Title: "Hold Back the Night"
Directed by: Aaron Lipstadt
Written by: Eric Overmyer
Air Date: April 19, 2019
Previous: Salvation Mountain
Next: Creep Signed His Kill
Guest Starring: Paul Calderón, Juliet Landau, Mimi Rogers, Linda Park
"Hold Back the Night" is the 9th episode of the fifth season of Bosch.
Bosch and Honey Chandler go to see Terry Spencer, the guy who put the handkerchief in the evidence box, and serve him with a subpoena.
Pierce and Vega are called to a scene where beat cops have found a suitcase in an alley, leaking blood. They open it up and find a whole bunch of severed limbs. Later, they search the derelict apartment building nearby, and find a bathtub stained with blood.
It's finally time for the Preston Borders habeas hearing. Chandler and Bosch show up and, citing the damage to Harry's reputation from the newspaper article, get standing to join the proceedings. Then Chandler starts dropping bombs. She cites the memo that Christina Henry wrote, planning to investigate all of Bosch's past cases. She tells a shocked Judge Sobel that her court stenographer, Rita Tedesco, has been married to Borders for sixteen years. She lays out the whole theory, that Rita, Borders, the Cronyns, and Terry Spencer conspired to plant evidence to spring Borders from jail—and that Terry Spencer is in the courtroom and prepared to testify about the scheme.
At this, Preston Borders howls with derision, calls Lance Cronyn an idiot, and promises to expose both of the Cronyns. The hearing suddenly and decisively ends, with the Cronyns led away in handcuffs. As he's taken away, Borders screams at Bosch that he knows Bosch planted the seahorse pendant, which was in Borders' backpack but not in his apartment.
Maddie was the one who alerted Honey Chandler to Christina Henry's memo. Her would-be boyfriend, Tom the law clerk, confronts her about it. Later, Maddie tells her father that she's leaving for college early, that she has to get away from him for a while.
Up in Bakersfield, Hovan gets his crack at interrogating Hart, the man that Pierce and Vega captured. Hart, lawyered up, admits to the murders he participated in, and leads the police to the location of Cleek, his and Stones's getaway driver from the pharmacy robbery. Hovan also finds the dog that the pill mill crew had at their camp and gives him to Harry.
Jerry Edgar, still investigating the murder of Gary Wise, finally finds Bo Jonas. Jonas insists that he didn't kill Wise, that he showed up at the meet along with Wise and it was the cops Arias and Marcos who didn't show. Then a couple of Jamaicans shows up and started shooting and killed Wise. Edgar follows Arias and Marcos to a nightclub and sees them in the company of Jacques Avril, the murderous Haitian warlord turned prosperous Los Angeles businessman. He realizes that the detectives, Arias and Marcos, actually orchestrated the murder of Gary Wise.
Tropes:
- An Arm and a Leg: Pierce and Vega find a suitcase packed with chopped-up arms and legs.
- Bluffing the Murderer: Actually, Chandler was bluffing the entire Borders team when she produced Terry Spencer; he was going to plead the Fifth. It works, as Preston Borders himself blows up and reveals the whole conspiracy to the judge.
- Courtroom Episode: Honey Chandler hits one out of the park, crushing the whole Borders habeas hearing. She calls it her "Clarence Darrow moment."
- Dirty Cop: Marcos and Arias, the cops who asked Jerry Edgar to look up Gary Wise, are revealed to be in league with Jacques Avril. They orchestrated Wise's murder.
- Dramatic Irony: Harry asks Chandler if her source on the Henry memo is trustworthy. Chandler answers "Impeccable." The source is Harry's daughter.
- Humiliation Conga: Cronyn watches his case fall apart, his scheme exposed, dressed down by the judge and dragged out of the courtroom in handcuffs.
- It's Personal: If it weren't bad enough that Jerry wound up getting Gary Wise killed, he also tells Avril that Avril murdered his uncle Hector. A cocky Avril sneers that it was his father who did that.
- Orphaned Punchline: Captain Cooper tells Barrel's "hunter raped by a bear" joke that ends with, "So the bear says, 'You don't really come here to hunt, do you?'"
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The judge gets off a beautiful one to the Cronyns on their fraud and the district attorney for wasting time on this idiocy, topping it off with an apology to Bosch.
- Sequel Hook: Maddie looks up a picture of Shiwei Chen, the Triad gangster that had her mother murdered, apparently simply to remind us that Eleanor's murder is still unpunished and dangling out there for Season 6.
- Surprise Witness: Subverted. Chandler surprises everybody but Harry by producing Terry Spencer to testify. Except Spencer never testifies, as Preston Borders blows up the hearing and leaves right then. Later Chandler gleefully tells Harry that Spencer was only going to plead the Fifth.
- Title Drop: When Harry ruefully notes that the mill operators are switching to fentanyl now that their oxy operation is shut down, DEA agent Hovan says "Hold back the night."
