we’re looking at the
series finale of Bosch, Amazon Prime’s
longest-running show.
The gritty neo-noir series’ ending lands on the takeaway
that each individual’s relationship to justice is deeply personal —
and it can make or break you.
To Bosch, everything in life (including the job he’s alway loved)
must come second to his idea of justice:
“Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”
Here’s the Takeaway of the ending of Bosch,
and how it sets up a new beginning for Bosch
and his daughter Maddie in the IMDBTV spinoff.
At the end of season seven, Harry Bosch still has
the 10-year-old victim of the East Hollywood Fire
at the front of his mind.
“Sonia Hernandez, her mother
and the three other victims are in the ground, forever.”
Sonia Hernandez’s killers may have been caught,
but the kingpin drug lord who ordered the arson attack,
Miguel Peña, is in federal custody.
Bosch can’t get an answer as to why,
or charge him with the murders he orchestrated.
“They’re gonna let him walk.”
Then, we find out that Chief Irving has just been
re-elected to another term as the chief of the LAPD —
“Police commission. They just gave him
another 5 years.”
an achievement he secured through an immoral deal
behind closed doors.
“I know what you did. I know you made a deal
with the Feds.
We lay off Peña, you get what you need
to keep your job.”
Chief Irving gave Peña to the FBI,
who will protect him because they need his intel
to combat gang-related crime in the city.
In exchange, the feds gave Irving Mayor Lopez’s file —
“I’m running down a rumor that in exchange for the extension,
Irving squelched a possible investigation into
the mayor’s campaign.”
With this, Irving blackmails the mayor into giving him
another five years as Chief of Police.
“So he strong-armed the mayor.”
“And the mayor leans on Delgado to change his vote.”
Everybody seemingly wins — except for Sonia Hernandez.
“The best outcome has been achieved.”
“You mean for you, right?”
Bosch wants to book Peña for the murders
before the Feds can use him as an informant —
or else Peña gets to walk free.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood Homicide office
is going under.
Most of the detectives are moving to different precincts,
while Lieutenant Billets is moving up to Captain.
Bosch’s daughter Maddie joins the group’s celebrations
to tell him she just applied to the LAPD.
“Mads, you sure?”
“It’s my choice and yes,
I’m sure.”
Meanwhile, after years of partnership,
J. Edgar can see what Bosch is up to
with the Peña case.
“I know what you’re doing… committing career suicide.”
“I’m doing what’s right.”
“Sometimes it’s the same thing.”
Bosch is about to ruin the FBI’s plans
to use Peña to infiltrate a gang meeting
and make mass arrests.
“Ten years old. I can’t let it go.
I have to do this.”
“Then I guess you’re going to need backup.”
Bosch and Edgar stake out the restaurant,
wait until Peña gets out of the car —
an FBI wire on him — and Bosch goes to work,
sneaking into the restaurant, pretending he’s one of the guys
who put Peña in there and taking him away into
his own car, before he, Peña,
and Edgar speed off.
“You’re under arrest for the murders of Sonia Hernandez,
Maria Hernandez, Victoria Solis, her unborn child
and Eduardo Rojas.”
The FBI gets wind of what just happened
and tells Irving that there’s no way his career
as Chief of Police will recover if Bosch manages to
deprive them of their witness.
“We had a deal and you f***** us.”
“You get him back, or I won’t hold back
when this blows up in the press.”
This is all exactly what Bosch wants to happen.
As soon as he books Peña for five counts of murder
back at Hollywood Homicide, he talks to the LA Times
about what exactly went down and reveals that Irving
was behind it all along.
“Irving made a deal with the Feds.”
Bosch tells Edgar to scram and save his job
“The avalanche is about to roll down the mountain
and bury us.”
“Not us. Me.
You get out of here.”
After Irving suspends Bosch and sends Peña outside
with deputies to wait for the Feds,
Peña lights a cigarette, and...
“Por Sonia.”
The precinct runs out to the curb where Peña lays dead
with a bullet in his chest, while his shooter —
Sonia Hernandez’s father — is on the ground,
shot by the other deputy.
Bosch returns his badge to Irving,
“Take it.”
and walks off, quitting the LAPD.
Back at the house, Maddie confronts Bosch.
“What are you going to do?”
“You mean with my life? Something will come up.”
And father and daughter look out over their city,
thinking of some other way for justice to be served.
As the credits roll, Bosch turns in his
private “eye” application —
“FBI does a background check?”
“They do, is that a problem?”
“No, no problem at all.”
— setting up a new path for our detective
without a department, provided he can pass
that background check.
So what are the deeper takeaways of this ending?
Bosch reaches his last straw when he hears the last words
of Sonia Hernandez’s father —
“Por Sonia.”
— words that also give the episode its title.
Sonia grew up in the U.S., but her father was an immigrant
who’d been deported a year before.
He came to Bosch for answers after he heard the news
of his family’s death and spent the season
searching for information about his daughter’s killers.
“I promise.
We’ll get you justice for your wife and daughter.”
“That’s all I want.”
His death underlines that the LAPD failed him
and his family.
And Bosch blames Irving.
“This is all on you.”
If Harry Bosch is defined by anything,
it’s his moral code: everybody counts
or nobody counts.
Michael Connelly, the author of the 20-book crime series
the show is based on, says that this code came specifically
from Bosch’s perspective as an outsider.
Bosch wanted to do right by those who were given less in life
by circumstance, just like he was after he
lost his mother during childhood.
“And what happened to you after her murder?”
“I went into the system. Youth homes, foster homes.”
In Connelly’s words,
“I wanted him to have a code that would not let him forget
his origins
and that would plant him firmly on the side of the underdog.
I wanted Bosch to operate with a code of conduct
and fairness that would not... leave him beholden to the
powerful and rich...
He would understand that he must give his best effort
on each case no matter who the victim may be
or where the clues may lead.
Everybody counts or nobody counts.”
But that’s just Bosch’s code.
Everyone else he works with has their own
personal interpretation of justice.
For Chief Irving, justice is always for “the greater good,”
“Sometimes we have to make compromises for the greater good.”
“Bullshit.”
There are several times throughout the series
where Irving wants to help Bosch
but can’t because Irving believes in serving the system.
As Chief of Police, Irving — who knows very well what it is
to experience life’s injustices,
is in charge of establishing processes to fight for
the common man.
“And instituting reforms that will lead to
more effective crime suppression
and better community relations.”
Creating a system that works for everyone is crucial —
but by focusing too much on the general over the specific
and cutting corners to get to “the greater good,”
Irving becomes blind to important things
and ultimately corrupts himself.
“All's well that ends well.
And all for the good of the department.”
J. Edgar has experienced his own share of injustice.
In season six, he kills his uncle’s murderer in cold blood
and is wracked with guilt.
“I wanted him dead.”
“And now you can’t sleep.”
His search for justice turns into revenge,
and then revenge starts to kill him.
He leaves behind his responsibilities —
letting down his kids, his ex-wife, his partner,
“Maddie’s in the crosshairs now thanks to you,”
and most of all, his cases.
“You on duty or what?”
But by the end of the series, Bosch has managed to
push him back on track, and make him remember
why he was a detective in the first place.
“Harry’s Harry. There’s no better partner.”
For Edgar, justice is inextricably tied to the self.
It’s something he learned from his partner —
If you aren’t ready to get justice in the right way,
you might suffer the consequences.
Lieutenant Billets believes justice relies on individual people
to make systemic change.
And to make change, you need power.
“This is what this whole thing was about:
power.
And now that I have some I am going to use it
to get everything
I can in the department.”
She has just gone through a season of online harassment,
hate crimes, set-ups, and threats to her loved ones
from “incels” within the precinct because of her role
as a female deputy commander.
So when Irving offers her the captain’s position,
she accepts.
“I think you’ll find that this promotion
will be only a brief stop in your steady rise
in the department.”
It’s easier to see that Irving is partially doing this
for the wrong reasons — covering up the
internal harassment scandal — but while Billets’ conceptions of justice
sound more idealistic at this phase of her career,
“I find that it's sometimes effective to combine command
and compassion.”
they’re actually in the same category as Irving’s.
She opportunistically does what she needs to
in order to get into a position where she feels she can make
the greatest impact in her department.
(So that foreshadows she could eventually compromise her values
the way Irving has.)
Maddie is still learning what justice means
in the real world.
“The world is going to hell.”
“What else is new?”
At her internship with District Attorney Chandler,
she believed it could best be achieved through
defending the innocent in a court of law.
But, after the shootings of her mother and her boss,
and the experience of becoming a target herself,
her belief that the system can truly protect people
and deliver justice is shaken.
When she’s led to a crisis of faith, just like her dad is,
the only central thing she knows is:
“I want to help people when they need it the most.”
And while her future is still unclear
at the end of the episode, we come to understand
that she believes in the same
fundamental brand of justice as her father
and wants to be at his side.
“I want to help.”
“Okay.”
Her dad is her moral compass illuminating what justice
means for her.
All these separate definitions ask the audience to consider
how they perceive justice and how they decide on
the right thing in real life.
While we see this world through our protagonist,
the other characters’ array of world views
surrounding right and wrong remind us that —
when we consider power, revenge, opportunity,
and egalitarianism — there’s never one clear answer.
It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Bosch keeps four pictures on his desk
of four young girls,
each of whom has died in tragic ways with no convictions.
He feels the need to solve these unsolvable crimes
as some form of a higher calling.
He calls it Blue Religion, something he’s believed in —
and struggled with — since long before season one.
“I have my own kind of faith.
Blue religion.”
Harry Bosch feels so connected to Sonia because he, too,
suffered injustices as a young child.
Bosch’s backstory — being driven by his
mother’s unsolved murder — is inspired by
iconic Los Angeles crime writer James Ellroy,
author of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.
As an orphaned child in the system,
Bosch endures terrible abuse at the hands of those
entrusted to protect him at his orphanage.
Connelly named his detective after the painter Hieronymous Bosch
whose famous work “The Garden of Earthly Delights”
is (Connelly told Fosters)
“a mysterious, dark allegory about good and evil and the wages of sin,”
while his own Detective Bosch in his nightmarish version of LA is
“traveling through a similar terrain of good and evil.”
Bosch believes that given his troubled background,
it’s his personal responsibility to find peace for other victims
and their families.
“Arthur Delacroix's bones came out of the ground
for a reason.
They came out of the ground for me to find them,
so I can put some part of this right.”
And he knows that not all brands of justice
deliver the same peace.
There’s the kind of justice Sonia’s father sought out on his own
that prioritizes the individual’s feelings
like passion, rage, and vengeance.
But even if Sonia’s father got Peña,
he paid the ultimate price of his own life.
Then there’s the kind of justice that comes through policing,
which prioritizes procedure, symbolism,
and the theater of public perception.
Policing cares about “getting the bad guys.”
But Bosch cares about the victims.
“I know this department doesn’t give a f***
about Sonia or her mother or the other victims.”
This discrepancy leads to Bosch’s growing belief
that the bureaucracy of the justice system
isn’t always right.
“There’s always a quid pro quo.”
In addition to his Blue Religion, Bosch used to also have faith
in the LAPD itself.
But now, especially after the events
leading up to and after Sonia Hernandez’s murder,
he’s not so sure.
“Do you still?”
“Believe in the possibility of justice?”
“In this world, for Sonia Hernandez.”
“Jury’s still out.”
Bosch’s series has long grappled with the problems and corruption
within the police force that was responsible
for the infamous Rodney King beating,
but Connelly told Fosters,
“Writing about him for almost 30 years,
it is also a commentary on how the city
and the world has changed.”
Season four showed an increase in pressure
from protestors and the media to stop police brutality
in the LAPD.
And it’s not over in this series finale.
Irving still believes that he’s doing his part for “the greater good”
of the department by fighting gang-related crime —
which, Commander Delgado points out,
ends up profiling poor black and brown kids.
“Intentionally mislabeling black and brown youth
as gang members?”
“Intent is hard to prove, and the gangs
are still a problem Despite decades of effort.”
“Gang labeling follows these kids.”
So often, the people in charge prioritize themselves
over the people they’ve sworn to protect.
And with this final season coming out in the aftermath
of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests,
the conversation of who has the responsibility
to protect is more relevant than ever.
Bosch is not a perfect person — or protector —
in the slightest.
He’s gone as far as to take lives
and make moves outside of the LAPD’s jurisdiction.
But he has always tried to hold himself accountable
for his actions.
“There are two kinds of truth, Mads.
The kind that comes from darkness,
gets bent, manipulated for someone’s self-interest
and the kind you carry inside and know is real.”
Going rogue for the right reasons
in the Peña case is part of his Blue religion,
and what he sees as his sacred responsibility
as a detective.
“Bureau's gonna let Peña f****** walk
because he's setting up gangbanger narcos
and prison bosses.
In what world is that the better choice
or the greater good?”
While this final season of Bosch was loosely based on
he 19th book in the Bosch crime series —
2014’s The Burning Room — and ends the same way
with Bosch turning in his badge, his story isn’t over.
As Hollywood Homicide disbands, nearly everyone is ending their run
in the series with a new beginning.
“PM Watch.
You gotta be f******* kidding me.”
And as this record long-running drama
looks forward to a spin-off, we can look ahead to
finding out just what might happen after
LA’s most notorious detective goes solo.
“Bosch who are you if you don’t have a badge?”
“I’m going to find out.”
There is something in all of us that wants to do the right thing.
But sometimes, the right thing and the wrong thing look a lot alike.
As complex as it can be, each of us has the responsibility
to seek out that right choice, no matter how small.
Believing in the importance of people,
and helping them no matter who they are
or where they come from, is the best route
toward delivering justice in an all-too-often unfair
and unfeeling world.
So what did you think of the Bosch series finale?
What do you hope will happen in the spinoff series?
Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe
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