‘Ballard’ TV Show Episode 1 Recap: “Library of Lost Souls”

Cold cases. As a concept for police shows on television, the killings and abductions and home invasions that went unsolved usually exist as stacks of musty file boxes packed into basements. Forgotten traumas, stashed in the bowels of some city facility. Which is where they stay, unless someone drags them back into the light. Someone like Detective Renée Ballard (Maggie Q), who we meet as she’s in a foot chase through Los Angeles, in pursuit of the embodiment of her latest cold case. Ten years after this guy put the hurt on somebody, Ballard has arrived as the consequence of his actions.  

It’s like Thomas Laffont (John Carroll Lynch) says, once he breathlessly catches up to his former partner in LAPD Robbery-Homicide. “I thought cold cases were gonna be safer,” he wheezes. When he agreed to join Ballard’s new unit, Laffont was probably picturing those static stacks of towering boxes. But just because she was railroaded into heading a dead-end department that is literally in a basement, that doesn’t mean Ballard’s just gonna live out her career moving files from shelf to shelf while maybe adding a few new coffee stains. She’s gonna do the damn thing. “The past is always present,” she says back at the office, clearing the closed case from her whiteboard. “But if no one cares enough to dig, then it just stays buried.”

It’s a line that feels like a mantra, a dedication to the ones who need it most, and offers a sentiment similar to “Everybody counts or nobody counts,” the oft-repeated one from Titus Welliver’s Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch. Ballard, like Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, is based on the books by author and series executive producer Michael Connelly. (In 2017, The Late Show introduced the Ballard character; she has since appeared alongside Bosch in titles like Desert Star and Dark Sacred Night.) The recent Legacy series finale did double duty as an introduction to Detective Ballard, and now, as she continues to gather her cold case team with only meager funding and amid major pushback from toxic (male) forces inside the LAPD, Ballard might also reach out to Bosch. She has her own style apart from Harry’s lone wolf ways. But they’re similar: the police department’s brotherhood of blue has dismissed Ballard, and the brass always hated Bosch when he was on the force.

Branded an outsider, Ballard’s building a team of outsiders. Laffond, her first partner back in RHD, is here. He’s retired but happy to help out. (And John Carroll Lynch is just the best get for any show.) Colleen Hatteras (Rebecca Field) and Martina Castro (Victoria Moroles), a true crime enthusiast and an intern studying law respectively, seem to be the best candidates from a stack of applicants Ballard calls “weirdos and wannabe podcasters.” And Ted Rawls (Michael Mosley) is a reserve LAPD officer assigned to the cold case team by Jake Pearlman (Noah Bean), a prickish LA city councilman who’s pushing for Ballard to solve a cold case involving his sister’s 2001 murder. Is Rawls just there to keep tabs? He seems to like playing cop more than actually contributing – he wears a gun belt with extra mags, but complains about going into the field.

We don’t yet know exactly what occurred to get Ballard pushed into a department role apparently designed to render her forgotten, just like those stacks of cold case boxes. But the experience weighs on her every move. “It’s like I can’t get free from it,” Renée tells “Tutu” (Amy Hill) back at the cool, rambly little house they share on the beach in Malibu. And Tutu, who is wise, knows it’s affecting her granddaughter’s personal life, too. (“Lord knows, the only people you ever get close to are those poor dead souls in the cases you work.”) There is a handsome guy lifeguard type (Michael Cassidy) hanging around; Renée leashes her dog Lola to his tower during her daily AM surf sessions. But she’s not out there showing off her moves. Renée sits on her board along a quiet swell, considering the quiet and the places where life isn’t yet fucked. 

She didn’t forget those cases’ forgotten traumas, just as she hasn’t forgotten her own – she only buried them in a kind of emotional basement. As they dig into the murder of the councilman’s sister, Ballard’s team is also investigating the six-year-old slaying of a John Doe, last seen holding an infant, and that case’s “murder book” (Bosch universe jargon: check) leads Ballard to the detective originally assigned, Zamira Parker (Courtney Taylor). Well, used to be a detective: Parker left Robbery-Homicide and the LAPD shortly after she worked the John Doe case. While she pitches Parker on joining up with the cold casers – she could use another set of experienced hands – the John Doe case is also linked back to RHD Detective Robert Olivas (Ricardo Chavira), who strolls into the team’s office with the swaggering air of someone who considers himself untouchable.

Dudes like Olivas seem to spend most of their time on the job slagging people like Ballard. “Let’s bury the hatchet,” he offers disingenuously, which she does not take lightly. “I plan on burying it,” she tells him. “In your goddamn back.”

Ballard intends to solve the John Doe case because she believes in finding justice for those left behind. But it would also be to spite Olivas, who couldn’t/didn’t solve it, and as closure on their lasting discord. What evidence the team has – a grainy photo, a tenuous link to a flophouse motel called the Sunbeam – is all on its own whiteboard. And next to that in the office is a board for the Sarah Pearlman murder. A trace print from the murder scene has matched with another case from the past, the unsolved murder of a young woman, this one from 2008. Ballard can’t believe it. Inside the moldered boxes the LAPD forgot about could be evidence of a serial killer they never even knew about. She looks at the murder book from the 2008 case and has to shake her head at who the investigating officer was, way back then. She might need to reach out to a trusted, cagey veteran quicker than she thought.

The name on the file? “Harry fucking Bosch.”

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.