Title:"High Low"
Directed by: Matt Earl Beesley
Written by: William N Fordes and Tom Smuts
Air Date: February 13, 2015
Previous: Lost Boys
Next: The Magic Castle
Guest Starring: Steven Culp
"High Low" is the 8th episode of the first season of Bosch.
Raynard Waits lights a candle next to the bed where his dead mother is still lying. Later he calls Bosch and tells him that his mother died.
Bosch tells Rider and Barrel to look for reports from McLaren Youth Hall that bear the code A102. This represents solitary confinement—Bosch suffered through this and he is pretty sure that Raynard Waits did too.
A tech tells Bosch that the skateboard they found at Nicholas Trent's house had the marking "AD 1993"—AD being Arthur Delacroix. Edgar thinks that Trent might have been guilty after all, even though Trent only moved there a couple of years later.
Julia Brasher is called into a meeting with Captain Harvey Pounds. Pounds confronts Brasher with the truth: the lack of gunshot residue on Stokes's hands proves her story is a lie. However, he offers her a way out. If she will fabricate a sexual harassment complaint against Harry Bosch, destroying his career, the report on the Stokes shooting will be buried and she can continue in her career as a police officer. Brasher is filled with anger at Bosch by this point, but still hesitates, mainly because Pounds's suggestion of sexual harassment isn't true.
Meanwhile, Harry goes back to Dr. Guyot (whose dog first found the human bone) and shows him the photo of Arthur and Stokes. Dr. Guyot recognizes the background as belonging to the house of his old neighbors the Blalocks, who have since retired to Nevada. Harry makes the six-hour drive to Tonopah, Nevada. Mr. and Mrs. Blalock confirm that Johnny Stokes the troubled teen was one of their foster children. More importantly, they recognize the skateboard—Arthur's high-end skateboard—which Johnny back in the day told them that he won in a contest. Bosch realizes that Stokes is the one who killed Arthur, and he did it for the skateboard.
Tropes:
- Criminal Mind Games: Waits kills a Streetwalker and arranges her body in a way that duplicates the murder of Harry Bosch's mother in 1979.
- Da Chief: Pounds gets a lot worse in this episode, pressuring Julia to file a false sexual harassment claim solely in order to ruin Harry Bosch.
- Dies Wide Open: A disturbing shot of Raynard Waits's mother Irene still lying on her bed, her dead eyes staring up at the ceiling.
- Disposable Sex Worker: Deliberately invoked by Raynard Waits. He kills a Streetwalker and throws her body in a dumpster in the exact same way that Harry Bosch's mother was killed.
- Flashback: Harry remembers when he was a boy, and his mother would get tarted up and go out to work as a prostitute, which he didn't know at the time.
- Pyrrhic Victory: Julia Brasher uses these exact words when contemplating the prospect of filing a sexual harassment complaint against Bosch. It will wreck his career, but it will wreck hers too.
- The Reveal: How did Waits know about the starfish in the backpack? Well, it seems that Waits, who got hold of a cell phone in jail, called the SID tech pretending to be from the DA's office, and got the information.
- Time-Shifted Actor: The actor playing 10-year-old Harry Bosch in the flashback is Titus Welliver's son Quinn.
