Monday, November 06, 2017
What does Bosch owe to Michael Connelly?
BOSCH – THIRD SEASON – 2017
The Third season is centered on a team of ex-military people from special forces, decorated and all who became US-military-money, embezzlers. They hi-jacked money in Afghanistan and also all kinds of goods, including weapons, that they sold on the black market in the US. A fairly complicated system that gets money and goods out of the way in Afghanistan and then repatriates it illegally on various military transport planes back to the USA for black market exploitation. This case is closed up by Bosch but with a lot of effort from others, effort and pain, wounds and spilled blood. It reveals that military dependency among some over-trained elite special forces is so strong that they can move from the war battlefields to criminal life as if they were one and only one. Yet one of them is the officer, the commanding officer and when the other members of the team feel that commanding officer is cheating them in a way or another, in military terms they would say betray them, then they will not rebel, not kill him. They can’t because of his rank and their military subservient obedience, but they will definitely trap the commanding officer before he kills them, because they know the betrayer is also a killer and that they have to accept to submit to his command, even if it is to die or be executed.
The second case that is solved is the murder of Edward Gunn and this murder leads to the main culprit, the brain of the whole case which has to do with using prostitutes slightly violently which means they are killed by that rough intercourse because the real pleasure of the pervert is to have that intercourse with a dead body they have just killed and is still warm. But the brain of that network of perverse killers is a filmmaker and he has to decide to get rid of one member of the network because he has become sloppy and also slightly overzealous in his killing spree or sprees. But the filmmaker has been chased by Bosch. So he will manage the whole thing so that Bosch will become a person of interest, if not the main suspect. He overdoes it in a way by inserting in the crime scene an owl which is a direct allusion to the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch. Too subtle to be true. The filmmaker must have watched Seven too often. This subtlety leads to curiosity, and then to pointing out a cultivated brain that cannot be the underlings who have as much culture as an army of snails.
What is surprising is that the Los Angeles PD does not seem to be using profilers that would enable them to narrow their chases and to become one-pointed, which is the only guarantee they will not waste their time on side-cases, on side-tracks, on fake possibilities. And it is true they do waste a lot of time and effort beating about the bush and running around. This also lets the various detectives alone in front of the cases they work on. There is no leading force. And the natural shortcoming of human nature comes back all the time: hostility, competition, jealousy, suspicion, ambition, social climbing and grade climbing, etc., among the various members of the department. And this is all the more effective in ruining the effectiveness of the teams when we take into account the political pressure on the Police Department, the vanity of those who have rank and want to control and command all those under them with just plain authority and no real police work or police thinking. Not to speak of the political dimension, since he is elected, of the Attorney General in his office and position who wants to make things easier, with many deals, saving court time and court cost, etc., all perfect arguments to win his re-election, or at times an election to a higher job like Mayor or Los Angeles.
Then the personal dimension of police work for the individuals who are in the Police Department, but also for their families, spouses, and children, is often reduced to a side effect of police work that cannot be avoided and that typically comes from fear which is a normal human reaction, so they say at least, from women as wives and from children. This is an obvious sexist position because fear is not really human, and spouses should be supportive instead of being “hostile” when it is not even purely aggressive more or less blackmailing the cop in the family. It is difficult to explain to kids what it means to kill someone, even if he is a criminal. It is difficult to explain anyone that there must be people who are ready to even sacrifice their own lives for the security of the community.
But it is true the press, and other media, are not helping since they systematically put on the public place things that should be nicely hushed up, not erased or totally banned, but muted down. In the name of the freedom of expression they even at times put many officers and policemen in danger by revealing their identities and the details of their operations. That’s far beyond simply blowing whistles about police brutality, police illegal action, and even police corruption. In fact, they make police work more complicated, more difficult and more dangerous. It is true along that line that the fact the various branches of police work have little communication among one another does not simplify police work since it is quite common to have some police officers confronted to some covert underground and unpublicized police operations leading to one policeman arresting another when it is not shooting to kill. Absurd and yet quite common.
This third season keeps some cases and situations unsolved, which is normal since then there will be a fourth season.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:51 AM 
